Sionyx Aurora Lens Mod

hello again everyone and welcome back to the underground today we're going to be taking a look at walking through the lens mod for the psionics aurora line of sport cams so let's get to it the very first step in uh doing this mod is really to cover up the lens and this this this is an optional step of course but i like to put a little bit of painters tape making sure that the painter's tape is in fact clean over the lens mod uh over the lens cap of the oem lens so that you don't scratch anything we're not really going to be doing too much with this side of the lens but we just want to make sure that if we were just you know stand it up on something that we don't actually scratch it so we don't want to damage our camera right so just make sure to protect your lens if you are if that's something that you're uh concerned about all right so the first step in the mod is to actually get access to the internal parts so we can start disassembling this bad boy so what i'm going to do is take a a common razor blade you can use any kind of a prying tool but a razor blade is really thin and what you're going to do is pry off this cap right here so a lot of people don't know that this comes off ing tool but a razor blade is really thin and what you're going to do is pry off this cap right here so a lot of people don't know that this comes off quite easily but usually you can get it with your fingernails quite easily like i get them on my fingers on that side so that's going to come off and you can set that aside make sure you're keeping track of your parts here because as you know we all know this is kind of an expensive camera so you don't want to be losing parts and there you go so this is the uh let me see if i can get the light in there so this is uh where we're going to be unscrewing some parts here and this little cover here this one's a little bit more a little bit more covert this one's also a cover as well now this one if the first time you're doing this you might find that it's a little difficult to get to get off because there is some double-sided tape right there so there is the second screw cover so let's go ahead and get rid of that razor blade and start unscrewing some parts so on this side there are three screws there is a screw here in the corner there's one right there as well and there's also a screw right here if we can focus uh that screw holds in a s ews there is a screw here in the corner there's one right there as well and there's also a screw right here if we can focus uh that screw holds in a small bracket which i can show you once it's out it's a little easier to see once it's already taken out so let me go ahead and do that from this side just a small phillips head screwdriver precision screwdriver set will work just fine for this and just to make sure that you don't drop the screw off the tip of the screwdriver a small set of tweezers is also quite handy to have so screw number one comes out into the parts tray and then also you kind of gotta wiggle this a little bit because it's a spring under tension but when that comes directly out there's a couple little pins holding it in there but that's the part let's see if we can get it to focus that's just the selector selector switch that helps uh once you turn this rotating ring here to select the scene that's all it does so that's what it's moving on the inside of the camera is that little spring thing so let's go ahead and take out the rest of the screws here all right screw number one all right and then for this other side here there's only two small silver screws on this e out the rest of the screws here all right screw number one all right and then for this other side here there's only two small silver screws on this side you can easily remember it if you were to put this back together that the silver cover covers the silver screws so let's go ahead and remove those as well the other one here all right once we've got all the screws taken out this is where the lens and the sensor module will separate from the rest of the camera body so you can already see it coming apart there this is where things get a little scary so don't worry you're not going to break anything if you do this correctly and you be very careful but now we have the internal guts of the camera open so what we're going to need to do is separate the lens and the sensor module from the rest of the camera body that's pretty easy to do once we can uh once we take a look at down in there and see what's going on so let's go ahead and do that all right so looking closely at the body of the camera we're going to need to do two things on this side so the first thing that we're going to need to do is peel back this black uh covering here now this isn't damaging anything it's just it's just a ide so the first thing that we're going to need to do is peel back this black uh covering here now this isn't damaging anything it's just it's just a way to protect some of the electronics so that they don't get damaged when they're in the factory right so sorry if this is a little a little blurry it's kind of hard to show what we're going to do is unplug these red and green wires from the circuit board here that's pretty easy to do you just grab it with a pair of tweezers just like this and there's no locking mechanism holding it in there it's just kind of firmly in there so once you get that out there you go you can just let that dangle pretty easy right so now we can cover that back up no need to need to do anything further now the second thing we need to do on this side is remove this smaller ribbon cable from its connection on the circuit board right there now this is this is the tricky one here uh really the hardest part to getting it back it's not really that hard getting it out so what we're going to do is there's a little door right here i don't know if you can see my tweezers on it or not that little door right there is going to come open so we will lift it up lift it ver r right here i don't know if you can see my tweezers on it or not that little door right there is going to come open so we will lift it up lift it vertically and the cable just comes right out it's just it's