The Highs And Lows Of Circuit Bending A G6 Thumb Camera

The Highs And Lows Of Circuit Bending A G6 Thumb Camera

This year (2026) has not got off to a good start, photographically speaking. For a start, the weather has been atrocious. We're in the middle of what is being called on the news, a 'comboio de tempestades' (train of storms, with Ingrid on her way out and Storm Josef following quickly behind. Now storm Kristin is upon us, with 140km/h winds, and destruction across much of Portugal. I suppose I could be going out in the gaps between the rainstorms, but it's been quite miserable and unpredictable, and if there's anything worse than me getting wet, it's my precious cameras getting wet.

The second thing is a slight loss of 'mojo', which I've mentioned before. I bought a few Kodak Charmeras to play with, including one to make full-spectrum. That didn't go well, and I ended up bricking one, which affected me more than I would have thought. I'm determined to get myself out of this 'funk', though, and I have a plan that I hope might help. For ages now, I've been talking about circuit bending a digital camera. I keep getting cheap cameras from CEX, but I always end up becoming too attached to them to tear one up. Then Kodak released the Charmera and I got one of those to circuit bend, but it still seemed a little too much, especially after bricking the full-spectrum one. And then AliExpress came to my rescue. They released a Charmera clone, the G6 Thumb Camera.

For about 14€, I can get a camera that looks like the Kodak Charmera but at less than half the price. Indeed, I can get two G6s for less than the price of one Charmera. So I did. I'm not going to go too much into the details of the G6, there are plenty of reviews available, except to say that the G6 is inferior to the Charmera, yet at the same time better. For example, it powers up quickly and goes straight to the picture taking menu, instead of having to select the photo option first. The G6 claims to have up to 12MP resolution, but I reckon that most of that is interpolation. From what I gather, the best resolution can be obtained at 1—2MP resolution, so the G6 probably has the same resolution of the Kodak Charmera, or 1.6MP.

Like the Charmera, the G6 Thumb Camera is easy to open up. The advantage of the G6 is that when you peel off the front cover, the lens assembly and sensor is directly in front of you, instead of having to unscrew and remove the main board within the camera, like on the Charmera. There's a short ribbon wire connecting the sensor to the main board, and unclipping that the whole lens assembly just pops out. It's time to start circuit bending. The simplest way to circuit bend a camera is to short out the contacts on the ribbon wire connecting the sensor to the main board of the camera.

There are many ways to go about this, but the simplest is to insert a small wire, or in my case a piece of tin foil, between the connectors on the ribbon wire. It's at this point that I should come clean. My first attempt, with the red G6, did not go well. I removed the front cover and popped out the lens assembly quite easily, but when I tried to reinsert the ribbon wire with the tin foil behind it I encountered all sorts of difficulties. I succeeded in getting a nice circuit bent result for a few seconds, and then the camera just turned off. When I tried to turn it on again, the 'Welcome' screen loaded and the camera just froze. It's at this point that I nearly gave up.

I put everything away for the evening and looked on AliExpress for a replacement G6. I still had one remaining, but I wanted to keep that intact for messing around with. But then I realised that I already have the Charmera, and the quality of the G6 photos outside of the line tool filter is quite abysmal compared to the Charmera so I'm hardly likely to use it much. So why not try and circuit bend the other one, too? I'd also realised that my failure with the first G6 was that I'd probably created a short with the main board with the foil flapping around inside the camera (this might have been incorrect, but I wasn't too know that at the time), so what I could do was to tape the foil to the bottom of the lens assembly, so that when I replaced the ribbon wire into its connector the foil was securely held in place.

The next day I prepared all of the bits and pieces alongside the black G6 Thumb Camera. Before I started, I removed the microSD card, just in case this might cause an issue. I then peeled the front off of the camera to reveal the lens assembly and sensor, and took off the tape covering the connector. I kept this to replace later. I undid the ribbon connector and pulled out the lens assembly. I cut a small piece of metal foil from the wrapping of the Ferrero Rocher (my better half ate the chocolate as I don't touch the stuff) and fixed it to a small piece of electrical tape. I then fixed the tape to the bottom of the lens assembly. It was a bit fiddly, but I reinserted the lens assembly to the camera and turned it on. Up popped the 'Welcome' screen, and then the camera froze again. Just like the first one. I was crushed.

I unplugged and removed the lens assembly and tried to turn the G6 off. This time it powered down with its cheery 'Goodbye' message, which was encouraging. I looked around for anything that might have caused this to happen and noticed two little pins just above the ribbon wire connector protruding through the board. I wondered if this might be the problem, so cut a very fine piece of foil and fixed it to the ribbon wire so that the foil did not come into contact with the pins. Again, it was a bit fiddly to get the ribbon wire into position, but eventually it was in and fixed into place. I reinstalled the microSD card, powered the G6 on, the 'Welcome' screen appeared and then the LCD displayed the most wonderful glitched image. I snapped a couple of glitchy images, then powered off the G6. I replaced the tape covering the ribbon connector and clicked the front cover back into place.

Filled with excitement, I was so happy that this time the circuit bending had worked, I took the G6 across the road for some images of my favourite tree and well. In addition to 'normal' colour images, which were now wonderfully psychedelic, I cycled through the different filters. A lot of the monochrome filters looked just like black and white, but it will be interested to see how they appear when making trichromes or checking the infrared response, but the weather will have to improve tremendously for that. The line effect filter looked the same as before the circuit bending, although I think the colour scheme is different.

All in all, I was delighted with my first real attempt at circuit bending. Well, second if you include my failure the day before. In fact, although I thought I had lost that camera, I thought it might be worth seeing if I could get it going again. The battery was completely run down, so I removed the lens assembly, charged it up again and powered it on and off. It worked. I reconnected the lens assembly, put the front of the camera back on, and powered up the G6. The 'Welcome' screen came on, and it froze. This time, I wondered if pressing the reset button might do the trick. And it did! I powered on the G6, and the next thing I had an image on the LCD screen. I took a couple of random images, them powered down the G6. 'Goodbye', it said. I had a fully functional G6 again. I was so happy. 

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