Gadgetory

hey I'm Jason Heiner and welcome to another episode of cracking open with me we've got our cracking open expert of course Bill Detweiler this is as always a partnership between tech Republic and CNET and this time we're cracking open one of the more popular drones that sometimes called the selfie drone bill tell us about what we're gonna do today yeah so we've got one of the smaller drones the DJI spark this came out in 2017 and it's sort of it's just above maybe the toy category yes groans it's sort of an entry-level drone it costs retails I think for 399 mm but it's down to about 299 right now and if you're looking for a drone that's just slightly above maybe a $69 $79 $150 toy this is kind of a good option and we thought it would be really cool to show people the tech inside these drones it goes into keeping them stable that goes into taking photos and letting you control them sure and we'll talk a little bit as you're gonna crack this open we'll talk a little bit about the difference between this drone and some of the other drones that DJI has to offer they now offer three drones under $1,000 this being the least expensive you can typically pick this up in a street value of 3 to $400 and then then all the way up to the DJI mafic Pro at about $1,000 999 DJI has become the leader in this category especially in consumer prosumer drones and they are based out of China as we know they started out making gimbals which is the the stabilizer that the camera turns on that's what they really know how to do really well and that is the key part of these drones so as we take it off we're gonna talk a little bit about what makes these drones so useful and and easy to fly yeah so we've taken the battery off there is some screws here that hold the plastic body together these are Torx screws so you'll want to make sure you have eh I think I'm using 81.5 to remove these screws what these once we remove these screws we're gonna be able to pop off the top cover here this plastic top cover and that's one of the nice things you can see one of the screws fell out there that's one of the nice things about these drones is that most of them are designed to be repaired because they know they understand that you know you're probably gonna crash one you're probably gonna break one you're gonna break the propeller so you get extra ones of those so I'm actually gonna to keep us from breaking the propellers I'm gonna go ahead and remove them nice thing about the spark here is it has these little quick-release propellers so you push them down they're spring-loaded you push them down you remove them I have the screws removed from the bottom and kind of get a shot here they use two different types of screws so here they have in the middle they have these Torx head screws okay but on these screws here they'll have a hex head you just have to be prepared that when you take these devices apart you you have the bits that are the right size that you have the bits that fit the screws and usually there's a lot of information online to do that so now that I have the screws removed we're going to take off the last propeller here I'm gonna go ahead and we're gonna start trying to pop off this plastic housing now there you go we're gonna try and be gentle and not break it I'm gonna start at the back here and I'm gonna use we have several different types of plastic tools these little plastic spudger is here these are really great you can use modified guitar picks you could use something metal if you wanted and I have metal tools too but depending on how sturdy the plastic is will depend on whether or not I you know whether or not I want to use metal or plastic just because I don't want to break or Mar the plastic and plastic on plastic tends to do a little bit better at that then not doing that yeah metal on plastic so you see we're starting to sort of pop the cover off we get here that we're gonna slowly work our way around and this is gonna get us into the guts of the spark like we say with all these cracking opens you know bill sort of has the hands of a surgeon and the patience of a saint you know is that you have to to not force it know don't force it you can see right there you slowly work our way around and now we can remove the plastic cover we can see the inside of the DJI drone there so we can see a lot of the components already exposed which is really nice some of the other devices we take apart you can't see that we have a couple circuit we have a cooling fan here we have a couple of circuit boards here the main circuit board is under here a little bit of a heatsink right here and so we can now start removing those internal components so as long as you have some small screw screw drivers you should be able to work on this yourself and I'm gonna start by removing this little card up here we this is the UM the communications the wireless communications card right here it's hard to tell sometimes what these chips are but from the connections now it's hard to tell I can't tell for sure here but we're gonna remove these screws nowadays if you're gonna work on your own electronics go online you can find a lot of you know there's plenty of tools online specialty tools when we first started it's a hazard of the job and little screws fell into the device so with the screws removed I can't just lift I can't just rip this board out there's a connector right here so again when you're working inside these devices you want to make sure that you either use plastic tools as much as you can or I have ESD safe tweezers metal tweezers so that they don't you lessen the possibility of any type of spark or any type of short and damage in the electrical components inside so we're gonna pop this connector loose and I should be able to lift this board off right there yeah and so we can see this board comes off I believe it actually has the GPS chip in it so it's important that it you know you can only go in one way yeah it makes it it's important for it to be oriented correctly in terms of so the