MatterFix

Video: Matterport Pro2 3D Camera Teardown | Video courtesy of MatterFix YouTube Channel | 13 August 2022

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 | Transcript

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Transcript (Video Above)

[00:00:11]
Mike Vorce: -Hello, this is Mike with MatterFix.io, and this is another one in our series of Pro tips videos that we're doing for the Matterport Service Provider community.

In these videos, we try to walk you through various problems that you might have with your Matterport camera, how to diagnose what's going on, and then if a repair is required, what your options are. For those of you who aren't familiar with MatterFix, we provide express Matterport repair services.

We typically repair cameras and ship them back the day after we receive them. We can even do same-day repairs if you're in a rush and we know the cameras coming in ahead of time. We warranty our work for one year.

We use only Matterport parts, we're authorized by Matterport to repair their cameras. Currently, we do out-of-warranty repairs, we do not do in-warranty repairs, and so keep that in mind.

This video, we're going to do something a little bit different. We get questions asking about the camera and referring to the different components and what is this called, and how does this work?

What we're going to do here is we're going to walk you through the basics components that make up the Matterport camera, maybe comment a little bit about what can happen to them when a camera gets dropped.

Then at the end we've got a video that shows us assembling a camera from all parts completely through to making a working camera and turning it on.

People find this pretty interesting. A lot of people use the Matterport technology and they know what's going on. It's interesting to see what actually goes into putting a camera together and how it works all the way through.

Today we're going to talk about, like I said, the various components that make up the camera, how they work together?

What can possibly go wrong with them? Maybe a brief comment on some repair issues that you might encounter. You start with a camera, you're all familiar with it. This is a Pro2. You have the mount assembly here, this whole assembly inside is referred to as the clutch assembly.

It glues them out. There's a bolt that goes through, and then that's connected to the stepper motor which turns the camera.

The stuff you can see from the outside obviously is the housing. You have the sensor array which sits inside here, and then you have your power button, your battery level button, your OLED panel, and your charger port.

That's the basics of the camera. When you take a camera and you take the housing off of it, you can start to see a little bit more separation what the different components are. You have the outside chassis, which is an aluminum frame that holds everything together.

Here's your mount, the clutch assembly is here. Here's a battery, the sensor array is here, it's held in by two rods. Then you've got your GPS antenna on the top and it's mounted onto a plate main board. You have one fan you can see here and another cooling fan that you can't see that's inside. Starting from the bottom working up,

[00:03:38]
Mike Vorce: Here's the clutch assembly. That's the mount, there's a shaft that goes through, it has bearings on it, and then this is really important.

This is the main gear inside the clutch assembly. This gear can get damaged if the camera is dropped, if the clutch's stepper motor is not adjusted right, it can strip the gear, and that can cause rotation problems.

Also, we've seen this main shaft that goes through get bent because the camera falls over when it's still connected to the tripod, and in severe cases, we've seen this outside casting that holds everything together.

We've seen it get bent and even broken in a real hard fall. That's the clutch assembly, and then it sits here inside the chassis, and to give you a little better example, here's one that has some of the parts in it.

You've got your metal chassis, you've got your clutch assembly here, and then you have the next component we'll talk about is a stepper motor.

That's a small, very high-quality electric motor with a gear on it, and the gear turns against the clutch assembly and causes the rotation in the camera, the 6 stops that it does when it completes a sweep. That's the clutch assembly, the stepper motor.

Next you can see, we'll talk about batteries. The Pro1 and the Pro2, each of them have two batteries. This happens to be a

Pro2 Lite with only one battery installed, how it comes, but the Pro1 and the Pro2 have two batteries, the Pro2 Lite has one battery.

The batteries are installed there, and as you're aware the most common thing that can happen to a battery is it doesn't get charged frequently enough, the charge gets too low.

The battery basically has a fail-safe surrogate in it and it cuts off and it has to be replaced, that's a safety feature that's in the camera. Now we've talked about the chassis, the clutch assembly, the stepper motor, the batteries, the next thing we'll look at is the sensor array.

This is the central ray. This is a Pro2 Lite which is identical to the Pro2.

We have a sensor array here. This is from a Pro1, but it essentially looks very similar to the Pro2 or the Pro2 Lite sensor array. The sensor array sits inside the chassis like this, and it is held in place by two aluminum rods.

Now quite often when a camera is dropped, these aluminum rods can get bent, and what you'll see, is you'll see a distortion most likely in the Capture app, you'll see that the images aren't aligned correctly. In severe cases, you can get an unstable error or that, but that's something that fairly commonly happens to a camera when it gets dropped.

That's the sensor array sitting in here, the two support rods that hold it in place.

The next component is this plate that's on the top, which has the GPS antenna mounted to it, and it has a cable that runs around and connects to the GPS chip here. This plate can get bent, this antenna cable can get damaged when the camera gets dropped.

I believe the GPS antenna is used to help locate your outside images or to provide any GPS information where it's able, if you are Capture app isn't accurately or supplements the GPS information that your Capture app provides to give you geo-locate addresses and generally locate your 360 images on the exterior of your scans.

That's the GPS point and that covers, I guess we really didn't talk about the main board. But the main board sits right in here, it is on this E carrier plate that can get bent. We don't see it very often, but it can bend occasionally, and the E carrier plate holds the main board in place.

Also on that E carrier plate, there are two cooling fans, we call this the case cooling fan. It blows the bulk of the air out of the camera, and I believe this is one of the processor cooling fans, so there's two fans inside here that are on the E carrier plate.

