As an electronics/embedded designer it hurts somewhat to see this beautiful tough MIL-SPEC technology, only manufactured to the highest of standards.... to be running for just a few minutes...
Why do you think our taxes are so high? Kind of remind you of a tea party.... Almost like the USA had become the very things it was founded against being. Because humans are dumb animals and tune into media or social opinions which and tuned by media.
Even if you were the most evil person in existence, and determined to commit war crimes, you wouldn't waste a Jav against noncombatants. It's just too valuable a resource to waste like that.
I used to work for a precious metal recovery company and can tell you, those gold plated chips and edge connectors make these boards [as with most old military electronics] worth a fortune! Modern boards/chips are gold plated measured in microns... old military equipment were absolutely lacquered in gold
There's more to this design than DSP. The gyro, other sensors and analogue front end will for sure have better performance than a low cost MEMS gyro and multipurpose micro. And can it time travel back to the late 80s and do it for $2 then?
40 years ago I took delivery of a box at my place of business in Belfast. I was expecting a resin sample from a chemical company and the box arrived by conventional courier. Instead it contained multiple carefully packaged cylindrical electronic devices. The address label for my firm had been stuck over the original destination "Short Brothers", a local defence contractor. The contained covering letter revealed the sender to be Graseby Dynamics, an English defence contractor, and the contents were described as the revised design of the Javelin missile warhead firing mechanism. I contacted Shorts and the police. and within 30 minutes my premises were crawling with plain clothes state security. The items were taken away and I was interviewed at some length. Somehow the press got hold of the story and it made the front page of the local paper. My business partner was by coincidence a friend of a department head in Shorts. He later revealed that a government junior minister had lost his job over this, and there had been several individuals severely disciplined both at Shorts and Graseby. I never did get my resin sample.
Working in Northern Ireland during that period must have been quite a mind blowing (no sick pun intended) experience. I was working on the mainland and it was bad enough there if you were a defense government employee.
The Javelin you saw parts for was actually an entirely different missile, a MANPADS developed in the 80's based on (and as a replacement for) the notoriously shit Blowpipe
I am not sure what makes me more surprised: the amount of hig-spec electronic components in that thing, or the fact that this guy got into possession of a missile guidance computer.
You can get everything for money in Ukraine right now. And no, that is not Russia propaganda. Just the reality of war and what happens when a murderous thug attacks his neighbors.
Hey dave. We'd have no chance ever scoring anything close to something like this in oz, ay? Did you ever get mil spec boards in a mailbag? I vaguely remember something or am i thinking of some high end telecom boards from a mailbag vid.
Maybe also hold a pressure and temperature probes, since the missile is expected to be used in al sorts of weather and the propellant, the detonators and the double shaped charges might need to be tweaked for very precise timing trigger.
It's probably an orientation sensor so the missile knows which way it is pointing when it can't see the target. The missile trajectory is that it climbs up at a steep angle (in one of the modes of operation) and then pitches down and attacks the tank from above where the armour is thinner, and using infrared targeting. I suspect when the missile is in the climbing phase of its flight, the infrared seeker is not pointing at the target. So in this phase of flight, the infrared seeker head cannot see the target and cannot be used for control and guidance of the missile. The missile needs to know the pitch angle it is currently at so it can then be steered back down towards the target and the infrared seeker will be used to guide the missile in the terminal phase of flight. Just a theory
The "sensor" is a javelin rate gyro probably made by marconi. It contains flourocarbon fluid and gemstone bearings. The pink coating at 6:13 is beryllium oxide and is toxic like asbestos.
ПРО токсичность Асбеста ничего нам неведомо , до сих пор все крыши жилых домов в России сделаны из шифера , где асбест главный компонент , у нас есть даже Город Асбест .
@@МигУдачи There are two types of asbestos, chrysotilly and amphibol, the first is less toxic, and is now used. If it is processed in the speaker, then everything will be fine.
