Let's take a look at an anti spy camera detector. Sounds very sophisticated, but isn't really. So this one came from Teu. It's an anti- Cammer light detector available from many online sources and to be fair, it does actually work.

This one has a USB C connector for plugging into your phone for convenience and it comes with a a manual written strongly in Chinglish for the anti- Cammer detector. Um, that has lots of weirdness. It's worth reading the manual alone. it's Noel though.

Most of these devices just have a ring of LEDs and you look through a hole in the middle and it provides a reflection from lenses, but this one is quite neat. It's got a diic filter if I tilt this, you'll see it lights up. Sort of bright cyan blue, but the light that's through it is actually red. That's quite nice.

It's quite good quality in that sense. This one also flashes, so when I demonstrate it later on, I'm going to warn you in advance that it is going to be flashing. So let's take a look at how this works beforehand. Notepad Focus Pen: If you have the camera receptor surface and you got the lenses in front of I'll just draw one lens for Simplicity and normally the light would be gathered in through the lens and it would be focused onto this sensor chip.

When you shine a light at it directly, the lens focuses a light onto that and it creates a bright spot on that that is then reflected back at you. And by looking through this, you're really looking for a Sharp dot of light. and I will demonstrate that. and then you have to apply some level of discrimination as to what it is that's actually causing that reflection.

Because as well as the tiny little lenses and pinhole cameras, you will find that things like LEDs also cause Reflections So let me just, uh, move this out the way. and I'm going to actually um, I'm going to actually set this up so you can see it. So at this point in time I'm going to warn you that it's about to start really flashing on and off red. So if you're you've got a photosensitive issue, then be aware that this is about to get very stroby right now.

Okay, brief spell of hideous flashing. Uh, and then I'll tell you when it's stopped. So this is a little spy camera. You can see the lens in the middle is reflecting that as a little dot.

Uh, if I hold an LED here which is unfortunate. LED does the same. It reflects the image back. This standard magnifier lens.

if I bring it down to the point it is focused onto the bench. you'll see. It also reflects only when it's at the focal point. And the other thing I'll show you is retro reflective material.

This is a safety cap which uh has the reflective piping in the edge right? The flashing is about to stop. The bulk of the flashing is now stopped. I'll just show you this. It has the LED flashing there.

That is it. I shall unplug it now right here. Not sure what the power Uh consumption is because I didn't have an adapter to measure. Also, it's flashing which doesn't really help with that I wonder if it's a chip? Well, we'll find out cuz I'm about to open it.

Uh, something worth mentioning This retro reflective uh hat work cap this gray material. The way it works is they basically have a fine covering of tiny little glass beads that acts as loads of lens in a reflective surface. The same applies to the road markings where you get the white plastic lines and it is moled molten plastic. They have a hopper of thermoplastic and it lays a big line down along the road but also sprinkles it a fine dust of glass beads as it does so to make sure that it's got the reflective surface on top.

Okay, let's Zoom down this. So as you can see because this is very directional, you have to go into positions that the camera would be pointing at to actually find out where it is pointing. but as long as you get roughly in the range of the lens, you should get that set of reflection. Let's see if I don't see any screws in this, so let's get the spudger under here.

here. Is this going to break? Probably. Oh can feel it breaking already. This is not going to survive this.

disassembly. H I Wonder if they've glued it together? It is kind of disintegrating. it's coming apart. Slip the spudger in here and I think it's the one that uses the little pins.

but I'm not sure I don't think it's the clips. As such, it did use pins. Here's the lovely decro glass Rens and a nice deep red. And here's a circuit board with a transistor.

Oh, that just pokes through there. Lovely. That'll be why I was, uh, breaking it trying to take it off. H It's got the straw hat style LEDs with the Le just cropped and folded at the back.

That's quite odd. Um, and it's got the little bit of circuit down here. Uh, we'll take a closer look at that one moment. Please, Reverse engineering is complete.

Let's explore the circuitry. It's not very complicated as you might expect and is based on a dedicated chip. I Wondered initially if it was going to be a of flip-flop two transistor thing, but it is a dedicated chip for flashing. LEDs Of the six pins of the S 23 type package, only three of the pins are actually used so they could have used a transistor type package.

There is an auditor here. This is the USBC Port. It's got the two pins that indicate that you can draw current from only one of the resistor positions is populated by a 4.6k resistor. The closest standard value to that is 4 7 H I Don't know if they've just left the other one off or I've knocked it off while taking apart I don't think I did, but I think when the one was populated I Did plug it into my Doogie type phone and it was absolutely fine.

It started flashing away even without turning the phone on. So we've got the power com on the two positive the multiple negatives, so you can actually put it nether way around. We have a couple of the capacitors, one as a reservoir cap passor, one just a noise filtering providing power to the chip, which then drives the transistor via a couple of resistors. and then there's a 15 Ohm resistor 1, 15, 15, and 0 as a decimal multiplier going out to the six LEDs and parallel.

Let me show you the schematic: Oh, I didn't find the chip By the way, I'll write that in what it is I shall Zoom down in this just a little bit more so that was a 23302, 2, 3302 H that a blank. It might be a custom code for something that's been set up specifically for this task. So here's the USBC Port There is one of the programming pins pulled down to the Zer volt rail. I Think that's pulled to the Zer volt rail.

Yes, it is pulled to the Zer volt rail. There's the big capacitor. I'll draw that as a slightly thicker capacitor like that, but not electrolytics. just uh, standard ceramic capacitors so higher Vol you want, then a smaller one for filtering.

There's a chip, there's a 1K resistor to the transistor's base, and then there's a pull down resistor to make sure it stays turned off at other times. uh, j3y transistor standard Npn and then the six LEDs in parallel and a 15 Ohm resistor in series to limit the current through them. and that is it. Not really an awful lot, but then it doesn't have to be an awful lot technically speaking.

If we did actually get 5 volts at the circuitry and we dropped, say, 2 volts across the red, LED D 3 volts to drop IAL V divided by the 15 ohms equals uh, 200 milliamps divided by the 6 LEDs equals roughly 33 milliamps each. But they're being pulsed, so that's kind of all right. It's kind of running them on an average about 15 milliamps, which is perfectly acceptable. and they've done that just for extra brightness.

But there we have it. I Think the key thing that makes this special is this lovely dichroic disc. In the middle of it dichroic glass is glass that has a metallization layer that is exactly one wavelength of light thick, so you can select which wavelength it's going to be. It will pass that wavelength, but the uh, other wavelengths will just basically bounce off it like a mirror.

and in this case it's a sort of cyani looking mirror. uh, but passing us a fairly deep red matched roughly to the LEDs. But there we have it it is. The spy camera detector sounds very sophisticated, but in reality it's not that sophisticated and you can't just point around the room randomly expecting the cameras to show up.

You have to get in line of axis with where the camera's pointing and then use common sense to decide. Is it just an LED in a smoke detector or is that a camera that's observing you above your, uh, temporary accommodation bed?.