These fans can go out, especially if a camera has been dropped, they can make noise. It's definitely something that if we're not operating correctly, they need to be replaced. Now I think we've gone through pretty much everything inside the camera, what does what.

If you have a camera like this, the last thing that would happen is the housing would be put on the camera.

The housing is composed of basically the back, which has your power button, your battery level button. This is the OLED panel that displays your battery life and gives you the messages, and then your charger port here.

That's the back of the housing. Then the other two parts of the housing are the front obviously, we refer to them as the top plate and the bottom plate.

Now, both of these plates quite often when a camera gets dropped, the only thing that the user notices is the top plate has become dislodged or the bottom plate is off and maybe the WiFi antenna. A WiFi antenna is attached to the top plate in this position, and it has a cable that runs from it and the WiFi connects to the chip on the main board.

Quite often when my camera is dropped, the top plate pops off, and if that happens most times, the WiFi antenna cable is torn, detached from the antenna or detached off the main board, so that's one of the things you notice quite often like I said, this bottom plate will pop off. The bottom plate being off doesn't really hinder the operation of the camera at all.

You can continue to use it, but the top plate and the WiFi antenna is a fairly common issue that needs to be repaired. Without the WiFi signal, you're going to get disconnections, slow transfer, and it becomes almost impossible to scan with. Then last, the front plate. Typically nothing, we don't really see anything happening.

In severe cases, this can get dented or something and need to be replaced when a camera is dropped, but usually there's no damage to this.

That covers the whole camera, all the different parts that make it up and what they do. Next, we've got a little video. If you're interested, you can see us assemble a camera from all the parts. I believe it's a Pro2 Lite, but the same principles apply.

Almost everything's the same except for one battery versus two. You can see us assemble a camera completely from all the parts, and at the end, turn it on to a working camera, and a lot of people seem to find that pretty interesting. It gives you an idea of how everything goes together. Just a quick review of the tools. You'll have your torques bit driver handle, your various torques bits, and the splurge tool.

[00:11:41]
Mike Vorce: -Wire cutters for cutting zip ties when you put the battery back in. I have a magnetic head here for the small screws on the stepper motor. I'll go over that when we do it. We've got the replacement vinyl that goes on the bottom of the chassis for tightening the clutch nut. We have a torch ranch here. We'll go over that and lock tight nut adhesive for adhering that ceiling nut when you put it on.

That's a quick overview of the tools. Just to go over the camera, the various parts while it's just assembled here.

We have the chassis, which is basically the mainframe inside the camera. We have what I call the mid plate. I think it may technically be called something else.

But this is where the main board attaches, and then this plate is inside the camera, holding the main board in place inside the camera. Here's the back housing, which has the buttons and the LED display panel. Here is the bottom housing. This is where the mount goes through.

Here's the top plate of the housing with the WiFi antenna connected to it. This is the front of the housing. Notice that rubber bushing is attached here. It's best to have it here when you're reassembling the camera.

This is the, I think they call this the GPS plane or plate. It is a plate that goes on top of the camera. The GPS antenna is mounted in the center of it. It attaches to the chassis. Battery, battery pad, which goes on. We'll show you that when we're doing the reassembly where it goes.

The sensor array with the three USB connectors on the back that connect to the main board. Here's the main board.

There are three ports where the USB cables connect from the sensor array. Here's the two ports where the batteries plug in. Since this is a Pro2 Lite, we'll just be using one of those battery connections, and then this is where the stepper motor attaches.

This is the ribbon cable connector on the main board, and this is where the charging port adapter plugs into the main board. Then we have the two fans. This is the clutch assembly.

You can see the mount on the bottom. This is underneath the camera. This part attaches inside the mid frame.

There's the clutch nut. The stepper motor, which fits inside the mid frame and mounts inside here so that this worm or screwdriver actually connects against this plastic gear. As this turns, it rotates this plastic gear, which turns the camera around.

These are the two main rods that go through the mouth or sensor array in place, and then there's the miscellaneous parts. Now when you first start looking at reassembling one of these from the bottom-up, it can be a little bit intimidating with all these parts, but you just need to think of it in steps.

We break it down into steps and just focus on the particular step at a time as you go through and then you shouldn't have any problem.

The first step that we're going to do or that you will be doing, will be taking the chassis and you're going to want to mount the clutch assembly inside of the chassis.

It'll basically go here. We'll obviously have to remove this to fit it down in there, and then at the same time as we do that, simultaneously we'll also be mounting the stepper motor.

Those are the two things we're going to do first here. In this particular instance, I took this out when we did the disassembly. This is hand tight now.

What I'm going to do is take the nut off. You want to be careful when you're pulling out some of these assemblies. Actually, these bearings and stuff inside here can be loose. In other words, if you tip it over, they'll all come out and there's a number of different layers of parts in there, and it's just a lot easier if you'd never let that happen because it can be difficult to reassemble them.

In this particular case, everything's in firmly, so I'm not going to worry that much about it. There's the mounting holes inside the chassis one, two, three, four, and then this has to fit a certain way. The hole has got to line up there, so if you line the hole up, there's basically one way it could go. I'm going to go there.

Then there are four screws. This is using the hex 1.5 size. Sometimes I think the newer ones have gone over to a T9 or a T10 or a torque screw here, but essentially it's the same, just a different type of head. I'm going to start these screws in and just loosely put them in to hold the clutch assembly in place. I've got two of them in, the clutch assembly is in place. I'm going to go ahead and put the other two in.

