Dropped Matterport Camera? Here’s how to test it!17036
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 Matterport Camera Repair Service Gainesville, Florida |
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| Video: I Dropped My Matterport Camera! Now What? | www.MatterFix.io [/vimeo]Dropped Matterport cameras are the most common cause of damage to cameras. Here’s a video that walks you thru how to test a dropped camera to determine how badly it might be damaged: https://vimeo.com/724246339 -- Transcript (Video Above) [00:00:11] Mike Vorce: Hi, this is Mike with MatterFix.io, and this is one in our series of pro tip troubleshooting videos that we're doing for the Matterport Service Provider community. We're going to do a number of these videos that go over common problems that you can encounter in the field with your Matterport camera. Go over what might be wrong with a camera and what your options are, what you might need to have done to get it repaired. This one we're calling, whoops, I dropped my camera, now what? This is, as you can imagine one of the most common occurrences with Matterport cameras where they incur damage. Somebody who's out in the field. They are scanning, the mount comes loose, the camera falls off. You're walking around a job site, you trip, and the camera falls. Matterport cameras are fairly precision piece of equipment. If you can imagine, it weighs £8. If it's up on a mountain, 5.56 feet off the ground and it takes a tumble onto a hard surface. There's a lot of damage that can be done. We look at the damage in two different ways. First, you want to look for visible damage, stuff that you can see. The most common thing that happens in that case is going to be the top plate is going to pop off. Now under the top plate, the WiFi antenna is actually glued to the top plate here. There's a cable that runs from the WiFi antenna it connects to the camera main board inside. Most of the time you drop the camera, if the top pops off, this cable is going to break. It's going to break where it connects to the main board, or it's going to break where it connects to the antenna. The top's off in that cable is disconnected, you know right then the WiFi antenna is going to need to be replaced. Now the other things that can happen is the bottom plate can be off. That's typically not a big deal. You can operate the camera fine without the bottom plate. The other thing that can happen is the camera casing can come apart, be dislodged, or not be lined up correctly. Generally those aren't too big of a problem. But if it's dislodged too much, it can warp the frame of the camera or cause the camera to be a little bit out of square, which can affect your models in that. That is the visible things that you can see damage. Now, more important is the damage that you can't see. What I have here is a Matterport Pro2 camera with the housing removed. You can see here's the sensor array. There's the mount, and then there's the main metal frame around here is called the chassis. This quite often can get bent when the camera falls. If you can visualize the camera falling and hitting on a corner, all of that force of that impact, hitting on the corner can bend that frame. Just going over what can possibly be wrong inside the cameras drop. One of the most common things that happens is the sensor array is held in place. Here's the sensor array. It's held in place by two aluminum rods. These rods are fairly strong, but with that kind of an impact from dropping quite often, these can get bad and that can distort your end model. As I mentioned before, that the chassis itself can get bent. It can be something very minor. You may visually look at it and not be able to tell there's anything wrong, but it can end up affecting the stitching lines and the way the images lineup in your model. Another thing that can happen, although not very often, is the sensor array itself can get broken. If one of the lenses crack, it's not a big deal that can be fixed. But if the sensor array itself breaks then the camera is going to have to go back to Matterport and you're going to get a refurbished camera because that cameras going to have to be taken apart and reassembled and recalibrated. Another thing that can happen is if the camera happens to drop and the impact is on them out, you can damage the clutch inside the camera, which is going to affect the rotation. The impact can also bend the chassis down below, and that can affect the camera. That's an overview of the kind of damage can happen inside the camera that you can't see when it takes a fall. Okay. We've gone over the visual damage that you can see when the camera takes a fall. Then we've gone over what can possibly be damaged that you can't see the non-visible damage that can happen to the camera. Now we're going to talk about some testing you can do to narrow down what might specifically be going on with your camera. The first thing you want to do, well obviously if your topic popped off and the WiFi cables