drone knows how to fly knows which way it's forward like that so we're gonna lay this aside right now and the next thing we're going to start doing is we're gonna go ahead and remove some of these other screws and start removing the the main circuit board in here so with all of the screws removed these were just regular Phillips screws lots of different sizes lots of different lengths so one thing you do have to remember when you're doing this on your own devices is to make sure that you either set them out in a way that you will remember so they know how the screws go back into the device and where all the pieces go or take some time take some photos as you go along you can see there's a lot of technology in this drone clearly from from all the chips that you're taken out and it does some really interesting things this is a drone that you can fly just based on gestures so you can have the drone you can have it take off from your hand and give it gestures to get it in position and then take a photo give it gestures to take a photo that's the that's why it's sometimes called a selfie drone you can also fly it from the app the DJI app from your smartphone you can use that to control it and then we've also got one of the controllers so this controller will let you take your smartphone connect to this and then use this controller to control it much more precisely so in much more ways that the professional drone pilots will do so that they you know put this drone up higher to get exactly the right shot now you do have to keep in mind with this drone you're only gonna get about 15 minutes of flight time this drone at the price though is pretty remarkable for what it can do what I'm doing right now is there's a lot of connectors yeah cables these little flat flexible ribbon cables oh yeah flat flexible cables they connect like said the motors the gimbal the cameras all the Wi-Fi antennas to the motherboard and so we're having to go through and disconnect all of those and you want to make sure that you do this very carefully and you don't damage any of the you know damage any of these really light ribbon cables they're hidden under these little metal pieces little little shields here is um and one of the things that's really interesting is there's actually a little bit of glue okay which you don't normally see on a lot of these connectors but there is just a little bit of glue here on the on these connectors holding them down to the motherboard just to make sure that you know as device flies if you crash it as it lands a vibration voters you know it's tried to be insulated speciale but they don't come loose right don't say CLE they don't shake loose so then it causes the malfunction and yeah you know you always want to make sure that you understand the warranty information when you when you buy a device whether it's a smartphone whether it's a drone whether it's any other type of gadget so if you're going to do this kind of repair you want to make sure that you don't violate the warranty you don't by doing anything that would be covered under the warranty so there's one more I've got these two connectors disconnected a little bit of glue there we'll pop it loose there we go these are likely for the gimbal that's mounted on me out here we're gonna remove that in a second so this drone if you were to crash this drone that gimbal isn't gonna necessarily break which is what you see when mind that gimbal was damaged when I crashed another patch mine so I had to send it into DJI for them to to repair that and so we've got the motherboard or the main system board whatever you want to call we call it mother because there is a secondary board here removed you can see on the back we have these large metal shields and it looks like they're not soldered on so we'll often actually get to see some of the chips underneath which is always fun before we do that let's go ahead and let's let's remove the rest of the components here there's two other things that we really want to talk really want to take apart that one is sort of this front facing a sensor array that has a camera and the IR sensors and then see if we can't get the gimbal apart luckily now that we're inside the drone I was talking about those torques and screwdrivers on the outside once we're inside it's all Phillips which makes the teardown go much easier so there's a couple screws here that we're gonna remove it looks like there's a little bracket here that's going to hold the gimbal in the screws for the gimbal are down there there's a screw here that's holding in the front sensor array we're gonna pop that off there's one head and screw on the other side I thought I had removed a knot and sometimes that's these you know sometimes I've never taken this apart before so you see Ally first time here and you know it did come out back in 2017 yeah there we go all right so we can lift out the front-facing sensor ray here we have all my screws in the body we can see here I like to keep all the screws nice and sort of organized together you can see the front-facing sensors that help the drone like you said have a little bit of obstacle avoidance and you know know how to navigate itself we got an IR a pair of IR sensors here and in a little front facing camera there so we've got our sensor board out with that I've already removed the screws that allow us to lift out here it's got a little metal bar on it it holds the gimbal in place and pull this out of these the cables for thee I've seen you go for an hour at a times where it where there will be something you're like I know that there's just something holding it on this and then I've got to find what it is so that we can release it yep and that's what it is he did not break there's a little rubber piece here that goes with the gimbal I don't want to break it so yeah it's like a little rubber band okay go okay now that has come loose there we go now let's see if we can lift the gimbal out there anything else holding it in there no no I have the gimbal and camera assembly it