What's inside the Belkin Autotracking Stand Pro?
Hey everyone, it’s Becky, and today we’re taking a look inside the Belkin Auto-tracking Stand Pro. Keep watching to see me try it out, take it apart, and analyze the design and manufacturing of the circuitry inside. This video is sponsored by DigiKey, which carries tools for your own teardowns as well as some of the components in the device’s circuitry. Head to the link in the description for more info on all the parts we could identify. Let me know what I should tear down next in the comments. So here’s the Belkin Auto-Tracking Stand Pro.
It’s got a simple but solid design. Snap your phone into the Magsafe connector, and the stand automatically rotates to track you. Belkin was kind enough to send me two of these, one to take apart and one to keep using. It’s a cool piece of tech, and the first product to use Apple’s new Dockit accessories standard. Previously, products like this would be limited to capturing with their own apps, but now the Dockit system allows the stand to seamlessly integrate with the native camera app while capturing content or during video calls.
It’s also got a battery inside, which makes it portable. It’s got a tripod mount on the bottom. It only charges the iPhone when it’s plugged into wall power, though.
To do its thing successfully, it has to move super smoothly and quietly, so I’m curious what’s going on inside. The first step of taking it apart is to remove the sticker on the bottom, which hides some screws. But this thing is a super awkward shape, so to keep it flipped upside down, I placed it over the edge of my table. Removing the bottommost piece of plastic reveals the first of two circuit boards, connected to the rest of the wiring through this free-rotating slip ring, which allows it to spin 360 without tangling any wires. After removing a few more screws, the main body of the base came free, revealing a large, heavy bearing to support that smooth rotational motion.
After unplugging the wire connected to the NFC antenna, I was able to remove the top body plastic. Then I cut the zipties holding the battery in place, and unplugged all the wires from the nearby connectors. Next, I unscrewed the first of two stepper motors.
This one was connected to the base through a gear situation, controlling the rotation. The other motor is still stuck behind the upright piece. At this point I was able to remove the first circuit board, the slip ring, and that really big bearing. Continuing on, there were a few bolts with antislip nuts holding onto the second stepper motor, and a few screws connected to the upright piece.
Inside this long neck is a belt that was driven by the second stepper, and some more wires. Without the metal shaft, the remaining magsafe charging, pivoting top bit looks like a combination between the Star Trek Enterprise and a Sentinel from The Matrix. Inside the pivot point is another bearing, a small circuit board, and wires leading to the magnetic charger. Taking a look at all the parts, you could reuse a lot of these for other projects. Two perfectly good, quiet stepper motors, a slip ring, two bearings, and a battery– score! Now it’s time to take a closer look at the electronics inside with my channel’s favorite electrical engineer, David Cranor. How’s it going, Becky? [Becky] Good.
[Becky] You are being watched up. I’m being watched? Come sit down. Oh, there it is. Oh, and you can bring it over to me. Hello.
[laughing] This is what we're taking apart, David. Wow. Cool. What is it? It's the Belkin Auto-Tracking Stand Pro with DockKit. The first official accessory to use this...
Apple's new protocol for peripherals to use the camera input. Neat. So it can. Oh, that's very cool. I guess previously this thing type of thing existed, but you'd need to use its own app and now you can use the native camera app. And you can do it vertical. This is like if you're like running around the room and wanting to stay on on the video call.
It's for the TikTok dances David. It's for the TikTok dances. Yeah. So that when you do like a cool breakdancing move like you're not out of frame. Yeah. Important. Like the guy on the box. Oh, yeah.
Look at him. [Laughing] he's not making manual camera adjustments in that posture. But also I think it's cool for like cooking videos or things where your hands might be dirty. Yeah. And I like that it works both horizontal and vertical.
Portrait and landscape. Yeah. And it also is a phone charger when it's plugged in. So it's like a, I have just been using it as a dock for my iPhone, even without the camera checking. Yeah. But see how it's battery powered. I like that.