Be kind to my friend Michel. He is making a great effort to do these videos in English, which is obviously not his native language, so he can share the amazing technology inside all his unusual items with the rest of us. You should give him a pat on the back.
In typical fashion I laughed at the bad joke and I also agree with everyone saying Michel is awesome! Maybe this reveals me as a crass American but I don't see the harm in that kind of ribbing. I laugh whenever I'm reminded my accent sounds funny to Europeans, never thought it should be a sore point for people that we all sound odd from far enough away. I love this kind of content, I'm a huge fan of novel and interesting computers!
It's a 1980s design. Everything used was the absolute state of the art at the time, and from what I read there were a lot of problems with it. Even the most modern version has unresolved issues. The biggest part on the board with the DSP is most likely a TMS34010, a general-purpose 32-bit CPU with special graphics instructions which was just going into production back when this was being developed. The IDT parts on a few of the other boards are most certainly dual-port RAMs and the VLSI chips will be custom glue logic.
Hey, overall as I've watched the Ukraine War I have been researching and learning obsessively about every weapon system in existence.... The thing I don't understand is with the advancement of technology, microcontrollers & especially computer vision object tracking available to the market nowadays, wouldn't it be possible to MASS PRODUCE something similar to a javelin for less than $2,000? **(A daytime version at least)? I understand a high-end Mid Wave Thermal IR Image Seeker operating at 60-120FPS would be ITAR restricted & add $10k to the overall cost but, still should not cost more than $15k total today... It seems like most of the cost associated with these guided systems is the software and algorithms....
@@justinhealey-htcohio3798 electronics and cameras did get cheaper over years and you could possibly improvise something with consumer grade parts. However, rest of the missile - gyros, shaped charge, soft launch solid rocket motor, some machined parts, some servos for those fins still do not fit into anything under $2000. And don't forget the control unit ("CLU") which has some good optics to enable targeting from up to 2.5 miles.
Not an expert, but my guess is that at least part of the high cost is related to hardening the electronics and software. Both against environmental conditions and electronic warfare.
@@Jerry_from_analytics Yeah, I've built many different drones (Large and small)... I would have to think that modern consumer grade MCU & MEMS inertial/gyro stabilization IC's Could replace most of the components on the Javelin today. I was really surprised that he said it's a 64x64 image sensor ADC which really isn't that high of resolution by today's standards. It really is extraordinary what they were able to accomplish back in the 1980s...
* The pink stuff gluing the metal plate to the carbon fiber body tube is heat transfer paste. * Those large VLSI parts are gate array parts rather than FPGAs. Gate arrays are midway between full-custom parts and FPGAs. VLSI used to make gate array chips where the silicon and maybe 1 or two metal layers were standardized, but the top couple of layers of metal were customized. So for the price of taping out (and making masks for) two metal layers, you could get a part with 100x the gate count of an FPGA, without having to pay the full cost (and manufacturing delay) of a full-custom 3-5 metal layer part. * Hardly any heat sinks! Most of this stuff didn't run long enough to get hot. Must of been a PITA to debug, since it probably got pretty hot during a debug session.
The ‘GA’ in FPGA literally Stan’s for ‘Gate Array’. For cost reasons, it was probably cheaper to reproduce the GA in large numbers with the final configuration once the configuration cleared development and testing.
@@derekedmondson9909 Field Programmable Gate Arrays and Gate Arrays are different technologies. The names are misleading, but what can you do. Gate Arrays are quite a bit less expensive that FPGAs, and use a LOT less power, and are much higher performance. On the flip side, I can reprogram an FPGA in a minute, but a new gate array is... months and at least several hundred thousand dollars.
