Trying to FIX a 99p SPY CAMERA from eBay 

For how cheap the camera actually is the footage at the end isn't terribly bad. I had expected way worse.

You’ve really gone against the stream, cutting a trace on purpose instead of fixing one! An exceedingly rare maneuver! Also, your son is a natural at painting landscapes! Go you, Ben!

"whats that blue light in your pocket?" "Don't worry about it."

Hey Vince! The cable you‘re looking for is used by many cameras! The type is EMC-5. There are lots of them on eBay!

The footage at the end was very 1970's ... I expected to see bigfoot in the woods as you were filming 👍

Just spent the day running phone wires through my house, using your Mr Telephone videos as a guide. Now I finally have internet throughout the house. Spending the evening watching more of your videos 😊

I'm just over 18 mins in, hooked, need popcorn and a stiff drink, go Vince GO. !!!!

Thanks for the content Vince, it's nice to have something to watch, and wow! That Spy pen is really good video and sound quality, take care mate and stay safe.

plot twist, it was spying on you throughout the whole repair 😱

Great video Vince and awesome painting Ben, keep up the good work xx

Ben is a blooming good artist!! He's going places in the future. Thanks Vince love your videos.

Hi mate, Iv been watching your vids for a while now and enjoy your repairs. True what u say about how good it looks on the inside but not so good on the outside. If u know anyone who does 3d printing you could make a new one. And your own design. Great vids m8. Love your console repairs. I'm an electronics fan and enjoy all these kind of vids. Keep them coming buddy. 👍👍

Frankenstein's port. I love it. Good video Vince.

Great fix. I loved watching your troubleshooting logic as you narrate. Amazing thatyou got the USB port hooked up correctly. Most impressive. Also for 99 pence, what a bargain. Novelty YES, but you can totally use that camera with very good quality video. Great video Vince. I love these small electronic fix projects.

Great job, the outdoor footage at the end reminds me of one of those hidden camera documentaries from life inside North Korea.

Haven’t finished yet and I’m thoroughly entertained.

The end was a double surprise. The resolution on such a clumsy looking thing and your son's painting! He should get to sell his stuff one day. It really is good!

Your clearly getting better I love your videos

that was the same quality as my dads sony camcorder from 1990, not bad. well done vince your getting seriously good.

Keep them coming bud hope you and your family are well and staying safe

Hook up the bench power supply directly to the battery. Set for 4 volts @ 2.5 amps. You’ll be able to see charging voltage and current. You can tell if a battery is good too using that method. Always enjoy your videos. 😀

I was enjoying every second. Fun video.

Surprisingly good image quality. Have few spycams myself from the early 2010's and most of them are really bad. They were cheap though, fun toys :)

Mate your soldering has come on big time well done mate :)

Your son is so talented, props!

That's bloody amazing, for the kit you have size of lens ect.............great little spy cam.........nice job Vince

Quality wise certainly better than some I have seen intresting fix

" I'm ready for my close-up Mr DeMille " WHAT? YOU'E BEEN FILMING ME THE ENTIRE TIME, FROM WHERE? 🤤😤

Nice work Vince.

Brilliant video!

That went so smooth, probably down to your level of experience, Vince :)

Nice hack, Vince! The video quality is not as bad as I expected, though it reminds me of those "convert your webcam to infrared" videos. That extra pin got me thinking. It probably outputs a composite video signal, so connecting that pin to the center conductor of an RCA cable and the ground to its shield maybe you can view the output on a TV. I'd measure the output on the pin first, just to be safe, but I don't think it would damage the video port with 4V anyway. Great video and again, nice circuit hacking!