[00:18:02]
Mike Vorce: This is the fourth one. I'll show you. Now you can see here, so here are the four holes. They are in there. This one went up a little bit more. You need to leave some play in them.

[00:18:27]
Mike Vorce: The play needs to be in there so that you can fit the stepper motor in. It's actually a H 2.0, which is what this screw head fitting is.

You see, I'm tightening them down, but I'm leaving a little bit of play in there. Now I'm going to flip it over. Now we're ready to go ahead and install the stepper motor. The motor, there's three grooves there, and then there's three thread it inserts in here that it fits over top of, and so you slide it in.

There's a hole where the worm drive goes into the clutch and basically boom, it's dropped in. Now at this point, the stepper motor's in there. I'm going to go ahead and finish. I'm not going to fully tighten these, but I'm going to go ahead and tighten them down to where the clutch assembly is.

[00:19:28]
Mike Vorce: Tight, snug against the chassis.

[00:19:41]
Mike Vorce: They're not fully tightened but it's in there, it's not moving anywhere. Now you'll notice the stepper motor, basically it's locked into place now. It needs a little bit of play to get it inserted there and then when you tighten it down, it's essentially locked into place.

Now, in this next step that we're going to do, there are three screws that connect the stepper motor mount to the chassis. For each of those you have a screw, you have a nylon washer, and you have a spring. The order they go in, there's a nylon washer goes first, then the spring, and then the screw on top of that.

Now, it's tight in there working a little bit of a problem, the washers are pretty easy to get on. But then when you start getting to the springs and the screws, that can get a little bit tricky. I'm going to set the springs for these two in place.

Then what I found works well. I had a magnetic bit driver that was really good, but for some reason, I can't seem to locate it.

But having something that has a magnetic head on it. This is a 1/16th inch Allen wrench which is essentially the same size as H 1.5, the smaller hex head. I rub it against a magnet so it's magnetized. You see it's not working.

My plan was that it was going to be magnetized. Since that doesn't work, I'm basically holding them with my finger and getting them started. That one started, that one's threaded in. I'm going to go ahead and do this one. Holding it with my finger, getting it in place, and then getting it started.

[00:21:48]
Mike Vorce: Now we get to the most difficult one, the one that looks tucked away in the corner there. The stepper motor's pretty close to it. I'm going to put the spring in, and get it in place. I'm going to drop this down while holding it with my finger.

Got it in place. What I was using that Allen ranch is, I said, it's 1/16th. It's the same size as the 1.5 bits that you should have. I'm just used to it to start because it's easier to get in there. You can use whatever you want, either one. Now I'm only going to tighten them down at this point to where they are fairly snug. I'm not really tightening them yet, just to the point where you start to feel good resistance.

[00:22:48]
Mike Vorce: Now you'll notice the stepper motor has some play in it. It can theoretically move that much.

You are not going to want it to move that much. We'll adjust the stepper motor tension later on. You want to restrict it to a very slight, almost like a millimeter or two of play you want in there. We'll cover that when we get to that point of tightening that down.

Now the stepper motor's in place, the clutch assemblies in place. I'm going to go back to the clutch assembly with the H 2.0. I'm going to start them fairly. These need to be fairly tight.

[00:23:42]
Mike Vorce: If you ever take apart some of the older cameras, these can be a real barrier to get out because they've tightened them and they put thread lockers on them. The newer ones, it's not near as much of a problem there.

Those are tightened down. I'm going to go back to the stepper motor mounts and I'm going to go ahead and tighten them a little bit more now so it was tight.

Then I'm just going a little bit past they were firm and now I'm just tightening a little bit more there. You want these to be fairly tight. You'll notice you can still move it. But the screws are tightened down pretty snugly.

[00:24:42]
Mike Vorce: Now the next thing we're going to go ahead and I'm going to show you how to put on one of these parts. Since we took the screws out, we've torn the vinyl there. I don't go to the trouble of peeling the old vinyl off.

I guess theoretically I could, but it's fairly thin. I don't think it affects anything. I'm just going to put the new vinyl over. This can be a little bit of a problem. I've only done it a couple of times. What I'm going to do to assist me is to get the chassis to stand upright so I can work down on it. I just use a clamp there. You can clamp it somewhere.

[00:25:33]
Mike Vorce: Do you see the hole here? This is how it's going to go. Well, there's vinyl, you want to weed it out first, which means taking out the pieces that aren't going to be used. It's just the two upright pieces on the H's on either side.

[00:26:01]
Mike Vorce: I'll go ahead and pull the center hole out. Maybe. Yeah. That's out of the way. Now you know, it's going to go this way. The key is to get it off of here and not wrinkle it up.

[00:26:21]
Mike Vorce: I peel both sides there.

[00:26:27]
Mike Vorce: What I'm going to do now is, a piece is stuck to itself, which is not good. It's still stuck to itself there. I am going to gingerly get it as close as I can and I'm just going to drop it. It may not be perfect. It's not perfect.

[00:27:06]
Mike Vorce: Then you can work with your fingers and get the air bubbles out. I'm sure there's probably a better technique for doing this. You can actually punch the vinyl holes in it, get the air bubbles out.

