How to disassemble and repair the signal wires in a D-Link DCS-5300g or DCS-5300, and possibly other models:

Disassembly

1) Remove these rubber feet, there are 3 screws to remove.

2) Pry loose the bottom cover, but be careful as to not scratch the PCB under it. Sorry bad focus.

3) Remove the gilded nuts on the antenna connectors

4) Now you can carefully lift the round end of the PCB, about 1/2 inch, pull it a little bit toward the round end, and then lift up on the square end. It will seem like the green EXT I/O connector is getting stuck, just lower the round end a little bit, and it should be able to clear the hole. If you tilt the PCB too much, it will not clear the hole because of the plastic screw post next to the EXT I/O connector.

Now that you have the bottom part open you can troubleshoot whatever you need to here. In my case I need to troubleshoot a connection issue with the CCD, you see the four thin wires going up behind the top (motor controller) PCB, that is for the CCD and the Mic. The other set of 4 is for the up/down motor. Those get worn out over time because they are so flimsy. I will be replacing them with wire from a cat-3 cable.

5) There is a small screw on the rotating camera casing, remove that and the back cover pops off. Now you can see the camera pcb and the other end of that flimsy 4 pair.

6) Remove both ends of the flimsy pair gently and carefully using needle nose pliers, Do not pull on the flimsy wires. Rock the connector side to side longways rather than pulling hard.

Repairing CCD video/Microphone wires

7) Now. to test continuity, My multimeter has an audio tone continuity test mode which I will use, if yours doesn't have that, you can just use Ohms (Ω). I am using a thumb tack connected to an alligator clip connected to negative for one end so i don't have to hold both ends, which would be pretty awkward. Then I just jam the thumb tack into the hole on the flimsy connector, and test the other end with the positive (+) probe. Polarity doesn't matter when testing continuity of course.

8) Now, In my case, pin 3 (counting from the red wire) is bad, but I will go ahead and replace both CCD wires since they are all stupidly skinny and ridiculous and will probably fail in the future if I don't. I'm not gonna worry about the mic wires because in my application the mic is not needed, but if you use the mic you should replace those too. Remove the two screws on the motor controller PCB. Remove the connector with the white wires from the motherboard (lower) PCB. Separating it completely will make it easier to work with both parts. Now is a good time to start heating up the soldering iron too.

9) Cut about 8 to 10 inches of cat3 or cat5 cable (or whatever thin cable you decided to use, old IDE ribbon cable would work fine too, if you pull apart the wires). Pull some single strands out of the outer insulation. Pre-strip about 1/4" from each end of the lengths of wire that you are using so that you don't have to strip them once they are threaded through the camera housing.

10) Lift up the motor controller PCB and thread the wires through the turret, it was easier for me to go through the bottom, and grab them with needle nose pliers when they poked up to the top. I was stupid and didn't strip the wires beforehand, but i went ahead and wrote it up above so that you would.

11) Now, If you haven't yet cut pins 3 and 4, do that, and leave about 1" to 1.5" of wire to work with, I stripped it with a box cutter because im an idiot, but if you have a better solution (wire strippers) that is recommended. Again strip about 1/4".

12) Optionally, put a bit of that heat shrink stuff on each side to shrink over the soldered wires, it works a little better than electrical tape, and you can use the soldering iron to shrink it.

13) Twist the wires together like so, and solder them. I am not going to go into detail about soldering because that is outside the scope of this tutorial. There are plenty of good tutorials out there on how to solder, including videos.



Smaller heat shrink would be better because you could wrap the wires individually, I should have done that instead, because I had to tape one wire to keep them separated. But this is the only size I had.

14) It is always a good idea to test continuity again after soldering the wires. You can also turn the unit on to test it, you don't even need to reconnect the motor controller to test. Just connect both ends of the video/mic cable, connect A/V using the camera's included video cable to a video source, connect power. Voila. Follow the disassembly steps backwards and it's like new.

15) On re-assembly, make note that the antenna connectors have one flat side, so if they don't go in easily, don't force it, align it so the flat side is toward the inside of the unit.

16) On re-assembly, When putting the main PCB back in, make sure the little wires are all out of the way of the screw posts, just wiggle it a little and it will pop back in. Make sure and put the square side in first, putting all the external connectors through the holes, before pushing the round side down. The screw posts have to go into the PBC and be flush with the bottom of it.

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At least I got a warning, because the cop was a cool guy.

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