broke and you know, the WiFi antennas going to need to be replaced, but you can still test with a camera. You just need to hold your Capture app close to the back of the camera. The first thing you want to do is go ahead and put the camera on a tripod and power it up. Make sure that the camera fully boots up and doesn't give you an error message. If you get an error message during boot up, then most likely one of the connections inside of the camera has come loose or something that's just not seated correctly inside the camera. That obviously at that point you can't do any more testing. You need to send it in for repair. That doesn't necessarily imply there's anything seriously wrong with the camera. It could be something fairly minor. You've got the camera on the tripod, you booted it up. It booted up successfully. The first thing you want to do is test your WiFi connection. Like I said, if the cable is broken, you know you need WiFi antenna so you can skip this part, but even if the top is still on and it looks fine that WiFi antenna cable can be damaged. The way you test the signal strength on the WiFi antenna is go ahead and open up your Capture app startup model connect it with the camera stand about ten or 15 feet away and initiate a scan. When it gets done scanning, you'll get that little message that says, okay to move camera. From when you receive that message, to when the image is fully transferred from the camera to your iPod or to your iPad, your capture device should be no more than four to seven seconds. If you get a disconnection while this is going on, or it takes longer than seven seconds to transfer that image over. That means probably your WiFi antenna cable is damaged inside or needs to be replaced. That's the first test. The second test you can do is you want to go ahead and initiate a scan. When you do, the camera moves six times. It has six different stock positions and if you're familiar with it, you know, it rotates, is very smooth. It moves, it stops, comes to a full stop and it moves again, it comes to a full stop. If you see anything unusual in the rotation. If it jiggles, if it bounces, if it's not steady, anything like that, that could indicate you have a problem in the clutch assembly. That's one problem that one test that you can do. The next test you want to do is go ahead in the same position, do three or four scans and make sure that you don't get an unstable error message. If you get the unstable error message than there's a pretty strong indicator that something inside the camera is bent. When the camera is sensing that it just isn't, something's just not lined up. It gives you that message. You complete that one. The next thing you can do is go ahead and move your tripod 4 or 5 feet away that initiate another scan. Your checking and make sure you get alignment from one scan to the next. Moving 4 or 5 feet away should have no problem getting alignment. If you have a problem getting alignment, that's another indication that something inside the camera is bent or out of place there. But you successfully complete that. The next thing you can do is to go ahead and open up one of the scans inside your Capture app. It's better if you're on a bigger device like an iPad, iPad Pro. Open it up to full screen and spin around and look at the stitching of the six images. There are six vertical lines where the cameras stitches the image together. If you see something fairly minor like it, maybe it looks like it's a quarter or a half an inch out of alignment, that's not typically not something that you need to worry about, but if you see anything significant, something it looks like it's out of line by a couple of inches, then that's another sign that something in the camera is bad. Most likely it's going to be the sensor support rods are bent, which is causing the sensor array to be slightly out of place and can cause that. Then finally, if you want to do an additional test, you can go ahead and upload a model, have four or five scans in different positions and upload a model and then go through and look at all the horizontal lines in the different images. You're going to look at base boards. You look at door jams over top of doors, look at crown molding, anything like that, and go along and see if you see any places where it's out of the line. If you see any alignment issues there, then that's another indication that something inside the camera is bent or out of place, or most likely is going to need to be replaced. That covers the testing that you can do. We've talked about the types of damage that can happen to your camera. The visible damage stuff you can see, and then the stuff you can't see that might be going on inside the camera. We went through the testing procedure to help you generally understand what damage might have been done to your camera and what might need to be repaired. Now we're going to talk about your repair options. The first thing you want to consider is if you purchased your camera within the last