Having decided I was going to design a camera module to add onto the back of a smart phone, I needed to pick a specific phone to base my dimensions on and to drive subtle aesthetic details. The phone I chose was the current version of the ever popular iPhone, the 5S. This is a phone everyone knows of, has been, and many people own, so it's an obvious choice when designing a general concept that need to appeal to as many people as possible. To ensure my renders at the end look professional, I decided to make a CAD replica model of the phone rather than super impose renders of my camera model onto existing iPhone images.
I'm not sure how or why, but when googling I stumbled across what look like official Apple technical drawings for the phone. Regardless of their validity, they were more than informative enough to mock up the exterior of the phone for use in my project. I built up a basic block work model with all the details that would be seen outside of the camera modules case included. Below you can see how it looked in SolidWorks, and then how it looked rendered up and an iOS7 sceenshot super imposed onto it in Photoshop:
With the phone model completed, I started to build around it starting with the casing which would attatch the module to the phone. By taking reference lines from the phone and offsetting them I built up a basic shell which could hold the phone without adding to much bulk and also retaining access to all the external buttons and switches such a the hold and volume buttons.
To keep the iPhone secure I designed the case to a slide in style case rather than a clip on. This means I can use a nicer material like anodised aluminium around the outside of the product, keeping it consistent with the styling of the iPhone which features a metal band around its rim. When inserted, the aluminium hooks over the edges of this metal band on the phone to keep it from dropping out without adding too much bulk or interfering with screen space. To keep the iPhone from falling out of the end though, I designed a simple clip which plugs into the end.
Building up the front half of the camera was fairly simple. I made a basic aluminium shell to house the electronics and sliding mechanism and then started to build a top face to secure the parts down. The top face is outwards facing, and therefore needs to look good and also be nice to grip. To do this I sketched up a couple of designs with sloping faces that dipped towards the lens in the middle, allowing your fingers to sink into the body slightly and keep a good hold on the unit. I surfaced modelled one quarter of it and set it to smoothly flow into the contact faces, hence the wave appearance. Once replicated around the body and knitted, I could see using the Zebra stripes that the surfaces blended into each other perfectly meaning the end surface is completely smooth.
From here it was just a case of building a little zoom lens unit with a ring flash around it to fill the centre. Because this is a concept development project, there isn't any need to do all the technical mechanisms like I am doing for my major. This project is selling an idea rather than a technical solution. Therefore it was easy to block model a simple lens and surround.
Here is the result. I added engravings around the body to imply how you use the camera, so for example I put zoom icons where you have to push down on the body to zoom. I also labelled each side as a different "bump" so that it was easy to correlate the physical body with the software interface.
