Circuit Bending a Camera

I bought a toy camera.

And then dismantled it.

Why? Because I wanted to try something called circuit bending. As said on Wikipedia, it consists in modifying the circuits in electronic devices. I recently saw some people circuit bending cameras, and I found it pretty cool. So I decided to try it! (And also document it on here)

The goal is to make the camera produce real glitchy, unpredictable effects.

Bending the circuit

This was fairly easy, I just had to access the camera pins and short them together.

I started by removing all the foam pads and the battery as I don't enjoy working with boards with batteries soldered on. I removed the speaker as well since I don't have any use for it.

Finding pins to short together

Next step was to find pins to connect together. For this I used a jumper wire to connect them and witness the effects in real time on the screen. Shorting data pins interrupts or alters the signal flow between the image sensor and the processor, causing the camera to misinterpret or corrupt the image data.

After some time playing around, I found two pairs of pins:

D5<>D6
D4<>HSYNC

D lines are data lines, and HSYNC is the horizontal lines sync signal. Connecting them causes the camera to mix timings and color data.

Linking those gave some neat effects, so I decided to go with it.

Soldering

There isn't much to say here, I simply soldered the connectors and it worked :)

After that, I soldered back the battery and put everything back together. Except the speaker, because I really don't need it.

And just like that, I had a working circuit-bent camera!

The result

With the connections I made, the camera now has glitchy horizontal lines, often green, and buggy colors.

I discovered that the camera has different shooting modes, but I have no idea what they were originally meant to do, since I never tested it before "breaking" it :'|

Shooting with it is quite interesting to say the least. You never really know if the shot is good or not, since the image changes every frame, even if the camera doesn't move. Talking of frames, this cheap camera has a framerate of about 2fps, it's awful.

Anyway, here's what it sees now:

Tiny side note, here are some useful videos about circuit bending that you might want to take a look at: