Hardware & Technical Disable ps3eye microphones?

[Jorki Rasalas]

Can anyone help?
I have a ps3eye camera & want to totaly disable the microphone -I’m a bit paranoid about webcam security, want to use this for IR headtracking so it will be plugged in permanently & solely used for head tracking (I have a separate webcam that I plug in when I want to skype etc).

Tried it yesterday with the CL driver & OpenTrack both running to check the cpu loading & the video was working fine with low cpu load in a separate window while playing ED all afternoon. However when a chum came online & winged up my sound to him was extremely loud & crackly & also deafened by the music from the FM radio I had playing quietly in the background. To me the sound was a bit muted vs normal.

I suspect there was perhaps a driver clash (found this page http://trackhat-forum.1125090.n5.nabble.com/PS3-Eye-Cam-and-Mic-Fix-td1050.html) & will look at disabling extraneous drivers, but really want the security of totally disabling the ps3eye sound. Is it just a matter of shorting out each of the four microphones? Someone said online they’re condenser microphones.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Someone said online they’re condenser microphones.

They'll be cheap electret capsules which are related to condensers but not the same. You can theoretically short the capsules, but you need to make sure that the resistor for the bias voltage is before the short or you'll be killing a 5V or 12V supply.

It looks far easier and more reversible to simply unplug the connector and leave it disconnected.

 

[Jorki Rasalas]

They'll be cheap electret capsules which are related to condensers but not the same. You can theoretically short the capsules, but you need to make sure that the resistor for the bias voltage is before the short or you'll be killing a 5V or 12V supply.

It looks far easier and more reversible to simply unplug the connector and leave it disconnected.

makes sense. Which connector though?

haven’t disassembled my ps3eye yet, but from looking at various YT videos where people have disassembled theirs to remove the IR filter I’ve only seen one connector-the main one for the usb cable.

edit: looking at the fifteenth pic in this thread https://www.behance.net/gallery/8955421/Hacking-Sony-PS3-Eye-Camera, view of the back of the circuit board, it seems that
a) the microphone array is held in a plastic mount strip that is mounted to the circuit board by a couple of circular inserts & then (presumably) fastened by soldering the four sets of microphone tails to the board
b) the microphone array plastic strip provides two mounting clips at the top for the camera case, so the array should not be removed else it would not be possible to reassemble the camera case.
c) there is a “mic-pwr1” label at top right of the board that looks like a circuit board track.

so I suspect one way to disable the microphone array would be to make a small cut in that track, alternatively lift the mic resistors which seem to be labelled R1, R2, R3 & R13 (though both these solutions would need checking for connectivity to the mic capsules, and my multimeter has died) however having looked at the circuit diagrams for electret http://electret microphone circuitand condenser http://condenser microphone circuitmicrophones it would be much easier to just solder a short bit of wire across the terminals of each of the four microphones.

 

[Shadowdancer]

Ah I was looking at the wrong hardware.

Assuming that those are the bias resistors, yes, shorting the capsules should work. You could also remove them entirely and only keep the plastic frame.