Sneek Peek

I disassembled my closeup camera into about 30 screws, two super small springs, six lens rings, two controller boards, and over a dozen rods and mechanisms just to expose the front and back sides of the primary and secondary lenses and the CCD.

After cleaning them thoroughly to eliminate the contamination of accidental water damage and actually reassembling the mess, the stepper motor driven zooming mechanism jams! And, what's worse, it would have worked, the LCD screen now shows a crystal clear view, but the camera won't focus for closeups.

Now, with a cheaper digital camera, I've managed to take some pictures of a few of the components used in the LSD-X4. For size comparison, pictured here is a blank 1" by 2" Ultrasound board with new LSD-X4 components placed on top. The two larger chips at top are the FLASH memory chip and one of the microcontrollers used for the main logic control. The lack of leads on these chips (QFN and BGA), minimize outline dimensions, among other things. Coincidentally, these two integrated circuits have the same Y dimension, which at the very least will lend to the aesthetics of the finished design.
The next chip (bottom left) is a 2 channel 24 bit, 96khz digital to analog converter. While this is probably overkill, especially with the limited size of the speaker, it will allow the saber card to be attached to external speakers and exceed CD quality sound. The DAC also possesses cool features like digitally controlled hardware volume control, frequency attenuation, and pop suppression filters which will greatly extend the range of abilities this board will do.
To the right of that is an 8-SOIC switching power regulator. Pretty basic and probably not the final solution, but still much smaller than the regulator used by the Ultrasounds, with higher efficiency and high voltage input allowance.
The USB connector at the far bottom, shows just how much space something so seemingly small really consumes.

Missing from this picture are the other two microcontrollers, two accelerometers, a gyroscopic sensor, the 50-100 or so SMD capacitors, resistors, etc. All of which, will perfectly fill this side of the circuit board, leaving the reverse side for the heavy duty power requirements of the drivers.

I'll be posting some more pictures soon. And, the first video demo.