@@derekedmondson9909 >"reproduce the GA in large numbers with the final configuration once the configuration cleared development and testing" There's a consideration of security as well - it being safer and actually cheaper to program the FPGAs yourself than to manage a secured trust relationship with a 3rd party for that function. Malicious code and hardware injection is a huge and growing problem in the field
I used to work for an avionics contractor. It’s interesting how similar this is to modern hardware … yet also very different. Everything has FPGAs with 16-layer conformal-coated boards. It all has a 1553/1760 bus with expensive parts and a lot of redundancy (compared to consumer stuff). But look at all those ribbon cables and interfaces! In 2007 we were already working on 16Gb fibre interfaces because the F-35 needed the bandwidth. But many years before that we were making missiles with a lot more resistance to EMI than this appears to have. But it’s a funny mix of new and old. I used to have to look up specs in manuals from 1973.
I’ve heard one of the limiting factors now for the F35 is that it’s maxed out in its ability to get rid of all the excess heat created by the avionics/computers. I would bet there’s only so much bleed air from the single jet engine that they’re willing to sacrifice to be used to power & cools all the electronics.
@@TheAlexBell Remember it only has to fly once. On the pictures it looks like the flat cables are covered with tape on the outside of the missile, so there is no drag on them. And the unsupported parts inside the body are probably light enough, with large soldered contact area. The cables also are a lot sturdier than the flimsy things you find in modern laptops and smartphones.
But why would you use FPGA in mass production? I thought that you only do FPGAs for rapid prototyping and after you are sure about the hardware you've emulated, you can just mass produce it instead
Wow congratulations for this find, currently I have nothing better than Sidewinder rollerons on my watch list ! All the golden parts are space grade quality, all that for a single use device, how wastefull war is.
@@h7qvi All COTS stuff at first glance so really not that exotic. The actual cost to the military includes long term storage/packaging/training and disposal so that bumps the price way up. These thingy have to last for many decades in some drafty storage bunker and they have to survive the g-forces involved in launch all that adds up.
@@Coecoo No, still humans. The chips just got smaller. What, you thought boards with tons of chips were designed that way because they looked better and "soulless machines" with no sense of aesthetics took it from us? Obviously what happened was chips got smaller, more powerful, more efficient to the point multiple could be stacked on the same die, that we needed less of them
@@Coecoo More like because the combined power of the entire thing doesn't even hold a candle to a dusty raspberry pi, and less chips = less failure points and less interconnects to manage.
@@cpte3729not entirely humans. Most of the fitting and layout is computer generated because they're much better at optimizing for timing. And they're rarely "stacked", just placed side by side on the same chip interconnected.
@@cpte3729 Nope, completely false. Please do your research before talking nonsense. A solid 90% or more chip designs these days are entirely computer generated. Pretty much the only input human has in their creation are entering parameters for the computers to follow, like designating areas for where cable ports need to be. A large part of the unfeasibility of having human-designed things is large parts thanks to the mainstreaming of multilayered PCBs. Trying to teach humans to efficiently plan out tens of thousands of pathways in a layered 3D structure instead of having a computer do it is wishful thinking at best.
Of course! Thats why I have those bits in my mega assortment, the javelin missle screwdriver tips! How could they forget the javelin missle screwdriver bits!
Huh? This item is from the late 1990s and as far as Wikipedia goes the system debuted 1996. 32-bit 386 came to market 1985, way more powerful than the 286.
I had a professor that said he worked for a DoD contractor. He said they would calculate the memory requirements by the max memory allocation per second and multiply it by the max possible run time. Memory leak? No problem.
Given the comments on this video, it really seems like when you make videos of this kind, you HAVE TO include a lot of disclaimers, at the very beginning, to let people know that this device is very old and doesn't contain anything sensitive that could be of interest to unfriendly nations. Otherwise, you'll get a lot of people reporting you to various authorities that could potentially make your life difficult depending on who investigates it (traveling to the US and being held up for a while etc). Obviously none of this is sensitive, but authorities can still go through their "due process" and their mistakes/misunderstandings can become your future problems. Federal government mistakes can take a very long time to correct. Simply DURING an investigation, you'll be on a watch list. As you know, government investigations can take years to complete, so there is that angle as well. Basically, it's probably not worth posting this type of content, despite the "cool factor"..... the comments made me re-think posting videos about some of my stuff as well. The more popular a video like this becomes, the more uninformed/ignorant people you're going to get in the comments. Even today, there are a bunch of somewhat modern missile PCB parts (from MBDA iirc) on sale for ebay, with FPGAs etc, which have been on there for years haha. No one recognizes them, so that's that. Lots of stuff leaks out in strange ways, unfortunately. I don't want to risk my own industry standing by getting involved, like most people... I've always loved your French accent, it sounds very pleasant!