just laying right there pretty easy so that's how you disconnect all of the connections on this side on the camera body side of the housing i'm going to go ahead and start peeling some of this black tape away now this black tape stuff is is quite sticky so you might want to be careful with it you can save it if you wish i'm going to save it just because you know why not now this copper tape here you don't need to necessarily worry about just yet but we're going to go ahead and start peeling away some of this stuff once you get it started with the tweezers you're really going to need your fingers to kind of get in there and very carefully remove this piece here i think i can just leave that yeah so we've noticed the tape changes a little bit from each variation to of psionics or aurora so now here you have the end connection for the this ribbon cable here this ribbon cable will just slide out now on mine uh it was it was it's pretty easy you just uh pull very very gently and it e this ribbon cable here this ribbon cable will just slide out now on mine uh it was it was it's pretty easy you just uh pull very very gently and it pops right out just like so and it's even easier if you just wanted to test just to make sure that it goes back in there you go slides right back in no no problem whatsoever so now you've got two separate halves you've got your lens and sensor body and then you have the camera body now this part we don't need anymore so we can bring that off to the side here and this is what we're going to start disassembling this part so that we could take that lens off so let's go ahead and move into that alright so on this side we have a lot of tape removing to do because there are four screws that we need to get access to so what i'm going to do is go ahead and put this piece of tape back because i don't need it and we're going to start removing some of this black tape as well as some of this shielding tape so this copper tape here is really just for shielding just to make sure that the electronic electronic components i get damaged with one another and things like that but we're going to have to appeal it back being very gentle to make sure that ectronic components i get damaged with one another and things like that but we're going to have to appeal it back being very gentle to make sure that we don't damage it but it doesn't really serve a purpose other than just protecting things it's not a little electrical uh component here so let's go ahead and get some of this black tape off one here there's a screw way down in there you probably can't see it maybe just a little bit on camera there okay let's go ahead and see if we can get the other one well we might as well just pull that all the way off yeah that'll do gotta get some rid of some of this copper tape here and really make sure that you don't modify these things or try to make it hard for you to do it so i've got a lot of clear tape that you probably you might not be able to see on camera there's a lot of clear tape as well that's kind of holding all this stuff together but that's not necessary so i'm just going to peel this off as best we can this is kind of the tedious part trying to make sure that you don't mess anything up but it's also difficult to get a lot of this tape off okay got one of those pieces of copper shielding tape out of the way which was covering th ng up but it's also difficult to get a lot of this tape off okay got one of those pieces of copper shielding tape out of the way which was covering this other hole over here there we go there's that one so we continue this all the way around and all right so once you got the tape off you can start unscrewing these four screws i had to get a smaller screwdriver that was actually uh that actually fit down in the bottom so these screws are torqued in there pretty good as you might find most of the screws are on this bad boy all right so once you've got the screws undone you can start preparing and making sure that you're ready to separate so you can go ahead and remove some of this tape that is again holding kind of everything together you can remove that let's see if i can make sure i can get that off there we go so now this ribbon cable can move freely without being yanked out or it would not be good to yank out random cables right so there we go on that just taking time making sure we've got all this uh all the connections undone all right so now we've gotten kind of the tape cleared out of the way we can kind of see the the gap forming there what you need to do is resist the urge right so now we've gotten kind of the tape cleared out of the way we can kind of see the the gap forming there what you need to do is resist the urge to pull on this because this is not going to separate right here there's actually a little bit of a trick so there's one more part that if you were to try to take this apart from here and you don't remove this part well first of all it's not going to happen and if you try to force it you're going to break it so what you need to do is you will look on this ring here on the on the focus ring right or it's really not a focus ring but it's to uh set the aperture right so this ring here if you will look at one of these little nodules here you will notice that one of them is not like the other this is a little trap door and you can pop that off quite easily to make sure making sure to not lose it and underneath here is a pin this pin is connected to the lens on the inside of this so if you don't remove this pin you're going to destroy your device so making sure to be very very careful you can use a pair of tweezers i've found that a flat head works quite well just grab the edge of it it's a smooth pin there's really there's nowhere to grab use a pair of tweezers i've found that a flat head works quite well just grab the edge of it it's a smooth pin there's really there's nowhere to grab on it unfortunately you might have to move the focus raw not the focus ring move the ring around around a little bit to grab it but it should come free quite i say quite easily and then it's difficult um there we go all right so now that it's out a little bit i can use my tweezers to grab