[00:27:41]
Mike Vorce: - Because I left the other vinyl and you can still see the impressions from this group, but it's in pretty good shape here and it won't be noticeable once the housing and that is on it. Okay, so that's done. Now the next step is we need to go ahead and install the mount, the main bolt. I get slid through the bottom there and then the nut goes on here.

Now, what I'm going to do is this is where you're going to use the torch ranch and you're going to tighten this nut down. Here's a torque wrench here. The setting for this as you want and foot-pounds, about 18 and 1/2 foot pounds.

You see this line goes up when I'm at zero here at the 15, so I'm at 15, 16, 17, 18 and one half. That should be good. I've tightened it up here at the bottom B to just follow the instructions with your torque wrench and then I'm going to use that and tighten that until this ranch clicks indicating that it's gotten to the desired tightness.

Now, also before you tighten, you're going to want to put some thread locker in here. The way I do this is I back the nut out or it forms a little bit of a cup. Then I'll go in and I'll put a little bit of thread locker around there.

You'll notice that the thread locker is up against the edge. When I tighten the nut down, that thread locker will be on the threads as it goes down. Then when I tighten it fully, when it's tight, I'm going to take a rag and wipe off the excess because you don't want any of this to drip down on anything because it can cause a real mess.

At this point, I'm going to go outside. I have a vise setup where the vise jaw is clamped. The mount here, I put a ride in there to protect so it doesn't scratch them out or anything like that. But I'll tighten it up. This will be fixed.

Then I'll take the torque wrench and go around, tighten it to the desired tightness, and then I'm going to do that now when I come back, that'll be done and we'll go ahead on proceed with the rest of the assembly.

[00:30:15]
Mike Vorce: I went outside with my vice, put the bison here, mounted the chassis, and then I used the torque wrench and tightened it down to the specifications and then wiped off the excess thread locker. This is installed now, you'll notice though, if you push the stepper motor against it, it feels normal.

But if you don't push against it, there's nothing holding the stepper motor in place, it'll come out. Then that spins freely. But when you're holding it against, that's the normal resistance you would typically want to feel when you twist this knob on the camera if everything's lined up correctly. Okay, so that's done. The next step is we're going to go ahead and install what I call the mid frame. I think maybe another name for it.

But like I said, I call it the mid frame. It goes the orientation of it is, you know that if you push up here, you're not engaged with a stepper motor, you push down, you're engaged so something needs to push down here. If you remember, we back this screw out.

This screw when it's pushed, threaded in, it pushes against the stepper motor and that combined with a spring, puts the pressure on the stepper motor to keep it properly engaged. In order for this to push down here, you know that this mid frame needs to go in this way.

Now, what I'll typically do, though. As I'll put it, this orientation with the knob, the mount closer to the top and then you're going to slide the mid frame in here.

Here's the part that's going to engage against the stepper motor. You're going to slide this in a plastic frame, take it out for now. It's going to go in there and then pop down into place. But if you recall, we had to basically pull the wings of the housing of the chassis out and now this is in place and it just needs to be slid straight in. But you recall the way this went back together is the washers go first.

There's two washers and then on top of the washers, there's this spring that goes between the washers and the cameras. It's like you have to, at the same time, you have to get that in place and keep the spring in place and slide it in. Now, as you slide it in it's going to reach a certain point where the screw thread it inserts will actually snap into these holes and line up. There you heard a little snap there.

[00:33:26]
Mike Vorce: The scenes are tight all the way around. These inserts are inside here so this mid frame is essentially in place the way that it needs to be.

[00:33:41]
Mike Vorce: Now, we're ready to go ahead and put the screws back in that hold the mid frame to the chassis. If you recall, this is where we keep track of where they go. We put some little black dots around there because there's quite a few different holes here.

We've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and we've got the six screws here. These six screws here are the ones that go in those six holes. This should be the H2.0, the most common one of the hex. I'm going to go ahead and add it there.

[00:34:41]
Mike Vorce: I'm not going to tighten it all the way, but I'm going to tighten it fairly snug and then another one goes here.

[00:35:02]
Mike Vorce: Another one goes here.

[00:35:26]
Mike Vorce: When I took the camera apart, the very first time, I had a little bit of a problem trying to remember which screws went where.

That's why I said it's handy to just make those little marks and that way you don't have to worry about when you assemble them together. Now they're all down and they just were basically tightening. I'm going to go back now and fully tightened them. You don't need to put a lot of pressure on them, but it just needs to be a firm tightening.

[00:36:11]
Mike Vorce: That's all six of those. Now the mid frame is in place. The stepper motor and the clutch assemblies in place.

Now this is one of the more nuanced parts of putting it back together and that is adjusting this. We want to push to get this set screw down where it's putting the right amount of pressure on the stepper motor.

The way it is now, you can still push the stepper motor out quite a bit. That's too much play in there. What you really want.

If I keep my hands on the motor where the stepper motor is fully engaged, that's your normal, normally how it's going to feel. You want to leave just a slight amount of play in there. But see, I backed off a little bit and it was almost at the verge of this, the stepper motor wasn't engaged. I'm going to walk you through specifically how we do this.

[00:37:21]
Mike Vorce: This should be a T10, I believe.

[00:37:29]
Mike Vorce: I should use the tools.

[00:37:37]
Mike Vorce: This is the T9. This should be the T10. This is a T10. This is a T10, torque 10. Now this adjustment can be done with the main board, once the main board is in place.