You watching too much holywood crap movies. The fact the the video itself is on RUclips is the proof that nobody care about thoses old junk. For theses califonians oligarchs the word niger is way much dangerous than a javelin.
Nowadays export controls are quite strict, trade has become too transparent for government agencies. In the old days, we sold the sensors from the US and French missiles to a Russian military institute and no one cared.
I cant even get an aircraft accelerometer shipped without a huge amount of ITAR paperwork and hoops to jump through. This guy picks up a javelin missile guidance system from the market 🤷
I work on semiconductor manufacturing equipment and appreciate the technology required to make modern ICs.. but lets be honest, nothing is quite as cool as an Apollo guidance computer!
I've wanted a peek inside a Javelin for years, very nice. Perhaps it was explained and I missed it, why are there ribbon cables extending out of the side of the airframe? Is it perhaps a testing/debug model?
You can see on the picture of the complete missile at 01:00 these ribbon cables. I think it is easier for manufacturing than using connectors inside the missile.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon I have an empty fuselage section of a Super 530 missile, it also have holes for routing wires in channels outside the main body.
@@msylvain59 Come to think of it, space rockets use an external raceway for cables, too. It just didn't occur to me that smaller rockets would be the same for some reason.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon The warhead is clearly a shaped charge and since it's behind the guidance electronics, part of it's purpose is that it will totally destroy the guidance electronics when it detonates, the shockwave and hot gasses are all directed forward by the shaped charge and the vaporised electronics form part of the extremely hot gasses the punch holes in the target. I can't help thinking that this is doubtless still classified in at least some western nations, I'm surprised you were in fact able to get your hands on it.
Designed by the guy who said something about 640k of RAM being more than enough. This illustrates the stupidity of people who say cutting China/Russia off from next-gen fabs will reduce their military might. Our latest and greatest, "cutting edge" ATGM capable of taking out any tank on the battlefield is perfectly fine running on fewer resources than my kid's disposable electronic toy. Any random commercial FPV drone in Ukraine right now dwarfs the Javelin in complexity. This is hardly unique. Even our most advanced F-22 fighter is running on i960s designed by Intel in the 80s.
I'll disappoint you. Javelin performed very mediocre, to say the least. A very expensive and capricious toy for rich NATO fools. In winter, in the cold, the batteries quickly ran out and there were a lot of problems with them. The missiles ended up in the real world, and not in an advertising brochure for the Pentagon, and almost always missed, as can be seen from this video at the beginning where the failed missile simply lies on the ground. The main thing is a cumbersome, capricious and insanely expensive system that is not applicable in a real war because It cannot be produced by hundreds of tens of thousands a year, and for its price, it will ruin any half-buyer. Now tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, trucks and enemy soldiers are destroyed by Russian FPV quadrocopters for $300, which are printed on a 3D printer in 2 hours - they fly 10-12 km with an RPG rocket and penetrate any NATO equipment. Javelin - flashed for 2-3 months, and now everyone has completely forgotten about it; they have been gone for a long time.
As real war field conditions demonstrated this thing is perfect example of overengineering in most bad way. Operator's feedback is mostly negative. Too many fails and various problems leading to odd behavior and very low combat efficiency, even when being used by well trained operators. Price per unit is enormous. Simper and much cheaper AT systems demonstrated much higher efficiency.
I was qualified in these back in my military days. After discharging I started a career in software engineering. I always wanted to understand the key components in the guidance system. Thank you for this.