it and pull it the rest of the way so there is that pin so that goes into the parts tray off to the side and now you can pull this apart but wait there's more this little ribbon cable here is going to come loose and that's okay don't worry about it i'll show you how it goes back together if you wanted to put it back together but you go ahead and separate i'll do it this way so that you can see where that ribbon cable goes and as you can see that ribbon cable comes out just like that you can see how it fell out of position there so if you wanted to put this back it's it's pretty easy you can see that it's slightly curved and the curve of course follows the shape of the lens and you bring it all the way back in there set it in its little tray there's a s slightly curved and the curve of course follows the shape of the lens and you bring it all the way back in there set it in its little tray there's a little tray for it to go into coax it in there and then you can put it back to normal so no problem there on that front but we're gonna since we're doing the lens mod we're gonna pull this out here's your lens cage that protects the lens and there's your ribbon cable and there's your lens as you can see it is a computer uh 16 millimeter one and 1.4 aperture so makes sense right so there is your lens there is your c mount lens you can now uh focus the aperture and all that kind of stuff so let's go ahead and break this down a little bit further and we'll see how we can uh change this to a uh interchangeable type of lens all right so once you get to this step you're almost done but we still have one final challenge so if you pull off this copper tape sorry i already did it because it came off earlier you will see if i can zoom in here just a tad without it going out of focus on us sorry if that's a little blurry the focus on this camera is not that great you'll see really the biggest challenge yet so this right here is obviously the le f that's a little blurry the focus on this camera is not that great you'll see really the biggest challenge yet so this right here is obviously the lens this silver part is also part of the lens so these little gray spots right here these are cut outs in the small in the black uh housing here now what needs to happen is this silver ring here and the rest of the lens needs to unscrew and come off that's the rest that's the seamount that's underneath this however psionics have epoxied this screw-in threaded in uh part right there all right so what you can do is use a razor blade or i prefer because it's quite a bit safer uh to use some kind of pick device like this um this is obviously not the best one but it's the only one i had on hand and you can start scratching away at that epoxy to get rid of it and dig it out of there this is going to be the chore this is the hardest part of the whole thing i know this isn't exactly a beginner friendly uh mod but once you get this done that's that's pretty much the final step before reassembly so let's go ahead and scratch away all of that epoxy and we'll be back in just a second all right so once you use your little hook tool or whatever you let's go ahead and scratch away all of that epoxy and we'll be back in just a second all right so once you use your little hook tool or whatever you have on hand to dig out all that epoxy you are done uh it's not too bad i overstate how difficult it is it's really not too bad to get in there and dig that epoxy out it's pretty shallow it doesn't go all the way through so it's really easy to do i only stab myself like 37 times while doing it so it's not too bad but once you get to a point to where it's free you will notice that that silver ring now is unlocked and you can unscrew the entire lens so there you go now you have a seamount lens that you can use for something else if you're into that sort of thing and so there you go and we are done uh now all we have to do is reassemble all of this stuff which is a challenge in and of itself but we are now ready for reassembly all right so before we go ahead and begin the reassembly process there's one more thing that we have to do that our lens mount is done but now we have to modify this housing so we can still use a bit of it so you can pull off this tape it doesn't really matter we're not going to be needing that anymore but we still housing so we can still use a bit of it so you can pull off this tape it doesn't really matter we're not going to be needing that anymore but we still have three screws only three screws left to go so go ahead and unscrew these and put that screw aside and now once we have these three screws out it's pretty simple so there we go uh now we have this piece right here which is going to be our our uh help us reassemble it and this uh lens sort of shroud we don't need anymore so we could store that away just in case we wanted to revert back to the original mod so uh take take the model and go back to the original camera so uh we're gonna need this for reassembly so let's go ahead and start putting everything back together so essentially we're just going to put everything back together again in reverse order so all right now that we've got this nice and screwed back down into place uh we can start putting things back into where they go so i'm going to go ahead and thread in this light bar from this side just cause why not you'll need some kind of adhesive or something to keep it stuck there because obviously we don't have the reverse side of a lens housing to keep it in place so once we ind of adhesive or something to keep it stuck there because obviously we don't have the reverse side of a lens housing to keep it in place so once we get that going it'll be that'll be fine but this is going to be the last part we connect up anyway so for now i'm just going to pull it out and not worry about it all right so moving back to the camera housing itself the first thing we're going to do is make sure that we have it oriented the correct way in this case we do so now we're going to connect up our larger ribbon cable making sure to do this very properly and making sure that everything is lined up just so we don't want it off center or anything that would