Since I’ve had my FW12, the webcam slider was very loose - so loose that it flipped between open and closed just from carrying the machine around.
It’s been that way from the start (batch 1). Now I finally got around to open a forum thread, wanted to see if it’s still loose, but it actually felt more terse…until it got stuck after moving it back and forth twice. Now it doesn’t move in either direction at the maximum of what I consider reasonable "fingernail force”.
Thoughts? Time to contact support before I make things worse, or is there an easy fix that I should try?
I believe the external slider/switch sits over a physical switch on a small circuit board (the board for the camera and mics). It’s possible that the notch on the back of the slider you actuate externally is not sitting properly over the switch on the camera board. It might be worth pulling out the display and checking to see if it’s simply out of place. If you aren’t comfortable with that, I would suggest reaching out to support, thought they may ask you to do similar things.
Either way, I hope it really is something simple like that and you get it sorted out.
I’ve finally found time to follow this guide until step 12 to see if I could spot anything wrong: Webcam - Framework Guides - I somehow missed that particular guide at first, but it turns out that disassembling the display half of the computer is easy and fun. Unfortunately, I still couldn’t figure out what’s wrong with the camera slider. I think it is physically borked, and will contact support.
Unfortunately, fixing the issue would require a full display replacement and that seemed a bit too much to me, so I’ll live with the loose slider.
Just in case this happens to more people: This is the little plastic thing that broke, I can actually pull it out when the display frame is open. This piece is probably too finicky to 3D print, and even then I wouldn’t know how to insert it.