When you _want_ to short out neighboring pins with solder, flux is like your enemy. It tries so hard to make the solder behave it makes it _very_ difficult to short adjacent pads. Solder the ones you do not want to short out first, clean the flux off with IPA, let it dry and solder the pins you want to short out without flux. Solder for electronics usually has flux in it (flux core) but it burns off relatively quickly and makes it easier to bridge connections. Sometimes, when there wasn't much to do at work, I'd cut a piece of solder with an x-acto knife and use the barrel of the knife as a rolling pin and squeeze out the flux from the solder from end to end. Instant fluxless solder! (Yes, boredom will do that to people) 😉

look like its recording in infrared .. maybe a filter has been removed / lost / dropped and not put back

The cable it uses is the one used on numerous cameras. It takes the EMC-5/EMC-6 cable. I had to get one a while back and it was $1.75 US on eBay. But for the way you were attaching the micro USB, you could've extended it out a little and connected it with wires. It would've been much easier to match the pins to the contacts and it would also keep it's video out function for if you ever wanted to play around with that feature.

vince you are my religion your bodge jobs are the best!! ❤️

1st class video to watch thank you take care kind regards from me kenneth

yeah, when you said it wasnt fantastic i was expecting really really poor images, but its a lot better than i expected.

Someone already beat me to it,but yeah, that was a fairly common camera connector. But I only know that from familiarity with cameras, I wouldn't expect most to know that off hand. And finding it by looking it up would be difficult as there is several connectors that look pretty similar. So just opening up a list of connectors would be a bit of a nightmare. Regardless, the cable would still cost a few bucks anyway, so it really doesn't matter unless you were planning on using it a lot or had something else to use it in. Good fix, in my opinion! Edit: Yeah, it really looks like it has no IR filter. r the color balance is just wonky. But it really looks like there's no filter. Neat. And your boy's quite a good painter, btw. I'm no art critic, but what he had there was quite nice.

Vince, Isnt that the conector most point and shoot cameras use??

Is that the built in microphone? If so it sounds really good!

Excellent job =D

Nice win!

The video is better than I expected.....

Wow that video quality is better than all of the Bigfoot footage we have....

Nix fix! Thank you

That weird connector used to be a standard for digital cameras around the mid-to-late 2000s, to allow it to ditch having a mini USB port and a composite video connector. Quite interesting video though!

Lol vinces son just causally painting bob Ross paintings.

Hi Vice! I watch youre Videos a longe time and i‘m ist impressed! If you interesst, i have a PS4 that you can make a video with :) i have allready a replacement on order but i would love to see my old one run again! Sorry for my pour English, i‘m from Germany and go to school was not my favorite thing to do so 15 years ago 😅

The quality is actually very good for a camera that small and cheap. That's more than adequate, especially when I expected it to look like an old flip-phone from 2001.

Jesus wept, your son is talented!

Hi Vince, for desoldering that USB port try also low melt solder... it's really easy! I got it from NorthridgeFix website and works like a charm

Lady, where's my spy camera? Where's my spy camera? Where's my spy camera?

spy camera that you have to discreetly hold down the power button for 3 seconds and a bright LED shines through your shirt lol. However, a fantastic fix. I think you should revisit this spy camera and install it into a wall or table clock. Maybe fit a motion sensor which turns it on and install it in a way that it records the postman or visitors.

nice fix mate

I love your purple trees.

that painting is brilliant, i can barely draw a stick man and im 21..... xD

When is Ben launching his RU-vid painting channel?

"Yes Mr Bond, here is your gadgets, a micro spy camera, disguised as a pen, fortunately no one will ever suspect it" lol.

This kind of thing is exactly when you could use an osciloscope to monitor the pins and identify which is which.

nice work

Letting the battery leads touch had me getting nervous...

Well done

I'm trying to hook up my xbox one controller to my switch. can I do it without an adapter?

That lead looks very much like some of the point and click digital camera leads you get in some of the nikon coolpix cameras from a few years back and those you can still get. i have a few of those cameras still myself and some im sure are like a mini firewire type lead others like a usb but not your standard shape of a micro or a mini usb .

In the words of Stewie Griffin victory shall be mine!