not be good all right so now that we have that pushed back in there we can put in our light bar if you're going to thread that through [Music] give that a little bit of a slack and the hard part is connecting this one back up honestly it's quite difficult to do to be honest um but we can we can give it a shot you might need an extra helping hand from someone else but it just goes lays right back in there where it came from if we can do this it's a lot easier when you don't have to film it when you're when you're not trying oes lays right back in there where it came from if we can do this it's a lot easier when you don't have to film it when you're when you're not trying to record this all right once you finally get it in there and you can close that little door on top of it uh there you go on that that works that's that's usually the most frustrating part and then now we can peel back this black this black tape once again grab our tweezers here and our connector and make sure to plug it back in now it can only go one way so don't worry about putting it in backwards because it there we go all right so once we got all of our connections made we can gently push this back together let's go ahead and grab our black screws first put one of them in here now i'm just going to lightly i'm not going to quite torque it down anytime you're trying to do something that's you know round or even square in shape like this kind of is you always want to make sure that you do it in a criss-cross pattern make sure to make sure you get the even torque all the way around and let's do our silver screws there we go on that let's grab one more here there we go and now i can go ahead and torque this down pretty good make sure let's do our silver screws there we go on that let's grab one more here there we go and now i can go ahead and torque this down pretty good make sure you close the gap so do that one and the one opposite from it and then the one over here and then back over here just like changing the tire right pretty easy so there we go all right so before we call it quits and declare victory on this there's one final step and that final step has to do with this led strip here now this is a very important step and you might find that it's not going to be a particularly effective camera unless you do actually do this final step this led light strip here it's not just a it's not really for visual leds what it is is a series of leds and sensors here i don't know if you can see that or not here and here what it does is it detects the light between these two sensors and it determines and uh what time of day it is or or the proper aperture setting for the camera or really technically not the aperture setting because you do that manually it really has to do with how the sensor detects light so what you need to do is to trick the camera into thinking that it's night time all the time because obviously th o with how the sensor detects light so what you need to do is to trick the camera into thinking that it's night time all the time because obviously this this piece of of hardware is now exposed and you want to make sure that it can actually function in the dark instead of being stuck in daytime mode which is exactly what's going to happen if you were to just stop right now you'll find that your fancy new night vision camera doesn't actually work in the dark anymore so what you need to do is very simple and you can take a piece of electrical tape and just cover up one of these sensors that prevents the light from going back and forth and tricks the camera into thinking ah it's night time so obviously you're not gonna you're not going to be able to switch back and forth between night time twilight and daytime with this mod but this will allow the infrared filter to be lifted away from the actual sensor and you can actually see infrared light this way so that's really the most important step when it comes to this part so let's go ahead and cover up one of these sensors it doesn't really matter which one i'm just going to pick this one right here now you could have uh if if you had uh nd cover up one of these sensors it doesn't really matter which one i'm just going to pick this one right here now you could have uh if if you had uh wanted to do this beforehand you could have just uh done this and then stuck it that back down inside the casing before you screwed it shut but you can do it from this side as well i just need a little bit of a little bit of work but it will fit back down inside there pretty easily but it just it's just really hard to film so so once you get that sensor tucked down and back down into where it came from or you could even just leave it on top and just tape over it it doesn't matter it's up to you you'll see how it works if you were to try to do this mod it's really the easy part what you could do then is uh go ahead and pop back on your normal lens um and just verify that the whole thing works again making sure to put the battery back in and everything like that um but yeah there you go there's the mod there's the full uh full version of it you have your aperture control right here pretty easy it's manually controlled and you have your focus ring right here so it works just like a normal camera now and if you were so inclined you could easy it's manually controlled and you have your focus ring right here so it works just like a normal camera now and if you were so inclined you could swap out this rather small normal standard little seamount lens for something just a tad bit bigger you could go with something a little bit larger than this of course that's going to increase your weight you got to be very careful when it comes to the seamount seamount options because of the threads are quite fine but there we go threading the camera onto the lens rather than the other way around but there you go now you can have a larger setup that actually works from quite a quite a distance away as you can see here this is a very good surveillance setup if that's what you're going for so very handy a very good mod to do if you're interested in stuff like that and then also you can swap it out for other kinds of filters and lenses as well