Photron Fastcam MC2.1 high-speed camera processor teardown

[@sokrates297]

Holy crap dude, long time no see!

[@tesla500]

Great to be back!

[@BlahBleeBlahBlah]

@@tesla500 it’s great to have you back!

[@mikeselectricstuff]

Test point guesses - P0V,H,F - vert,horiz,field. OSD - onscreen display overlay, PICLK pixel clock

[@msylvain59]

The case is amazing, it looks like something out of a spacecraft !

[@PeterBrockie]

I was hoping you or Mike ended up with this thing each time I lost it on eBay. haha

[@johnpossum556]

They probably have a special jig or plug to hook up to the test points. Glad to see you back again, you're like my second favorite KZbinr. First is Ave.

[@NoPegs]

Glad to see you're surviving the pandemic so far. Totallydidn't expect your avatar in my notifications this morning! Well done.

[@originalmianos]

It looks like a bunch of very mature systems joined together. It does not look like a low run device, aside from the milled sides on the case.

[@sidewinder15599]

Oh yay, another video! Glad you're still going, man!

[@bitcoredotorg]

Yes! Another teardown video from you! You and mike have some of the most fascinating teardowns on KZbin. Thank you for producing another one!

[@CrunchyMaggots]

That ethernet mount is the kind of goofy solution I'd probably end up doing if I ended up in production. I love it

[@Some_Beach]

Always a good day when tesla uploads

[@martin09091989]

Last time I clicked that fast on a video, the Chronos 2.1 wasn't even for sale!

[@jasonpohl2931]

Been too long since one of your teardown s!!! Thanks for the vid, that case is such overkill

[@ChipGuy]

Very nice video and awesome item. I would like to see more vids from you, but I understand that running a small high tech company is pretty time consuming and does not leave much time for making videos.

[@2handsomeforlaw]

Please do more of these! :D

[@SeanBZA]

Did they mill the case out of a single block, or is the 4 sided section a cast and milled part, or it it 4 separate sections? Yes looks like standard product boards for the different camera systems, they make the top range ones and then for the mid range simply software or configuration changes, and likely the boards each represent different design teams, each working to fit a common envelope and interface spec, but using the interoperability as they likely have to use up boards already built a decade earlier but still in stock, as I guess production volume would have been under 100 a year, and they made and tested a batch of 1000 boards to get the assembly house to set up the tooling. Could also be that this one was the parts mule, stripped to repair others, and you got all the bad boards put into it, when they either all went out of support, or they started offering an upgrade return for discount on new version option.

[@tesla500]

The case is made of separate flat panels, it looks milled only in sections where parts mate. Good insight there on the likely origins of the board configurations!

[@jcims]

@@tesla500 I wonder if that's why they have Altera and Xilinx packed in one product, or do you think there is something about the specific chips that warrant mixing suppliers?

[@noisytim]

You know there will be some tasty stuff inside, when there are this many lemo’s on the front.

[@alexwang007]

I kept on laughing at the sizes of the RAM thinking how a kronos would put them to shame, yet kept on forgeting that YOU are who designed them

[@Merlinkatamari]

you can see your High Speed Camara in use at 4:00 kzbin.info/www/bejne/rmPNhmiNacqbhqc

[@alexwang007]

For an unrelated question: do you think there's a way to copy the xilinx config flash chips? I got a super old design which uses thes XCFs that's gone obsolete and am thinking out loud for ways to dup them

[@tesla500]

Never actually looked into that but conceivably it should be possible. The Intel FPGAs use a standard flash chip, or at least are compatible with off the shelf flash parts in addition to the expensive "special" ones

[@dtiydr]

13:49 $1400?!! Can you reuse them or are they locked or such?

[@rkan2]

Today's $200 options probably beat the obsolte $1400 by a significant margin, so you'd only use them to repair something. Therefore an even more niche market than there ever was for this camera.

[@XFourty7]

Holy crap, I never knew FPGAs were priced so high. www.digikey.ca/en/products/detail/intel/EP2S60F1020I4N/764060 ouch! Some of the Stratix II's are upwards of $20,000 (CAD) :X

[@simontay4851]

$20,000 fuckin' hell. And i thought the $1400 one was expensive.

[@rkan2]

Peanuts compared to doing custom silicon, I guess

[@randacnam7321]

A chunk of that is tiny features on big dies and thus high scrap rates.

[@MrBleulauneable]

I've always been puzzled about the economics of this kind of high tech products, how many units do you think were made of this thing, is it like tens or is it thousands ?

[@tesla500]

For this it's probably in the high tens or low hundreds per year, something in that ballpark. This would sell for ~$50k or something like that and likely has a BOM cost ~$5k

[@worroSfOretsevraH]

Are you going to repurpose any of the components for something else?

[@tesla500]

Pretty much just for a PCB wall or something like that, or spare parts to fix another camera.

[@simontay4851]

You could definitely easily reuse the DC-DC converter modules in other projects. Also unsolder the FPGAs and sell them for a decent amount of money.

[@scose]

Afrotechmods text post, now this... Who's next?

[@fkiesel9442]

That switch on the front panel is probably missing the cover.

[@tesla500]

I thought that too potentially, but it doesn't seem to be, all the marketing photos show what we see here as well

[@Tesloachplaysgames11]

Make a microwave explosion 2022

[@WarmPudgy]

Imagine all the science I could do if I had more than 960fps that my cellphone does. But even the Chronos is too much for this pleb. :( How was your adventure with the beyond the press people?

[@stimpyfeelinit]

boss which crypto should i cop

[@tesla500]

AES. Buy at 128, sell at 256