The main board was sitting here. You'll notice there's a hole here, but you need to have a longer screwdriver to go down and make the adjustment here. It can be done with a main board on, right now it's awesome, it makes it a little easier to see. I'm going to go down to where it's maybe not quite a quarter of an inch, an 8th of an inch.

The set screw is beyond the on flush down inside. Then I'm going to see if there's any play.

[00:38:34]
Mike Vorce: See now, I'm to the point now where it doesn't feel like there's any play in there which you don't want. It's really nuanced. Still feels like there's no play, let me go again now.

[00:39:03]
Mike Vorce: There. There's play, but there's probably too much now.

[00:39:21]
Mike Vorce: It's just a little bit of play, but not to the point where you can ever spin this fast and hear a clicking sound, or it means it's just engaged. I've got it. Maybe there's, not a 16th of an inch of 30 second or a 64th of an inch a play in there. I'm going to tighten it a little bit more. You see there, I got to the point and all of a sudden there's no play.

I know that that's too far there. I think that's the sweet spot there. The reason you want that little bit of play in there, that plastic gear that the stepper motor one dive rotates against can be ever so slightly.

Precision machine part but something, maybe there's a slight bend in the shaft or just something can be slightly out, which makes that maybe a little bit out of round. If you're tight against it, when it rotates like that, it changes the way that the two are interacting.

Whereas if you've got that little bit of play, if there's an outer round spot in that gear, it compensates for it and it rotates correctly. Like I said, that's probably one of the more trickier, more nuanced parts of the camera in general when you're working on the camera. But we've got that done now.

Let's see what we are going to do next. Typically, what I probably will do here is I'll go ahead and put the fan motors back in. There's a spring here, I must have had an extra spring from when I disassembled the camera.

This is the stepper motor spring. I know there's three under there. I think when I disassembled one of the springs that was supposed to come out, it actually got stuck in the frame somewhere and it turned up. But you always want to make sure that all of your parts are accounted for when you go back together that you've, everything is in there.

Those little springs can be a little bit difficult sometimes to keep up with, but I know there's one under each of those screws. We're at this point now. I'm going to go ahead and put this, I guess fan shroud.

I don't know exactly what the technical term is for it, but it helps direct the airflow and supports the main board, so that. Some of the older cameras there's actually rigid cardboard pieces that are glued to the frame, but this one is a removable plastic. I'm going to drop that into place.

Then do you remember when we were doing the disassembly, I went ahead and left the fans. You can see this fan here.

This is how it came out of the camera. You got three steps here that it goes into. I left the screws and saw, that's the way that it goes back into place. There's no question about that. Like I said, it's a good idea sometimes until you get real comfortable with staff to take a picture of something before you take it apart, what you're putting it back together, you make sure you get the orientation right.

These screws should be the 1.5 hex. You don't need to overlay, tighten these as your plastic fittings. That can crack. The plastic housing on the fan which can crack if you over-tighten it. You just want them to be snug firm.

[00:43:11]
Mike Vorce: Then you see there's a little clip or retaining clip here. This is where the fan wires go under. I guess it basically just holds the fan wires in place. That's one of the fans. Then there's a smaller fan. You can see the studs are here, but when you flip it over, that one, if you recall, was surface mounted here.

Once again, there's three threaded insert. There's three screws that I left in place, so there's no question about where it goes.

[00:44:12]
Mike Vorce: [inaudible 00:44:12]. - Maybe I'm doing the wrong thing. [inaudible 00:44:17] was that easy, torques. Let me use the two points. Let me see. I guess that's the two points though, not the 1.5.

[00:44:45]
Mike Vorce: That will be a little bit closer.

[00:44:51]
Mike Vorce: Maybe it's the T9.

[00:44:59]
Mike Vorce: Fair enough. I was wrong on that. That's the T9. Some of these smaller screws, it's a little hard to differentiate what they are, but you can tell when you start screwing it in if it doesn't act right. I know that this wire goes over.

They've got a piece of tape here to protect so there's no chafing on that wire. If you remember, when we took those apart, these two pieces here were oriented like this and went into the board. Now, we're ready to put the motherboard in place.

[00:45:43]
Mike Vorce: We need to think about orientation. You see the two fan fittings there. You know those have to be at this end. These are the battery connectors and the stepper motor. They have to be accessible through this hole so they would go down.

[00:46:01]
Mike Vorce: I'm just getting this out. Actually, what I'm going to do a little easier is just go ahead and plug the two. Since I'm in the right orientation, I'm going to go ahead and just plug the two fans here and right now and I'm going to set the board in place and we'll log. There we go. Now, if you recall, we have eight screws that hold the board in place.

[00:46:39]
Mike Vorce: I'm going to go ahead and start one in this corner, I'm not going to tighten it. I'm going to go to the opposite corner and I'm going to place in place.

[00:46:59]
Mike Vorce: This is definitely a well secured board with these eight screws here, but I guess, it also provides the grounding for the board.

[00:47:40]
Mike Vorce: Board in place, fans hooked up. I'm going to go ahead and firmly, you don't need a torque on these screws at all. I just want to get a firm seat.

[00:48:02]
Mike Vorce: Well, we're making progress now. We've got the board in, the fans hooked up. Let's see, what do we want to do next? Let's go ahead and plug the stepper motor end. You can see there's a wire retainer here that's obviously designed for the stepper motor wires to hold them in place, probably, to keep them from getting too close to the clutch assembly there.

Then this goes with the exposed side. The little connectors you see, one side is flat, you can't see any wires through it, here.