@@simongreen9862 plus this is not just all made by 1 person. Typically your average embedded software or hardware guy only has a narrow view into a couple of components that make up such a system. And the system engineer will probably have an overall understanding on how it all fits together but he wouldn't be able to reproduce the product by themselves. It's very much need-to-know basis.
Fascinating, I used to service the launchers (FCE) and training computers (analogue - op amps performing calculus) in the 80s, and it’s predecessor (blowpipe) but never got to see ordinance though 👍
This is the american anti-tank guided missile FGM-148 Javelin, not the British anti-air missile that you serviced. Still, thanks for sharing your story!
Great video! That was so high end cutting edge stuff and crammed in that, I bet just manufacturing the carbon fiber shell made a few people tens of millions.
Millions yeah, it would be dry fibre wrapped around a mandrel and run through an RTM press that would have been the bulk of the cost and charged up-front to the government. In the 90's / early 2000's they were probably using a template fixture for manual drilling and cutting, rather than CNC. The resin is probably phenolic and the PPE for the manual processing was probably pretty crap
I bet this is what russian missiles will use in the future once they run out of parts, haha! A missile powered by a smart lightbulb sounds like a bright idea! 🤣
Such an amazing find! There’s actual real gold in those components! Amazing stuff; the components look like mil-spec radiation hardened devices, like the same components you’d use that makes up a rover to be sent off to Mars! No expense spared in this unit (because…thank you tax payers!). However, it’s a shame all of the engineering put into that, along with extremely expensive components…to exist as a single-use subassembly!
The components in here are not extremely expensive at all. The chips and electronics are dirt cheep. The reason why these things cost over $100,000 is because it's a problem that the department of defense has been dealing with for a long time. It's called price gouging! You see these missiles probably cost anywhere from 5000 to 10000 to make. But they're going to sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they set the price and they know that the governments going to pay up. The Pentagon gets priced gouged on everything, from office supplies toilet paper to missiles. We're talking about pins that cost less than a dollar getting charged $80 per pin and over $100 a toilet roll. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Textron and more. All of them price gouge the hell out of the taxpayers it's the biggest scam nobody ever talks about. It's basically why we have to pump so much damn money into defense because the United States it's basically getting scammed by United States companys.
@@patman0250 Don't be so dense. The reason they cost 100k is because the 'cost' of the weapon is far higher than just the bill of materials and labor to assemble them. They're not selling flatpack chairs here.
Hello Michael, Do you think you can do a presentation of old EGPWS from Airbus? Also all callouts of the FWC Flight Warning Computer. May be you can get in contact with Airbus in Toulouse and they can send you one or may be more modules for free for education purposes.
@@lelabodemichel5162 At 10:54 what is the thing in the bottom left side of the aluminum bulkhead? It looks like another sensor (same cylindrical shape).
Stupid question: why are most of the chips packaged in a golden package? I know about different properties of different pcb materials for example, and I know that a simple epoxy package might not be enough. Is it to protect from EMR? Why not have a "normal" metal can for that? The golden packaging seems to be common is super serious hardware so it must have some specific property!
This likely is a design prototype or a manfacturing functional test technician training model, that someone had secretly kept in their garage for decades.
Why do you think that? The easiest explanation is that in the poorest country in Europe, people can take stuff meant for war and mark it as used and sell it afterwards. Not a jab at Ukraine, just the simplest explanation.
I think you are right. 1. The umbilical cable is intact, so this cannot possibly be from a dud. 2. None of the cables are creased like they would have been after being folded when the complete missile is assembled.
dude you neeed gloves, military aerospace stuff have al kinds of nasty coatings to keep them operating in all environments without corroding for a long time. aerospace engineering have a large set of exceptions to normal environmental rules, and if this thing was made in the 80:s it is before many of the rules we have today was created.
Beautiful piece of design, seems a shame to blow it up. What really amazes me is how anybody could reverse engineer this, Russia at a minimum seems to have been able to do it. Just to work out the PCB layout would be hard enough let alone the FPGAs etc
I think these devices are re-engineered rather than reverse-engineered. If you know someone was able to make a missile with such and such specs it's easy to be motivated to make something like it or better.
