Disassemble Ingenic Smart Wireless Doorbell Camera

Smart doorbell cameras become popular during recent years, because they can not only replace your old fashioned wired or wireless doorbell, but also make you and your home safer. Skybell and Ring are two dominant brand for smart doorbell camera products. However if you wish to buy an affordable one, you may choose our smart doorbell camera, they do the exact same thing, and share the same features, most importantly, they are high quality, durable and reliable. Here we are going to tear down Unifore battery powered smart doorbell camera.

This smart doorbell camera looks very professional, the silver color can make it fit most of house decoration. Comparing with other products, it has a rain/sun shield to prevent camera body from rain/snow covering. We can find a camera, a PIR sensor, a call button on its front design. Behind the black lens, it should have Infrared illuminators because it has night vision capability.

We can find a big size rubber on its rear panel, it precisely covers the space of battery, we can open part of rubber to see its interfaces including microSD/TF card slot, power button, microUSB port (DC5V), reset button. On its top, we can find a big button, it’s a tamper switch, then a QR code shows device UID. Using rubber is a bit ugly, but it lets camera have IP65 rated weatherproof protection.

Let’s disassemble it, we need unscrew nine pieces screws in order to open the camera. After we open its front cover, we are able to see internal design. Checking the main board of it, we can see it uses Ingenic chip, the model is Xburst T10.

Ingenic is an emerging semi-conductor company embarks on developing ARM processors with its own potent. The company is listed in Chinese stock market, it’s funded by Chinese government as an incentive scheme that setup a numerous companies can develop and manufacture high-tech processors intending to compete with international rivals.

According to the news report released by Ingenic, the company has successfully released Xburst SoC for video processing solution back to 2014, these SoCs can be widely used in many different areas such as industry vision, security cameras, portable cameras. It’s one of processor suppliers for some famous brand for example Hikvision.

The lens and camera module is in a different PCB board, this design helps heat dissipation, so that the camera can capture high quality image without heat interference, also makes it more reliable, because when the processor is working it will generate a huge heat, if image sensor and CPU are in the same board, heat will be induced to CMOS, over heating is one of main reason why CMOS image sensor stops working properly. Around the camera module are four SMT infrared LEDs, they will turn on when camera works in darkness or low-light conditions.

SD-M1 support 1.3-megapixel resolution, but it actually uses a 2MP 1080P 1/2.7, 2.8mm lens. This high quality lens can let camera shoot HD video with high clarity.

You can find the most chips on front PCB including main processor, power management chip, IR controlling drive chip. On the another side of main board here we can find Wi-Fi module and battery power management chip, image signal processor, GD25Q127CSIG Nor-flash. Since the camera uses battery, it’s important to use a low power consumption Wi-Fi module, this product uses Qualcomm/Atheros Wi-Fi module - AR4100.

The AR4100 is a small form factor, single stream, 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi module with an on-board low power application processor. The AR4100 Wi-Fi Module enables rapid development of sensors for smart energy, security and automation demonstrators through extensive SW support. The AR4100 Wi-Fi Module targets a wide range of application areas including, sensors and multi-input sensors (Industrial / Medical), White Goods and Appliances, Building Automation, Home Automation / Home Security, Actuators, Portable Units. Most importantly, AR4100 Wi-Fi module can enter an ultra-low power mode, hence it fits for the application of battery powered cameras and doorbells.

After removing the main PCB board, we can find the battery carriage, it uses a polymer Lithium-ion rechargeable battery, its capacity is 3000mAH, can last around 90 days in standby mode. As it can not use the continuous power supply, you have to take it off from the sun/rain shield to recharge it when the internal battery runs out. Fortunately, the App can show the real-time remaining power, also can send an alert when power capacity is lower than 20%.