This side, you can actually see the little connectors that's the side that faces out and it basically slides right in those grooves and goes and pops in place. That's in place. Now, the next thing we're going to do is put the battery in.

Now, we'll be doing a lot more extensive detailed videos about battery installations. This is the Pro2 light which only has one battery.

You notice there's one for two batteries. One battery goes here, and a second battery would go here. If you have the Pro2, you're going to have batteries on both sides. If you have the Pro2 Lite, you're only going to have a battery on this shorter side here.

You notice this side is longer where the stepper motor is, the shorter side. I'm sure the reason the battery is on this side is because it's closer to the center of rotation or center of gravity, I guess, of the camera, as opposed to having the weight further out here. Anyway, on the Pro2 light, the battery is going to go on the short side here.

This is the battery pack. It's a forest battery pack with a proprietary management and battery management system board built into it. It's got an eight pin Molex connector on it as a Mylar padding around here.

This is the newer battery. All the cameras now come with his battery. You always want to visually inspect a battery, you never want to put a battery into a camera or put it back into a camera if you've taken it out that has any physical damage.

The main thing you'd want to be looking for is if somebody had put the wrong screw in and there's a puncture and goes down. If you have any doubts about a battery pack being damaged, you do not want to put it back into a camera. You don't do it, period.

If you're doing a repair for a customer and push comes to shove, they've got a damaged battery in there and you can't get them to pay for it or something like that, you just need to eat it and put it in a good battery.

You just cannot put a damaged battery back into the Matterport camera, period. You see, this battery pack looks really good.

I don't see any signs of damage. This one is the newer one. I'm going to put it in with a label facing towards the stepper motor, the cables coming towards the center out like this. Then the Molex connector, it's an eight pin and it's got a little clip here, and the clip it plugs into on the board here. What I'm going to do is turn this around, orient it the right way.

[00:51:33]
Mike Vorce: I can't even see [inaudible 00:51:33] anybody else is going to do it. Let's see here. Let me see. Maybe this is about as good as you can get. There's the connector that is going to go in. I line it up correctly, maybe. -It's lined up and I'm going to push it in. You notice the fan turn, that's pretty common when you reconnect a battery. It's lined up.

Now, some of these newer batteries when you plug them in require a fair amount of force to make the connection correctly. I never like to put a bunch of force on the board without supporting it from behind. I'll put my thumb behind here and then I'll push on the connector and you can feel it sit all the way down.

I know it's fully seated. The battery is in, it's fully seated, the little lock connectors in there. This battery is in correctly. Now, the next step then is there's a pad that's always installed. This is the orientation of it. It's like a capital I or something.

The rounded corners go up, you slide it in here. It's going to be here and it's going to be there after the zip ties, you're going to put it in and they're going to hold it in place. What I'm going to do is,

[00:53:01]
Mike Vorce: I'm going to steal a piece of tape here for a second. I usually like having extra pieces of tape around for this. I'm just going to take a piece of tape or something and basically tape that, and that's just holding it in place.

We'll do the zip ties. You got two zip ties. This is pretty important here. The zip tie, when you're finished you want the locking portion of it to end up right on this corner of the battery, you don't want it out here where it can rub against the sensor array or anything like that. You want it here.

What I do is, I start with a zip tie like this, I push it out through that square hole here, and then I gauge it. I want it to end up there. I'm going to hold that with my thumb and then I'm going to go around here.

This is another thing that's important when you come out here. You need to go through the whole but you go over these two plates here. That's part of what holds the zip tie in place and allows it to hold the battery in place. You go through the whole over top of that and then back into the chassis.

When you push this in it's not going to want to go in, it's going to hit against the clutch, so I go, take this tool, find the end of it, disband it a little bit, get it around. Now that's inserted through there. Now I want to go back to my gauge here. I've got it like this, I want it to end up there.

I knew that and I worked around and pushed the slack out of the zip tie. Then I'll go ahead and engage the zip tie and adjust it again, there. Now, eventually we're going to be using a tool that puts a certain amount of tension on the zip ties.

You just want to make sure you put a lot of, you want these types. See how this is out here, this is too loose. I can actually just use the chassis and my thumb and push and you can see how tight that is there. You can get a lot of leverage by pushing the zip tie there.

That's in there, that's good and tight. Now, the second one, basically the same as the first one, it's just a set of holes that are lower. Put it in, gauge how far you want it to go.

Go out the back, make sure you've gone over that metal piece and then back into the chassis. Stuff down there. I use my little tool to thread it out. I get started, get engaged, or it's blocked a little bit, then I make my final adjustment on where I want it to end up. Then I pushed the slack out of it. Come back here. Pretty good. I'm going to do the same thing. I'm using my hand here and pushing my thumb and then holding the other end of the zip tie. You can really put a lot of pressure on those zip ties that way. There again, you can see that the zip tie is flat.

That's what you want. That battery is in place. Obviously if you had a piece of tape in there now you'd take it off and you want to take a side cutter now, go in, clip off the excess from the zip tie. Obviously make sure your cables are out of the way so you don't accidentally cut a battery cable and you have to redo everything.

That battery is installed correctly. Like I said, we'll have another video that's going to deal exclusively with just the batteries. We're making good progress here. We're a good bit of the way done at this point.

Now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to put the sensor array back in. The camera is oriented, the mount away from me. It's open. This top plane is off for right now, this will go, the GPS top one piece will go on here. But it's handy to have it out of the way when you're at this point. You can see inside there better.