So it's, got a battery in it. It's obviously got two motors because it's moving side to side and up and down. It's very quiet.
It's super quiet. Motors are quiet. Oh, come back. There it is. Grab me again.
And it only tracks people faces, right I think so. I haven't... read that it does anything else besides people it uses.
You know, whatever the apple tracking is using just people. But you can use it on the back facing camera to oh, oh. It remembered wow. Okay. Yeah. So it's fun, right. And that has this button on the front.
You can turn off the tracking. And this is like a regular phone stand. Yeah. And you know it's MagSafe and all this Magnetic mount. Yeah.
So Belkin was kind enough to send me two so that I can have the one to demonstrate to you, and then... Destructively analyze one? This one! Wow. That's a lot of parts. One for using and one for Becky Smash. Yeah.
So I actually would like to show you like this is a monster pile of parts. Belt Drive. We usually do wearable things. So this is kind of big for us. Yeah. But why don't we look at the scan first? Because as a pile of parts, I don't think it really shows off like all of the cool engineering features.
And I wanted to show them to you and have you be excited to touch that belt again once you learn what it's doing inside. So Lumafield 3D scanned it with their CT scanner and like, look at all of the stuff in there, right? There's like, here's a motor, here's a motor, here's a battery, here's the MagSafe. This is a full on robot.
It is a full on robot. There's a bearing down in here. Gigantic bearing. And then like a bunch of different screws. And then Lumafield also prepared us some PCB... PCBs back and forth. I think this one is really interesting. The, plastic removed.
So this is the bottom motors, the battery, and the two, you can see both of the PCB. So you can see just one of the PCBs right here. This is the PCB. And there's two PCBs.
You can see both of them. This one down here this one here. But yeah you can see the motors and all the screws and the wires all nice and packed in there. Really. It's got a nice weight to it. Right. That the bearing right at the bottom. Some density, yeah. Here's the bearing. Like a good bearing.
Oh, yeah. Nice. So smooth. So smooth!
Well, this one's never been used. Yeah. [laughing] And this is motor. Yep. So there's two. What are those stepper motors? I think steppers. I think so because when I looked up the chips they were stepper.
I mean they look like steppers. And then they each have a gear on there. Like this one has a gear and this one has. What is this called when it's a belt drive thing. It's also a gear? I don't know, it's the thing that the belts. Yeah. This thing, the belt goes on.
The belt goes on. Is it a sprocket? Maybe? I'm sure someone in the comments will tell us. Tell us what it is. Yeah. And then let's see, the here this look at these bookmarks.
So this is the belt connected to the motor. So this motor at the bottom, the shaft faces out the back of the device. And this the metal pit- bit goes up here and the, the belt wraps around that belt mount attachment on the motor and goes up through the shaft. But look at how it- Is it twisted? Yeah, look at it twist 90 degrees. Oh, interesting. From like around the back of this motor and then up and it- I see so that's- That saves some hardware from having to put gears that like interlock and- Yeah, so it has like a right angle twist to the belt drive which doesn't hurt the belts at all.
The belt isn't like turning over and over again like it would on a motorcycle. It's just going back like back and forth so it doesn't need to traverse the whole length. Yeah, it's pretty cool, huh? That is pretty cool. I thought that was really clever. And yeah, you can see it really clearly in the scan.
The way that the belt twists. This is something I never would have noticed if not for the scan. Like while taking it apart, I wouldn't have even noticed that the belt was right angle to the motor, because when I took it apart, you know, like the motors detached and then you don't see how it was attached to attach there anymore. Okay. So do you want to start looking at the circuit boards?
We have the two motors. What do you think? Sure. Let's start with the first PCB. That's the big guy.
There was a can, over this area. You can see... where it was mounted. Yeah. I’ll use the pointing tweezers. You can see the edges of the can here And I use my hot area workstation to very easily take that off and then. Oh, surprise, surprise. What's underneath? Besides our friend, our our dear friend.