was this little piece of this little piece of metal here that was attached to this little rubber rubber piece there and you can see the gimbal and you know the front-facing gimbal camera assembly like you were talking about that was what DJI was really before they got into sort of drones that was what they really sort of they are a gimbal company for a long long time and that's why they transitioned pretty easily to drones because this is what makes this device right here those slow pans and zooms and tilts is what gives you and then of course the drone itself flying in in a slow pattern is what gives you those really really interesting shots and so we finally we managed to pop off the little light here because this actually does light up there's an LED ring under piece under these motors so you can kind of see the drone more easily at night and it makes it cool to look at and fly around like a UFO right there's a pair of screws here on this little plastic part of the housing and then we can see the chips here the controller's for the for the motor and for the the LED right there one other thing I'll see if I can remove this here this is the attach to the body you see this is really componentized so it's really nice when you know taking these apart when you have all these different separate components that can be if they break they can be replaced it's one of the things that we really like to see you know they don't have manuals for them yeah so you kind of have to figure this out as you go check the internet see what other hobbyists have done see what other sites have done checkout see nets and so youtube channel cracking open videos so here's the bottom here's the lower got it out yeah so here's the the bottom sensor right we have oops dropping things all over the place so we have a lower camera here and then we have the IR sensors to detect the range from the ground right and again this is one of those things that could be damaged it could be broken and you it's nice to be able to remove it individually and then replace it without having to just sort of scrap this whole plastic body right so that's kind of about it for the plastic body we don't see the cables that run to the motors there's a few more there's a Wi-Fi antennas attached here a few more pieces of a few more cables attached the battery contacts and of course the motors that's kind of about it for the body the last thing I want to do when we set this apart is I'm going to pop off if I can these metal shield gallier that protect take a look and we'll see if we can see the chips underneath that's one of the things that we really do like to do and it sometimes some manufacturers will actually will solder these to the boards and so it's a little difficult to do it's impossible to do there's one problem I always like it when it's not so that we can see the actual brain you know we can see the real chips underneath sometimes we learn interesting things about who makes chips for who you know the fact that this is how we know about all those chips for example that Samsung makes for Apple that are often not very public and lots of other devices too and that tells you a little bit about those companies and how well they're doing and how some of the chip makers are doing and some of the component makers when you start to look up these chips which you you will do especially in the more popular devices and we learn a little bit about you know who their partners are some of which is not this is always yes which is not public and that's why Jason I say you know definitely if you're really interested in learning more about the chips check out the full sort of cracking open article and gallery on TechRepublic after this if you watch the video and it will have a lot more information about the chips that are in the device is and what's really interesting as we've talked about before Jason on some of our previous episodes is that chips get reused will see chips designed for automotive use in in devices like this will see chips designed for smartphones in these devices like the GPS they're the triaxis gyroscopes or sixaxis Tyra scopes will see all kinds of dual use products in these in these devices and it's really kind of interesting to see that yeah so we've got the fan is here I've disconnected a fan cable gonna try and pry it loose just probably a little bit of yep comes right off a little bit of glue holding that down here we've got a little bit of a heat sink right here to help dissipate these fins help dissipate the heat from the chips underneath I think this will these metal shields will pop off - yep they sure will work our way around real gently do this is the last thing we're done new this is this has been actually didn't expect it to be because it's pretty simple to this place to replace a rotor pretty simple to replace up pretty simple to replace a you know broken maybe the gimbal things like that we see a little bit of thermal paste yeah right there that helps conduct the heat from the chips underneath we're gonna pop these off there's one I am or thermal thermal paste there there's another chip yeah we've got one of our chip fire meaning so see we'll take this one off it's a flyer yeah so here we've got our last EMI shield off here EMF shield and we can see the chips the real brain of the DJI spark there's a lot of there's still some thermal paste on there we'll get that cleaned off we'll take some really nice pictures put those up on TechRepublic and on CNET so that everyone can see what the actual brains of the DJI spark is very good another successful cracking open all right remember you can see more of cracking opens all of the photos all of the commentary on TechRepublic and you can see all of the videos for all the devices that we crack open on CNET and on cns youtube channel and if you've got something you'd like to see us crack open leave us a note in the comments we're always looking for new things to break open take a look at and learn from so thanks for watching we'll see you next time