What I'm going to do is facing away from me, I know that this most exposed sensor USB connector goes towards the bottom of the camera. That's the orientation. I'm holding it there. I tilt it up and I take that first cable and you want to make sure the first cable goes into the first USB connector.

The middle one goes into the middle one, then obviously the bottom one goes into the bottom one. Now, at this point, fairly soon we're going to have some special tape that's going to be used always to make sure that these USB cables stay locked into place. For right now what I'm doing is using kapton tape which is what Matterport has used in the past.

I'm just going to take three pieces of kapton tape. It's just a little extra security for keeping the cables, sometimes when the cameras get dropped, especially the pro ones when they get dropped sometimes those cables can actually become dislodged and therefore it affects the camera. I've got kapton tape, all those three are in place.

The sensor array. Now I'm going to go ahead and set it down. It's fairly easy to figure out how it goes here. Set it down here, look there, make sure that cable is not rubbing against the Koch pieces. That looks good. Now,next thing is we're going to take the rods to go through. There's two rods that hold the sensor array in place.

Now, another advantage to not having a top plane on here is you can actually look inside and you can see it's really easy to slide there if that's on there. Sometimes it's a guessing game to get that slide into place.

[00:59:19]
Mike Vorce: I'm putting this second one through. You notice now, don't want it. This is fairly common.

Sometimes if it doesn't go one-way these rods can go either way. You see that time I went, didn't go one way but when I pushed it in the other way it slid right in.

There shouldn't be any torque or anything, it shouldn't be like you have to push it down to get the rod to go in. You need to position it right, no tension on it and put the rods there because you don't want this. This needs to be free floating and just held in place by the rods. We've got both of the rods on there. I'm going to go ahead and put the retainer clips on at this point on the right.

These are those two little clips that we took off at the beginning. Now, you notice that the rod is not pushed through and half unless I push the camera.

There's a little groove in the end of the rod that the retainer clips fits in. I'm going to actually just physically push it together and then slide the clip down. Now, the clip is in place.

I have a flat screwdriver that isn't a good thing to use for a big flat screwdriver but if it's oriented right you get it in there but basically you should just pop and it should pop into place. That's the one. But remember there's two. Go over here, there,

[01:00:54]
Mike Vorce: so I pushed a little bit, I got it started.

[01:01:00]
Mike Vorce: - That's in place. You want to make sure they're fully engaged in that groove and held in place. This is another thing too that you can notice. See these scratch marks here.

This particular camera has been taken apart a number of times by me and apparently by somebody else. If you see the scratches here, you'll notice, you probably know that somebody who's been in there and taking the camera apart.

I'm not sure if this happens with Matterport works on the cameras or not. But I know typically when I work on a camera sometimes there will be scratches that I've noticed other ones that come in. That's just a sign to look for as to whether or not someone has been into a camera. We're back to this point here. Everything's looking good.

We're ready to go ahead and put the top plane on or the GPS plane. If you recall, it just had four screws.

We go back to our nicely organized screw tray here. These four here, these are Phillips. I will find our Phillips here. I won't type it all the way. Put it most of the way. Same here, most of the way. Just for convenience, I'm going to make it a little easier. I'm going to flip it over.

I'm going to go ahead and this one in Number 4. Now if your chassis is bad or something, this could give you an indication that your chassis is bad if you're having a hard time getting the screws lined up correctly.

But on the plus, if you do get this plate, fitted back. It probably isn't bad and you get it all, fit it back together and lined up. This plate can serve to pull the chassis back into the proper form that it should be in. That's on.

Remember this is the GPS antenna. We're going to go ahead and use your typical little UFO connector. The round thing goes down. You can line it up visually where it's over top and then boom is pushed down. You can use your tool. I like to use my finger because I can actually feel when it pops into place.

Then we had a piece of tape here. I'm going to save and we're going to use it for both of them. I've got a tape here. We don't need to. Because I'm going to use one piece of tape here to hold the, I don't like the positioning of that and these a little bit more to the center.

[01:04:10]
Mike Vorce: Now that's out of the way when the GPS or the WiFi antenna when we hook it up. We're good to that point. Now we're to the point where we've simply got to basically put the housing back on and we're going to be done. You flip the camera back over.

Here's the front housing and it fits here. You remember there's that rubber grommet or bushing or whatever. It's good to have it on this side because you want to line it up with this whole, what I'm going to do is basically drop it down. Make sure that's lined up.

[01:04:50]
Mike Vorce: I felt it actually slide over the washer. Now, I've made sure that all of the screws are lined up, they fitted all four on each side.

That's fitted correctly. I know that's fitted correctly. Now, I'm going to pull the right side out and lift it up at an angle. I'm going to slide the camera to the edge. I'm going to orient the bottom plate correctly and get it into the groove there.

[01:05:35]
Mike Vorce: You do it if you bend that out. You push it together and eventually, it'll slide and you'll feel it, it'll pop into place. Then when you get done, you want to make sure that everything's fitted back, everything's lined up.

This is lined up correctly so you see there's no gaps or anything. It's not rubbing there so you know, that's done. You've got that together. Now, we're going to go ahead and put the housing screws in. I'm sure you recall because I went over it a lot. But you're always going to put the battery screws. There's four screws on each side.

The bottom one is where the batteries are in the camera and there's specifically two screws, the two shorter ones need to go there.

