Kinect dissected, innards not so fancy

I don’t know what I was expecting when I heard that the folks at ifixit tore open a Microsoft Kinect to see its insides. I was expecting magical artifact shards and eye of newt or something. What are all these electronics?

The teardown gives you a part-by-part look at the tech that went into Microsoft’s motion sensing device. You get to see the cameras and microphones and circuit boards that make it tick. There’s a ton of little processors spread out over the device’s two circuit boards, and ifixit identifies them all. Did you know that it sports a cooling fan? Are the innards really that hardcore that it needs a cooling fan?

Check out the full teardown on their webpage.