What is it? What is it, Becky? It's our friend, the Nordic NRF5340. 53, this is a 53 series. Interesting. So this is a dual core Bluetooth 5.4 SOC with Bluetooth LE,
Bluetooth mesh- NFC, NFC, Thread and Zigbee. What’s Thread? I’ve never heard of Thread. I don't know, I have to look it up. So that's that's our friends.
This is our our, per episode daily stock tip is Nordic Semiconductor is a publicly traded company. And we see their parts in like literally- They’re in a lot of stuff. Every single thing we take apart, so- Very popular. That's my hot stock tip. Nordic semiconductor. So that's and then like is the so that's the Bluetooth chip.
And why why do they have cans again. To keep electromagnetic interference from escaping. And/or from getting it in. And is it fair to say that these motors and their supportive circuitry cause a fair amount of electromagnetic interference? Probably true. That can definitely happen. Right. Moving on What are these giant electrolytic capacitors for? Just like for- Well, there's two of them.
So that makes me think it's, And they're both close to those motor driver chips. Can I peel this up? Yeah. I'm not going to try to put it back together. I already mangled the MagSafe connector. 25 volt, 47 Microfarad. So it's not huge.
The fact that there's two of them and they're each close to the motor driver chip, like the other motor driver chip is on the other side right there. Yeah. Makes me think that they're related to the motor. Can you show the motor driver chip? Yes, here is one ,motor driver chip. And you can see it's got these big old sensing resistors next to it. What are sensing resistors? So often when you when you want to like determine how much current is actually going to something you have to like measure how much current is going to it. And one way of doing it, one way of doing that is you put a resistor in the current path.
That's enough to provide, like a measurable voltage drop between the input and the output of the resistor. And then you measure that voltage drop across the resistor. And then from that you can math out how much current was actually going through it. But because these are sensing for driving current to motors, that's going to be like a lot of current. So that's why these resistor that's why these resistors are much larger physically. Chonky boys.
What's that footprint called a big footprint that looks like a 1206 to me. Next our motor driver and our other motor driver chip, which is on the other side of the board, also has those beefy friends. All right. So mystery solved. There's this like through-hole component sticking up off the board okay I get it under the microscope thing. Oh there it is. hee-hee. where is it? It faces, like... it faces up.
It's a Hall effect sensor. I see. I looked it up. Oh this is that's and that's probably for like position feedback. Yeah.
Oh because like which where are you or like how many times around if it'll, it'll if it has a magnet in it somewhere which it must to line up with that. It's going to be able to sense like that. It's gone all the way around. Right.
With the hall effect sensor. And that's probably why it sticks up like that. And anyway, when I've done like a spoke bicycle project, like this is the same way you set up the. Yeah, stick it straight out. And it's kind of vulnerable to getting whacked on your bicycle, but not so much inside this package.
All right, moving along. And then they have this little I'm looking at the, Okay, this is the Nordic chip over here. Yeah. And so this connector was probably under the can. It was. This is probably use this is probably used for like debugging because like, if they don't want to be, you know, if they want to be checking like the signals that are going out the antenna, this is just a place where you can just like plug, plug straight in and see. So I'm moving along to our next Chippy chip.
Let's see I got this. Do you have any idea what this big guy is? It could be an inductor. It's in its own little... It is. It doesn't have any exposed wires. Like this looks like an inductor to me because it's got, like, a coily to it.
Looks like it's got something wrapped around it. What all things is it next to? There's another one over here too. Under here. Yeah. There's two. Oh, there's two.
Which means that it has something to do with the motor. They have different values. Oh they do. Okay. Maybe it doesn't have something to do with the motor. This chip... Can we see into these in the x ray?
Yeah we can this chip, “MPPS” is.... MPPS. It's the fully integrated synchronous, 30 watt boost converter with passthrough mode and programable switch current limit by monolithic power systems.
So that's managing the.... Battery charging, yeah? Boost converter. 30 watt boost- could just be for managing like all of the power going going to it. 30 watt boost with passthrough okay, Yeah. Because when this is plugged in it charges the phone.
