I decided to take apart a broken Flip I had laying around. The screen had been damaged during a trip and would no longer display what was being recorded.
During the disassembly I was able to turn the Flip on and record a short video. It’s kinda cool to see how far it could be taken apart and still function.
I’ve put up a series of photographs of the process on my Flickr account with notes that I hope prove helpful for anyone attempting to do this on their own.
As for what will become of this Flip – maybe a hidden-camcorder-in-a-book mod?
Hi ! Great post, thank you for raising my hopes for this camera as I’m planning to put something like this on a little rc-plane and shoot some videos from up above. I’m wondering, is the video shot while the camera was under the surgery freezing up because there is some components taken away or it was just uploaded like that ? This would be a great candidate for rc-mounted videos.
I’m not sure why the video is freezing for you. Both the original and the version uploaded to flickr are playing back fine for me.
I had the USB connector and screen disconnected while recording so I think this would be a prime candidate for your plans.
Wow. Thanks for the rising hopes !
One last question, is it easy to operate the camera with the display taken off? For example, will I be able to take off the screen, put the camera in lightweight enclosure, and operate it without a screen ? I’ll just need to take one video at a time, then transfer it to the computer right away.
Do you have any idea if the memory can be extracted from a dead camera and mounted via USB?
I haven’t tried that. However, I would think that as long as the circuitry is still working (power and the OS running OK) you should be able to plug it in and read off the memory.