@@BertoldVdb I agree, but then the Russians have the Kornet which is more powerful (more penetration, cheaper, between other features), but less famous, for obvious reasons in western countries. So, perhaps it was interesting for Russians to reverse engineer the Javelin to only develop countermeasures for it, not to actually use it the the battlefield. IMHO, its design looks over-complicated (and probably very expensive) for what could be achieved using a more streamlined design. But, in its defense, this could probably be due to a design legacy and the result of being manufactured as a military commercial product, so part of its complexity was needed to justify the price tag for its vendor to market it to the Pentagon.
@@pepepistola9258 the kornet is beam riding, the only way to do a top attack is to manually fire the missile in a higher arc then steer it down. man in the loop. javelin is fire and forget, and has multiple launch modes. completely different systems *edit* before anyone says it, yes, i know it can be controlled by an automated targetting computer on some vehicles - vehicles can be destroyed or obsfucated. its still not fire and forget.
That "multi sensor" gyro is likely ITAR grade! I looked up the Emcore price list for NON-ITAR grade fiber optic gyro cylinders. the high end is ~$45K for ONE, if you buy 200+ quantity they will give you discount to ~$35K each. (non-ITAR)
Если ты не обманул, и это действительно платы от Джавелина, то большое тебе спасибо, добрый человек. Интересно было взглянуть на электронику зарубежных боевых ракет.
Very interesting, thanks a lot for posting! "You must ensure the missile goes to the target and not in your garden." - made my day=) I am curious about Part 2, and yes, I'd love an analysis / deep dive into the 64x64 Infrared Imaging Sensor and ADC specifically. Essentially, the sensors first stage. Maybe some aspects of the actors section as well. 330MOPS, 60MFLOPS in the DSP .. ok;) FPGAs proc power .. no idea. I guess all the processing magic will be buried in the bitstreams (ROMs, FPGAs, DSPs ..), hard to extract or analyze, so I'm not waiting for a Javelin emulator for Android soon;)
If I were developing a new Russian Javelin today, would this information help me? I think no. The engine, thermal camera, optics, servos, shaped charges - yes. But this electronics is very obsolete and over engineered. With new principles of neural networks and modern computers the guidance task can be done much better.
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for this video, all the components and board arrangements are typical 90's high tech. My old IBM thinkpads are just like that, full of boards atop other boards full of big custom chips and components. 😊
Sure, but those components are all of military grade, they are built to resist at broader ranges of temperatures....I'm not sure about the specs, but probably they are much better than any retail component of the same period!
The warhead is behind the electronics for having the best penetration distance without needing a probe as with previous generation missiles that had the warhead in the front.
As others already said, sad to know this beautiful and super expensive piece of engineering is designed to be used only once, then it self-destructs. But even more sad that the sole purpose of its existence is destruction and to kill people.
I was speaking in general, every modern missile must have a guidance system of similar complexity and build quality. Yes, I wasn't aware this is an anti-tank missile, but still, the tank has crew in it, so it will still kill people, unless it is targeted towards the engine which might absorb enough energy to leave the cabin somewhat intact. Yes they will be military casualties and not civilian, but does it matter that much? The tank personnel were also civilians just months or weeks before, and a lot of them has families. A lot, if not most of them don't want to be there, but they are forced to. @@JaakkoF
@@mrnmrn1 Well, sure the tank crew also has people in it and their lives matter. I suppose it's a good thing to reflect on the tragedy of war now and then - guess most people just accept it as a fact of life, maybe get desensitized a little as long as it happens somewhere else.
Now I understand how that military chip manufacturer was able to create their own graphics card 3DFX out of nowhere and bring it to market. These missiles are basically flying webcams with video processors on them guiding the missile to the infrared/heat target.