Does anyone know what charging cable is needed and whether this spycam downloads in 720p ?

Hi Vince. The port looks like Mini USB port like the one on the PS3 controllers. If you've got a PS3 lead around, you might be able to get it to connect up to you laptop. Stay safe and well.

Turns out Vince lives on pandora. Or the camera has no IR filter.

Pretty good image and the mic is clear as anything.

I think that may be a mini-usb port which is a bit narrower and thicker than the micro-usb. These were used in a lot of electronics before the micro-usb came out.

My mate vine that weird usb is actually used on some point and shoots camera like nikon or canon cameras but now it is stopped cause of type c

I have one of those cables. Got it in 2014. Also, that looks like an iPod battery.

The footage looks like there is no IR-filtering - interesting ;-)

Oh wow, the AV quality is actually quite serviceable.

Both the video and sound are good for that price point.

You know, it's not the worst camera out there, the sound is decent

I hope this video doesn't self destruct once I click play. It's funny, when I was a child it would've been me running around with a spy camera, filming my Dad painting.

I doubt you will see this, but I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ3 digital camera that has what "looks" like that connector. I also bought an adapter 4 pack that had the connector that fit the camera as well even though the other 3 were standard ( USB D, micro and mini). Perhaps there was a camera standard?

The sound quality was pretty good

Looks like one of the older digital camera USB ports to me, very common cables a few years ago and cheap devices like this still use ports like this probably just to use up old stock and save newer USB port types for more expensive products. Just like mobile phones many years back, nearly all digital cameras had their own proprietary cable before USB mini and USB micro came along to standardise it all. If I had to guess it looks like it could be either the Casio or Olympus type port but go to Google Images and search "camera USB cable" and you might be able to work out what one it is. Composite out is also possible using the data lines of USB, older cameras had similar cables using their proprietary port and more recently GoPro cameras used to support composite out over USB mini. I'm really surprised this thing works with a 64GB card. Cheap devices (like this) and older devices (like old cameras) will usually only support a maximum of 32GB cards. This is because 32GB and lower cards are SDHC and 64GB and above are SDXC. SDXC devices are backwards compatible with SDHC cards but SDHC devices cannot read SDXC cards because of the difference in the file systems they use. SDHC uses FAT32 and SDXC uses exFAT.

looks a lot better than the cheap ebay dash cams actually.

it was mini usb 2 at the end of the spy camera you get them a lot on 2in external hard drive cases, i got loads of them

The names Vince,my mate Vince.

700th like loved the video

what is model of this battery? if someone want to replace one? where to buy one?

25:12 "I thought the image quality would be awful because ... tiny camera" Me (when I saw the camera earlier) - Wow, that's a huge camera, that should produce a decent quality video, that must be why the device is so big. The OV2640 is a tiny camera, that one there is HUGE!

Educational for sure. But i miss the explanation about replacing the usb connector... What was wrong with it?

Isn't that a mini usb b? Also connecting it to your tv will probably show a folder for the content inside of the sd card (basically an sd card to USB adapter).

Nice hack mate 😊

is it becaus the battery was flat that you didnt short it when you unsolder it ? 8:53? becaus the 2 leads did come together

Well I’ll be damned. And your son is a great painter too. 💯👍

Vince it's looks that that camera doesn't have IR filter. Maybe you could use it for short circuit find by heat. Try heat up knife and see if this camera pick up heat as IR radiation.

No IR filter gives that beautiful pink purple hue to the foliage outside.

Pink tree leaves, means infrared blocking filter missing

Looks like an ordinary mini USB socket.

That USB port kinda looks like the one that was on a old HP digital camera I had years ago

Is it not just a standard mini USB port needing a mini USB cable (the precursor to micro USB)

Haven't been this early in awhile.

I think sacrificing an old USB cable would be the way to go instead of using the XBOX USB connector. You'd have a USB cable dangling from the PCB, but you could separate out the cables for easier soldering.