year, it's still under warranty for Matterport. I would advise contacting them and seeing if they'll be able to do that repair or under warranty. Well, physical damage typically isn't covered by manufacturer's warranties. Depending on when you bought your camera and some other circumstances you might find they would actually be able to help you out and fix it under warranty. If you don't want to go to the warranty route or if your camera's not under warranty, we obviously are going to recommend sending it to MatterFix. At MatterFix we typically repair cameras and send them back to customers the day after we receive them. We warranty the work we do for one year and we are authorized by Matterport to repair their cameras. We think this is a really good choice. The options that MatterFix offers, one is if you've tested your camera and the only issue you're having is the WiFi connection is weak. The tops come off, so you know, the WiFi antenna needs to be replaced or even the top hasn't come off. Everything tested good. But your WiFi signals week you're getting disconnections that slowed or transfer. If you want, you'd be a good candidate to order one of our DIY antenna repair kits. The kits or $200 plus shipping and they come with the new replacement WiFi antenna. All the tools you need and an access to a walk-through video to guide you through the process of taking the camera apart, putting the new WiFi antenna and putting everything back together. I emphasize though, that's only if you're not having any other issues. If you've tested, went through all the tests, you're not having any rotation problems, you're not having stitching problems, you're not having any error messages, anything like that. If you are having any of those issues, replacing the WiFi antenna is not going to help those and you could end up with models that won't process, won't to upload, or if they do, they've got errors. That's one option. The second option is to send the camera to us. For cameras that have been dropped, we tried to simplify the repair cost. We have a Level 1 that cost $250 and we have a Level 2 repair that costs 350. A lot of the cameras that have been dropped, can be repaired with the Level 1 repair procedure which would cost you $250 plus return shipping. For that if you happen to crack a lens, we have fixed that. If the sensor support rods are bent, we would replace those. If the clutch needs to be adjusted, we would do that. If the charge report needed to be replaced, if the top plate was damaged and needed to be replaced or the bottom plate was damaged and need to be replaced there's about 18 things that we'll go through it, that $250 level. A lot of the time for cameras that have been dropped, that'll take care of it. Now the Level 2 is $350 and where that kicks in is if like I was explaining earlier, if you have if you're doing the testing and you get a unstable air, if you get bad stitching when you look in the Capture app, if you're having any of those signs that something major inside the camera is bad, most of the time it's this chassis. This chassis gets bad. But if the chassis gets bad, if the clutch assembly is damaged or if the carrier plate, which is the the metal plate that holds the main board, if any of those three things need to be replaced, the repair cost is 350. But at that 350, we replace any all of those items that need it plus anything that we would have repaired at the $250 price, the level one repairs, so we do all of that plus the extra stuff and the total there is 350 plus return shipping. You pretty much know if you don't test the camera, if you drop it and it needs to be repaired send it to us, it's going to be 250 or 350 depending on the level of damage. Feel free to message us on Facebook, email us info at www.MatterFix.io. I believe we have our phone number on our website. You can call us and we look forward to helping you get your camera back in action as soon as possible. Thanks. |
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 WGAN ForumFounder & WGAN-TV Podcast Host Atlanta, Georgia |
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WGAN-TV | Top 10 Matterport Pro1, Pro2 and Pro2 Lite Camera Repairs (Revisited) | Guest: MatterFix (@MatterFix) Founder Mike Vorce | Thursday, 18 November 2021 | Episode #126 MatterFix Transcript: WGAN-TV | Top 10 Matterport Pro1, Pro2 & Pro2 Lite Camera Repair (Revisited) Hi All, Also see the WGAN-TV show above. Best, Dan --- Video: Matterport Camera - Complete Camera Assembly Video | Video courtesy of MatterFix YouTube Channel | 30 May 2021 Special Offer for WGAN Forum Members   Free! 12 months of WGAN-TV Training U (in Matterport) Membership with a MatterFix repair of $250 or more. |
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| One early morning scan, in a dark dark room, and having a bad case of presbyopia, I thought I had secured the tripod head clamp onto my Pro 1. BAM. 1.6m drop to the floor. Luckily no problem! |
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