@hakimmohamad6216 because it's not true lol. i think the only graphics card that was a result of military development was the intel i740 which was actually a joint project with lockheed martin and an outgrowth of their simulation systems, but it was really shit. SGI (where the 3dfx team originated) didn't make military hardware either
The sensor is the rate gyro, dual axis. Requires plus and minus 15V at 400Hz 3 phase to spin up the motor in it, the circuit no doubt used the overkill aerospace mosfets as part of the motor driver. I always though military weapons stuff was extremely wasteful of high tech stuff😢
That thick PCB will have loads of circuit tracks, making a reverse engineering project near impossible - but I'm sure someone somewhere will have done that. Great video, thank you Michel.
Sure you can have highly skilled engineers reverse engineer a many years old design, but it might be better to use that talent to design a new device to the latest standards. The magic is really in the software though.
NO need to reverwse engineer anythihng now. Today a 4 man team of decent engineers can achieve in 6 months what this thing was capable of back in the day. There is a RUclipsr who managed to propulsively land a model. I'm sure an ATGM would be an easier task for someone with those skills.
64 x 64 is quite low resolution but in high sampling frequency should provide enough information. I originally heard its 16 x 16 and it sounded bit a stretch 😅
If you're someone who makes these, you could consider, oh i dont know, pinching one of those ribbon cables in a nondescript place right along the edge that is to connect to the head ports. It would still read data and validate but if the right pins were cut the head wouldnt ever go off when used. Just something for humans that care about other humans to consider. Ya know. Hint hint wink wink.
Great video - as always! This breakthrough digital technology is not as fun to reverse engineer as analog technology. What's surprising is that the main shaped charge and engine are so small. Gryroscope - what I can tell you - go for it.
Anyone have any idea what that giant golden TI ASIC is in the left hand side at 9:16? Googling the numbers on it don't reveal any info, just found one for sale on ebay.
This is weird to come across. I never used the internet to search it.. Anyway, I modified mine to for auto target acquisition people entering my property with two XM556 Microguns that pop up the ground with multi-laser guidance. That and my thermal and night vision the board has a lot of stuff to play with. A deer entered and when it alerted me on my phone, I allowed it to go to mince meat mode. incredible. Either way, no more Mormons come to my door
Many thanks for the video. Beside electronics made to highest standards, the most interesting part is the cost of the missile at around $78,000, that's incredibly high for such part made in series of tens of thousands or more. So this is how weapons manufacturers and lobby get extremely rich.
American here with hands on experience in military electronic parts supply (night vision parts specifically). I'd recommend everyone saving this video. Nice on covering the serial too. Theres a dumb law (ITAR) we have that defines electronics (even well known decades old ones) as "arms" and must not be shared with foreign nationals (including allies) unless it has State Dept. approval. Since Google is an American company and we don't own any of what we ever upload, RUclips may be forced to "bend the knee" to our "competent" (when it wants to be) gov't at some point (if it gets popular enough). Just wanted to point that out. I'm no lawyer but thats what I've always been told. Regardless I like this content. Thank you.
I just wanted to further add that I don't know how sites like "thefirearmsblog" (TFB) gets away with tearing down and showcasing night/thermal/fusion vision devices amongst other things. Ones in current use (AN/PSQ-36s) were clearly "demilled" (literally they drilled the sensors). Older stuff (up to early 2010s) the gov't generally doesn't care for the most part (teardown sites and vids are still up). Heck I found a FWS-I technical manual pdf copy by Googling. But again you never know with both RUclips and the US gov't. Or just in general (how bout megaupload).
I'm also frequently around defense related electronics, specifically aerospace. This, given it's part of an active system, shouldn't be on the internet. Edit: I should add our adversaries certainly already has some of this stuff(plus the actually useful stuff would be the lines of code), but it's still a dark grey area that would just best be avoided.
Your English is so strongly accented I barely understand what you are saying, please write pertinent things on the screen, or try to neutralize your accent and enunciate more clearly when speaking. I am not a native English speaker so I understand it can be hard and it's easier to be lazy and speak with a strong accent, but to use it as the international language requires clear speech.
