Tyler Montgomery’s blog

Well, once again, you might have noticed that I haven’t really had time to update my blog for a while– but I do have an interesting story to tell ya.

It all started when I tried to add a USB cable to my CVS-Cam for downloading the videos from the camera.
I had wanted to attach this camera to a kite or a tethered balloon to get some aerial photography, but it all went horribly awry.

[7:30 AM]
Okay, so I’ve just gotten up from a good night’s rest, and I thought that I’d try my aerial camera today, but I first need to make a cable for my camera…
After some Google-ing, I found this link on Make:Blog which detailed how to build a cable for the CVS Camera, and all I needed to do was to find a cable somewhere that I could use.

[8:00 AM]
After scouring my room for a cable that would work for this project, I found nothing to my liking. I then set search for an old USB cable that I could cut up and dissect to use for the camera… and 3 minutes later I had found the perfect match.

Click to read more…

[8:15 AM]
I had just finished reading the Make:Blog article for hacking the camera, and I decided to heat up the old trusty soldering iron to begin crafting my cable. Five minutes later, my soldering iron was heated up and ready for action.

[8:45 AM]
I had just finished soldering my connections to the pads on the camera’s circuit board, and I started to check my connections… okay, they looked fine, no solder bridges or bad solder joints, so off to my room to test the camera.

[8:50 AM - The final hour]
Now was the moment of truth, as I was about to plug the camera into my computer and test it, when a thought crossed my mind… “mabye I should use a cheapo USB hub to test this… … naah, it’ll be fine“, so I plugged in the USB cable and…. nothing. Uh-oh better try again… nothing on my other front USB port either. Okay, this computer is known to sometimes need a restart before it’ll see a USB device, so I told Windows (yeah, I know) to reboot, and I proceeded to try my other computer.
Right after I hit the restart button on my computer, I smelled something, kinda like burnt rubber, but it was kind of sweet smelling- I thought it was just me smelling the solder still from the cable I had just made… I walked over to my other computer (which was my server that hosts this site) and plugged the USB cable into one of the back USB ports (bad idea). POP!! That was the sound of doom.

My server’s screen immediately went blank, and I heard my other computer beeping at me too… oh no, I’ve killed them!

I hurriedly went to check out why my main system was beeping at me, and to my horror, Windows was stating to me “Windows has recovered from a serious error!”.

I shut off both computers and proceeded to check my wiring– did I short two wires together? did I not solder something right? what would do this??

Well, looking closely at the Make:Blog instructions, I discovered that I had wired the +5v from the USB plug and the GND together by soldering to the wrong pins.

The order that I had my USB wires in was as follows: (don’t use these– there’ wrong)

• Pin 10 on camera to the black USB wire (GND)
• Pin 9 on camera to the white USB wire (USB data)
• Pin 8 on camera to the green USB wire (USB data)
• Pin 7 on camera to the red USB wire (+5v) — wrong.

My problem is that the red USB wire (+5v) was connected to pin 7 on the camera, which is a GND pin.
I had shorted 5v to GND with no resistance and fried my motherboard, or so I thought…

Here are some photos of the aftermath of the CVS Cam incident…

What had happened was the +5v trace on the front USB board of my desktop (in a Cooler Master Centurion 532 case) had basically lifted off of the board and became a fuse!
If you look closely at the bottom of the board, and in the left-middle of it also, you will see burn marks and a lifted trace!

Too bad was the fact that I couldn’t take pictures after this, as my camera battery died- so I couldn’t show how I fixed it.

[Edited on Aug 27, 2006 to include photos]