And when it's not plugged in it doesn't charge the phone. So that's that what that means by a passthrough mode? A boost converter will just I'm not sure what their implementation of pass through mode means, but like boost converter in general. Basically just like take a lower voltage and convert it to a higher voltage, but at a steady...
At a steady rate. Also, I think that these are inductors, because the label on the, silkscreen is an L. and that's typical for... Yeah, that's inductor. Here they are on the PCB. This is them right here and here.
Here and here. The squares, the circles inside them that are just as tall as the can? Yeah, it could be a coil. Yeah, it looks like a coil. I mean, this is the other one that looks like. It looks like what it is. Right.
So I think, yeah, they look like they're coily inside. Yeah, and it says L2 and L... L9. Is that a do I see a threaded insert at the top? This? Uhh, yes. For the tripod mount.
Love threaded inserts. I didn't bother... Top... threaded insert is a top tool. Yeah. It's cool.
It's for... It's because this whole thing can sit on a tripod. Yeah. Especially if you're doing home, home 3D prints and stuff like that.
Yeah. Here you go, look. Heat-set threaded inserts are great. That’s a coil I ever saw one. That's an inductor. Oh that's that's this one. Is it? That's that's this one I think because then you can see the box there and the box there.
Oh okay. So I can't see into the box in this particular view. But we can see it. What’s in the box? You can see it here on the cross section. Yeah.
It looks like an inductor to me as far as the other side of the board... Also boost converters you often find... Inductors? Industors nearby. On the other side of the board, there isn't much. There's another one of those motor chips. There's a bunch of connectors. There's there's a few LEDs here.
Three together, LED. So tiny! I know. Really tiny.
Okay. A silkscreen says what LED... 6, 3 and 4. 6, 3 and 4? And this thing has a couple of light pipes on it.
One it's like is here I see for the front, like whether it's tracking you or not, light. And there's one on the back for if it's charging, I think. That looks pretty good.
Yeah doesn't it? But it changes color, and that's, that's why there's three LEDs here. Oh interesting. So they didn't do one RGB LED. They used three discrete LEDs. And then the light pipe, and then the light part touches all of them. And then it just they just choose.
Yeah, so that middle one is the white one. And then I think there's a blue one and a red one. Oh they use a Taoglas antenna. Or green when it's tracking... I've used those for company before for, for patch antennas.
So what's going on there with that antenna on the piece there? It's an NFC tag and it's used for pairing with the iPhone. Only. Like you once you pair it with the iPhone you don't use that NFC tag again. But that's part of the DockKit standard is that it's really easy pairing with the with the Apple devices. You just put the iPhone near this NFC tag and it like connects like magic and everything.
Everything works. So Carlos, my buddy who hooked me up at Belkin, he let me know about this in advance. He's like, there's one piece that you're going to need to unplug as you take it apart in order to not rip it. And that's... that's this NFC tag. So when I took it apart I was able to find this plug, thanks to the scan.
Also looked at the scan before I took it apart. Oh look they do this same thing with the three LEDs down here, too. There it is again. Yeah, sometimes it's just cheaper.
And then also you don't have to like, PWM them to blend the colors or anything. You can just... Yeah. it'll be what it'll be. And then this what's this this header I see some signals. Yeah, I see some signal names that I recognize, like SCA, SDA, SCL.
That's I2C, right? Uh-huh. Yeah, this is where you would start if you were trying to do software hacking on it. So this board is driving the motor, powering the motors, And has the switches and LEDs.
Oh, there's one switch on this board. Yeah. You ready to move on the second circuit board? This one sits closer to the bottom in the- so if we go to the scan you can see it it's, it's closer to the bottom here. And that one we just looked at is definitely in the middle. So on this side, there's like nothing except the connectors. There's a little button. beep-beep.
Where? There. Oh there is. That is the... I think that's the tracking button that you press to like start tracking and stop tracking you. Yeah. I think it says that on the other side actually there's like a label.
