Panasonic Optical Disc Drive

     As promised, this is the take apart of the disc drive found in the Vaio laptop - my favorite piece/section from that night. A disclaimer: there was a much greater number of interconnected pieces in here than the laptop, and I couldn't (or more accurately wouldn't attempt to) document each little step when I removed something. I encourage you to look intimately at the more detailed pictures and make inferences as to what went where and how the pieces interacted. I'll offer help in the notes as best I can, but another disclaimer: I an no engineer (though I was trained in product design), and many of the technical terms and precise design techniques are lost on me as well. For what its worth, take a look here for some info on how optical disc drives work. Fascinating stuff. Anyway, ONWARD!

A few screws gone and the protective cover is removed. The disc drive was a separately made component that was simply installed in the laptop (at the notorious foxconn factory I mentioned last post) so it is made fully encased.

Detail of the "business end". Very basically, the drive works by spinning the disc on the center wheel while a laser is shot through the lens (pale blue shiny thing in the photo) into the grooves on the disc. Based on the info encoded there, the light bounces back in a particular pattern and is read by photodiodes in the mechanism which the lens is attached to... I think...

Here you can see the receiving platform as it would be extended by the computer on little tracks. The information is transferred from the lens along the flexible orange ribbon to the circuit board on the right... where I assume it is decoded from the 1's and 0's of binary language (Or possibly to binary? Anyone care to clarify?)

The receiving platform (right) removed from the casing with the circuit board. Thankfully, these ribbons simply unplug.

The underside of the "receiving platform". Bet you didn't think it was that complicated, did you?

The spinning wheel is just left of center in the photo, where the green circuit board is visible. The lens mechanism is just to the right of that, connected by an orange ribbon of its own. If you look closely, you'll see a long, precisely machined screw (looks like a bar with little notches in it) which spins very slowly to move the lens along the CD to stay in line with the groove as it progresses. Exactly like the needle of a vinyl record player.

Detail of what I assume has to do with unlatching the receiving tray when you want to load a disc. Each little part of this drive has its own little world of tiny components hidden within. All those white plastic pieces had to be meticulously molded and attached with springs and pins. Can they really be that important? How the hell does one go about designing something like this? Is that a tiny electromagnet I see? I haven't a clue what that's for.

This piece held and helped track the lens as it moved. The round opening was where the spinning wheel was mounted.

The covering removed from its frame. 

The lens and its housing. I like this piece as is, so I decided not to disassemble it any further.

The spinning wheel, obviously. Great shape of the circuit board - one of my favorite individual components.

All the large components gathered.

Most of the important pins and tiny pieces.

 I dare you to try to put that back together. The best part of the whole deal was when I told my roommate, who was the laptop's former owner, about how impressed I was with the intricacy of the disc drive in particular, he replied that it was the first thing to die when the laptop started to fail. There's a lesson there somewhere about the reliability inherent in simpler systems...