Narrative Clip Teardown

[00:00:00] Speaker A: This is the Narrative Clip. It's a lifelogging camera you can wear almost anywhere. And Narrative's founder, Oskar Kalmaru, sent us one so we could check it out. Unlike most of the wearable tech we've taken apart so far, this is the first gadget we've seen with a camera inside it. And that's super exciting to me. I love having photos of my day, but I don't like experiencing my life through the lens of a camera or with my smartphone in front of my face. So the fact that this thing takes a picture every 30 seconds means

[00:00:25] Speaker A: I don't even have to think about it. And when I do, it has an accelerometer inside, and you can tap it to take a snapshot. You plug it in via USB to charge, and a companion desktop app slurps off the photos and sends them to the smartphone app, where you can play back image sequences like stop-motion videos. There's a lot going on in this small package, so let's check in with Lady Ada to take a closer look at the parts on the board.

[00:00:49] Speaker B: First up, over here in the corner, we have a little camera. It's a camera, it's got a camera in it. These are actually really common little video and digital cameras. They're often OV-something-something based from OmniVision, used in pretty much every single cell phone. So this is actually a very basic component. For taking video and photos though, for these cameras, they're raw devices. They're not buffered. So you do need to have a pretty hefty processor, which is why they probably went with

[00:01:14] Speaker B: the 1891 SAM here, which is an ARM core processor from Atmel. It's a pretty powerful processor. It comes in a BGA package. You can even run Linux on these. Who knows though, maybe they're just, you know, writing directly to it. This is sort of similar to the processor used in the Due. And then to go along with it, up here we have these 2 BGA chips. Now you see SanDisk on here. that gives you a big hint as to what this is. It's almost certainly a flash drive.

[00:01:40] Speaker B: It's sort of like a 4 gig flash chip, except it's soldered directly onto the PCB. And then over here, there's another chip, which looks kind of similar, same sort of square BGA package. It doesn't have a lot of markings on it. But because there's a flash disk, and flash is a little slow, and images can get really big, this is almost certainly onboard SRAM. This is the sort of SRAM that's used by the processor. And often with the Atsam series, they'll actually have

[00:02:05] Speaker B: built-in integration. So you don't have to clock the RAM. directly. It's handled all in hardware. You DMA buffer the image directly to the RAM. And then once the image is captured, then you can sort of slowly write it to the flash. And flash is sluggish, can take milliseconds to write. So those are these 3 major chips here, the processor, RAM, and flash. And you can probably look these up and figure out exactly what the values are. I'd say probably it's, you know, 4 to 8 gigabytes

[00:02:30] Speaker B: for the flash, maybe a megabyte or 2 for the SRAM. We have a couple more chips over here though. All the chips are on one side. Over here we have MX25. Now, whenever you see something that sort of starts with 25 and is especially a big chunky shape with 8 pins, it's almost always an EEPROM or flash chip. Now, this is separate than the flash that's used to store the image. This isn't gonna be a big flash

[00:02:55] Speaker B: chip. It's a little flash chip, low cost. And this is usually used to store configuration data maybe for the chip or the actual program memory. Sometimes these big chips actually don't have flash on board. You buy a separate flash chip and that way you get the exact right amount that you need. If you need more, you just buy a bigger chip. If you don't want to spend that much, you get a smaller chip. So this is flash, but this is probably configuration or program flash. And then over

[00:03:20] Speaker B: here, there is a little chip that says CellGuide, ACLYS. Never heard of this company, so I actually looked up this part, and CellGuide makes one-chip GPS units. This is actually a GPS receiver. And once you know that's a GPS receiver, the rest of this board looks a lot more familiar. Here we have a little antenna management circuit, a crystal— usually need a really good crystal for GPS because it has to do time syncing. Linking with the signal. And then over

[00:03:45] Speaker B: here, you see a bunch of passives for a balun or some sort of antenna matching, and then a little clip. And then on the package itself, you see the clip connects to an onboard antenna that is bound to the package. This little metal thing, it's glued on. This is the antenna, and you can see a little dot right there where the antenna meets the clip. So they built the GPS antenna into the

[00:04:10] Speaker B: package. That said, it's not a big GPS antenna, so chances are you have to be outside for a good minute or 2 to get a strong GPS fix. And then over here we have an LC07A. Look this up. This is actually a TI chip. It's just a 74LBC series 07 hex buffer. This is used for probably level shifting or something. You know, maybe the cell guide runs at, you know, 1.8 volts

[00:04:36] Speaker B: or something, and then this chip runs at 3 volts. Or maybe it's the other way around. Basically you have to, you know, combine a couple different voltages. You know, an HC or LBC series from TI It's like $0.25, super cheap. And if you have the board space for it, go for it. And then finally over here, we see that C3H. That's our much-loved LIS3DH accelerometer. This triple-axis accelerometer has been in every single wearable

[00:05:01] Speaker B: we've seen so far. It's like the most favorite of all. Hopefully they'll get an award for it. Nice work, ST, with your LIS3DH series accelerometers. Apparently everyone really likes them. And on the back of the board, as usual, you'll see a lot of passes. These are all the filter caps. Almost all these are going to be capacitors, maybe, you know, little helper chip here and there. And over here we've got the LTC3557 Linear Technology

[00:05:26] Speaker B: chip. They make really good power supplies. This all-in-one doodad is actually very nice. It's a LiPoly— so you get that LiPoly here— charger that uses USB as well as a triple buck converter. So that's the Narrative Chip. So you can see there's a lot of stuff packed in here. You got main processor, flash for the processor, big chunk of flash for storing images for long term, SRAM for buffering the images, short until they're

[00:05:51] Speaker B: pushed out to the flash, onboard GPS, as well as an antenna, level shifter, and then an accelerometer.

[00:05:59] Speaker A: For this and many other teardowns, we used hand tools and the Adafruit USB microscope with its articulated stand. What wearable tech should we take apart next? Post your suggestions in the comments and catch up on our last teardown video by visiting our YouTube playlist, and subscribe so you won't miss the next one.