So I don't think I like, figured that out by myself. I think I read this text that said tracking. Yeah, it literally says ‘tracking’. [laughing] That's the only thing on that side of the board. It’s nice that they labeled it with, like, human readable. Yeah.
Things you don't you don't see human readable names of things on circuit boards very often. Usb-C one is the usb-C port, then it's got this is the chip on this board. It's the CPS8... Child Protective Services. This is made by a company called convenient power... power delivery controller.
I see. I see. So that's so that it can charge real fast. Charge the battery and charge the phone.
Yeah. So that's why we need two different power chips. One is probably for powering the...
Like the boost converter... 30 watt boost converter in this because it's 30 watts, that that just tells me like this is- without looking at the rest of the board. But if I just see like a big old boost converter like that, I would think that that's like, this is conditioning the power for like, everything. Okay so here's the battery. It looks suspiciously like an 18650.
Is that the exact size of the 18650? Are they a little longer than that? Well we could measure it because 18650 is, is the measurements. Its the measurements of the outside of the battery. So this bottom circuit board really only has... 5000 mAh. the USB port and this power chip, and then the connector for... does that connector fit onto... No. Everything plugs in like the bat- like the battery plugs in,
the motor plugs in, somewhere, you know, like, so find something with the right... Here you go. It's for the slip ring. Ah! That's what I wanted to talk to you about. It's... this connects to the slip ring. So the bottom...the bottom circuit board and the top circuit board spin independently of one another.
So there's a slip ring in the middle that, allows for that. Cool, so this spins, but the wires all stay in the same place. Yeah, and that connector there is for... is that. Can we look inside of this? I can show you the product page. When I worked at Adafruit and we started carrying these, We like cut one open and took photos so you can see how it works.
That'd be interesting. We can look at it on the scan, though, because we have the scan of this thing. Base scrub left or right? Yeah. Okay. Thank you for these handy bookmarks. So here's the slip ring here. Right? Oh, it's back... see?
Oh, yeah, you're right. There it is. Yep, yep, there it is. All right. That's it right there. Here. So how do they.... What are they on the inside? Is it just like like however many tracks that are concentric and they.
And then there's like a brush that, that, that sits on it or something. Yeah. See, see how there's like one. Yeah.
Sort of channel for each of the wires. Right. And like one, one set of wires connected like on the inside of that tube. And the other set is connect on the outside and yeah, there it's like a brush that... Cool. Yeah.
It's a cool thing. It is a cool thing. I've never seen it used in a product, like this.
Right. I don't I actually don't think I've ever seen one used in a product, period. But then again, you don't really think about this kind of thing, like, oh, the top spins independently of the bottom, and without taking it apart- and you don't realize how annoying and hard and hard it is to design that until you actually.... Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
And then this giant bearing is really fun. I like giant bearings. Definitely reuse that for some project. It's a good like, fidget toy. Yeah. Here's a cross section of the motor. Here's a cross section of the motor.
That's the motor in the back. And then what is? it's cool that the thing is so quiet I know that- Here's the bearing on the inside. Like you can see the balls. I looked up the data. Oh yeah. Look at those. Look at those great, great looking balls.
[laughing] I looked at the data sheet of the motor driver, and it definitely has a lot of special features for for keeping the motor quiet because the stepper motors have problems with, like, whining and, like, making sounds, especially when they're, like, speeding up or slowing down or just, like, sitting in one place. But the coils are engaged. You can hear them hum. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like my my 3D printer. you’re never alone when you have a 3D printer around.
Exactly. But this is really quiet and it goes to the level of the component selection that they chose for the actual motor driver. Like it's you can tell it's something that they really cared about.
During the design process. I think the whole product shows that everybody really cared about it, cared about it every step of the way because it's yeah, it's works really well. And, it's like no extra space anywhere. There's no it just looks like everybody worked really nicely. Oh, watch the lights light up. But they're not like, irritating in your face. Yeah.