You're always going to take those off first when you're disassembling a camera and you're always going to put them back on first when you're reassembling the camera is very important and we don't ever want to put one of these longer screws down in this battery, where these batteries or they could theoretically go through and damage the battery.

Like I said, that's super important. What I've done is I've put those two in first. Now in this particular case, the side k screws are Phillips. Sometimes they're torques, sometimes they're hex.

[01:07:06]
Mike Vorce: The hex ones are lower profile. Something to keep in mind is if you're ever replacing a housing and the part you're using is a newer housing, it may not work with these side screws, like the Phillips that have the washers because they stick out too much. The newer housings are a lower profile.

If you're switching over to a newer housing piece, you'll want to make sure you have basically the same screw as this. It just has a very thin head on it and it is a hex head. I believe it's the H1.5, similar to what the battery screws are here.

But if you're doing a newer housing, you'll want to not use these thicker screws because they stand out too much and the housings don't really fit back together correctly. You want to switch over to those lower profile ones, which you'll have those supplies you get from us.

But that's just a little trivia there. I spent a couple of hours one day trying to figure out why the housing wouldn't fit back on and when I finally figured out it was the profile of the screws was just too high. We've got that done. Got three to put it over here.

[01:08:42]
Mike Vorce: -That's that. That's done. Now we're back to the point of the top plate and WiFi antenna. Basically slide that in, rock it back-and-forth, it pops in, line up the same as we did before, line up to connect or put it over there, boom, pop it down, use the plastic tool. I use my finger.

We're going to take a piece of Kapton tape here, and we're just going to use it to secure that wire fairly close to the center. That's done. Now we are basically at the last step. If you recall, this is the back housing.

This is a plastic kind of an insert piece that goes inside of the handle. It gives it that rubbery plastic gripy feel. I always typically keep that attached to the front the whole time while I'm working on a camera. It can be attached here too. It doesn't really matter. You just want to make sure it's in place, completely wind up.

Now we're ready. First thing we're going to do is plug-in the charger power connector cable. This slides in. There's a little clip on the top. You can feel it walk into place.

Pretty straightforward. We got bad lighting here. I'm going to try and do it from this angle. If you recall, this was a camera that somebody had been into and they actually broke this ribbon cable, connector gate.

You can see it starts to fall off. But you'll want to use your pry tool and make sure that the gate is open. There should be that 16th inch gap that you see in there now, and then I'm going to take the ribbon cable and I'm going to try instead of going straight in, I want to try and go at a slight angle up and in. That gives you the least resistance.

[01:10:58]
Mike Vorce: When it's in, then you just push the gate in and the gate secures it in place. We've got that hookup. This is a good time you can do your little quick test here. Make sure that you power it up. I mean, not powered up, but you've got connections, so you push that, you get the battery indicator turned right on. Obviously that's what you want to see. If you don't get that then you could get problems. I'm popping that down, around.

[01:11:33]
Mike Vorce: I'm not liking the way that's going. Oh, I guess it's fine when the screw goes in. I've confirmed everything fits well there, and then I'm going to pop in the four main housing screws and then the two handles screws. We're doing our H, the hex, the 2.0, so the bigger of the two hex bits that you have, which is right here.

[01:12:11]
Mike Vorce: Just confirming everything looks good. The seams look good as you tighten. That one didn't want to fit in there why? This wasn't aligned up quite right. You notice I had to start that screw at a slight angle, but that got threaded in and straightened up.

You want to make sure that the screws are straight as they go in, but sometimes they're leaning a little bit when you get started. Now I'm going to find my T15 torques, and meanwhile while that's going on, I'm going to turn the camera on. That's done. Then last but not least, we want to put the screw covers back on.

[01:13:32]
Mike Vorce: Fit them in place. Push them down. Make sure they are seated. There we go. Camera's powered up.

Back on. Everything is good to go. Last but not least you don't want to end up with any parts at the end. I did have this spring leftover, but I couldn't find it after the disassembly. It was stuck inside the camera somewhere, so I replaced it with another one, and then when I'm putting it back together it magically showed up.

Obviously, you don't want to have any unaccounted for parts at the end. But it's a little intimidating the first time you do it. Some of the steps and especially that adjusting that stepper motor tension can be a little bit intimidating.

But I'd say if you take your camera and just gradually work through the videos, taking it apart, putting it back together step-by-step, you can have my video queued up and just pause it as you complete each of the steps.

After you've done it three or four times, it's really not that difficult. Like I also said, don't get intimidated. Think about it in a step-by-step process instead of a whole bunch of parts that are all going to go together. Say, first I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do this and I'm going to do this, and if you break it down, it's actually fairly simple.

-So that wraps up today's video. I hope you found it interesting. You should have a good idea of what the different components are called and maybe a general idea of things that can happen to them when a camera, for instance, gets dropped. We would add in, we really don't suggest you taking the camera apart yourself.

There are very few real easy repairs like replacing the WiFi antenna, replacing the charger port, where we do have kits that we can send to you and you can kind of walk you through how to do that, repair and repair the camera yourself.

But you need to be sure in those cases if there's nothing else going on with the camera. So overall, we generally suggest not opening the camera and doing anything yourself on it. We're here at MatterFix with any questions that come up, concerns.

You just want to know something, curious about something, message us on Facebook.

We usually monitor that pretty well. We've got a Contact Us form on our website, but feel free to reach out to us at any time. Thanks.