That's what I would expect from Belkin. Yeah. Belkin does a good job usually. But I'm still impressed even even at them having such a fancy reputation and still impressed by this thing.
Yeah. There are a couple of other, little circuit board things I wanted to ask you about. Oh, baby. To see if you understood what was going on. This thing goes up the neck and, exists right at the at the top of the. It's like, near the MagSafe charger. Okay.
So, like, oh, maybe we should be using this to illustrate. Where is it on this? It's here. And it has these two wires coming off of it that went to another tiny circuit board that that just has this switch on it. Only that switch. Yeah. Okay. Probably just because they want it, it's probably just a sensor for like, is the phone attached? It's, is the phone like being attached or is the phone being, you know, because it like does stuff when you connect the phone besides just charge it it like also starts to do the tracking and, you know, see if the camera apps open and stuff so that I know is- it shouldn’t need a physical button for knowing if there's a phone on it, if it if it gets data through here.
Oh, it's the Hall effect sensor reader. It could be. It could be. Yeah, it could be a Hall effect sensor. Or is it a magnet? because there's already a Hall effect sensor. Here's the Hall of sensor.
Is this. Well, but why would we need another one. Oh he's down here. Oh wait a second. When you plug in the phone like the magnetic field becomes stronger. Right. Because it starts charging it
No, it should be pretty contained inside of the inside of the coil. So, I mean, maybe, maybe the Hall effect sensor senses because, I mean, the. Does the iPhone have a magnet in the back of it? Yes. The MagSafe ones. Yes. So maybe maybe that's what it's maybe that's what it's sensing. Maybe that's the thing that actually senses to see if the phone, is nearby.
So this whole circuit board is all about is the phone docking or undocking or it could be. And you know, and we need two different ways to tell that we need the magnet sensor and we need the switch, apparently. Maybe.
And maybe it could be a positioning thing, like, maybe there's a way to, like, put the phone on where the where the switch is clipped, but like, the MagSafe isn't aligned right or something. And this would tell you if it's in the right place, maybe, I don't know, it doesn't really stay on the thing unless the MagSafe is engaged, you know? Right. So this is like it's like this. Yeah. Yeah I see it in the scan.
Yeah. And then only the two little red little power wires over this. Does this tilt up and down. Yeah.
So then it's then that's position feedback. Oh position feedback for this hinge here on the belt. Oh okay okay. And then maybe that's the magnet. Yeah. That's what it is. Okay.
All right. So that's like the surface mount version of this thing. Yeah yeah yeah that makes sense. Okay so for positioning and so each of the motor axes has its own Hall effect sensor for positioning. That makes a lot of sense. But, yeah, I think this thing is pretty well well designed. Most of it's plastic.
All these pieces at the bottom are plastic, and the motors are heavy and everything, but the neck of it is metal here I see. Oh so it's nice and strong. This is holding your phone. Yeah. Exactly. And also moving around. And also moving. Yeah. And you want the camera movement to be nice and smooth.
Cool. This is a nice extrusion. Or whatever it's made of. How’d they make this? Is this machined? You can see machining marks. Or is this like molded?
Let’s see. I guess we should look at it under the microscope. There's no way that they machined this. Yeah, but these are machining marks, right? There could be machining marks on a mold. What else we got? I think that’s it.
That’s it? That there is, that’s a lot. There's a lot of stuff going on, and there's, like a ton of parts. And as far as, like, harvesting things, this this has some harvestable parts.
It's got this really cool battery. It has two really nice quiet stepper motors. Nice bearing. A nice bearing, a slip ring, The slip ring is very cool. Slip ring is great, too. Yeah. Slip ring’s real good. So out of all the things we've taken apart, I think this has the most parts that we can reuse.
But that makes sense because we usually take our wearables and this isn't a wearable. These are really nice steppers. Yeah. Cool. All right. Well great. We did it. We did it. See you next time. Thanks, David. Bye bye.
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2025-04-25 08:24