I've been watching your channel for a few years and it looks like this video really took off for you. Glad to see it and hope it brings you the subs and views you deserve.
Neat to see. I've been curious to see the electronics as well as what makes them so expensive. (As a side note, as an American, I don't know if I could have made this video without a knock on the door, or being put on some list 😛)
@@BigSmartArmed It doesn't look like it was fired at all. Considering it was manufactured in 98, I'm guessing it was rescued from a military weapons destruction dump.
@@BigSmartArmed Well, that is a sample picture from Google. The one he has is not the same as the one in the picture. Besides, the Pentagon generally has a 10-15 year shelf life on these missiles which indicates that what I said earlier was probably right considering the date of manufacture. I would bank more on it being decommissioned.
As an electronics/embedded designer it hurts somewhat to see this beautiful tough MIL-SPEC technology, only manufactured to the highest of standards.... to be running for just a few minutes...
I was thinking that, too. Only has to work once!
Why do you think our taxes are so high? Kind of remind you of a tea party.... Almost like the USA had become the very things it was founded against being. Because humans are dumb animals and tune into media or social opinions which and tuned by media.
@@andreyukhov9403 Or it kills innocent people.
Even if you were the most evil person in existence, and determined to commit war crimes, you wouldn't waste a Jav against noncombatants. It's just too valuable a resource to waste like that.
@-_a-a_- ?
I used to work for a precious metal recovery company and can tell you, those gold plated chips and edge connectors make these boards [as with most old military electronics] worth a fortune!
Modern boards/chips are gold plated measured in microns... old military equipment were absolutely lacquered in gold
i can imagine some Ukrainian guy firing the missile, then running at the speed of sound out his trench with a butterfly net.
why use gold anyway?
To protect from rust or?? we have stainless steel, a lot cheaper. I dont see the reason to use gold.
whats the point?
@@jw200 if you are using modern, expensive munitions, you need to make sure they work with no chance of failure.
@@jw200gold is much more conductive than ss
Purée ! C'est de la belle électronique ! Ce sont des bijoux ! Merci pour le partage !
That is a lot of electronics for a missile that is not that big, very interesting video!
i believe a 2$ esp32 can do better than this!
There's more to this design than DSP. The gyro, other sensors and analogue front end will for sure have better performance than a low cost MEMS gyro and multipurpose micro. And can it time travel back to the late 80s and do it for $2 then?
I am happy to see esp32 not yet used to any war today, which is a good thing indeed!
@@深夜酒吧 FPV drone in Ukraine uses esp32 as flight controller!
@@深夜酒吧 Boy do I have news for you
Would be very interested to have the sensor opened. Thanks
So when the President says there is a semiconductor shortage, here's why.
40 years ago I took delivery of a box at my place of business in Belfast. I was expecting a resin sample from a chemical company and the box arrived by conventional courier. Instead it contained multiple carefully packaged cylindrical electronic devices. The address label for my firm had been stuck over the original destination "Short Brothers", a local defence contractor. The contained covering letter revealed the sender to be Graseby Dynamics, an English defence contractor, and the contents were described as the revised design of the Javelin missile warhead firing mechanism. I contacted Shorts and the police. and within 30 minutes my premises were crawling with plain clothes state security. The items were taken away and I was interviewed at some length. Somehow the press got hold of the story and it made the front page of the local paper. My business partner was by coincidence a friend of a department head in Shorts. He later revealed that a government junior minister had lost his job over this, and there had been several individuals severely disciplined both at Shorts and Graseby. I never did get my resin sample.
Ever checked if one of those contractors had the resin sample? :)
You could make a better deal, if you called Russian embassy instead.
the last sentence really bites :-)
Working in Northern Ireland during that period must have been quite a mind blowing (no sick pun intended) experience. I was working on the mainland and it was bad enough there if you were a defense government employee.
The Javelin you saw parts for was actually an entirely different missile, a MANPADS developed in the 80's based on (and as a replacement for) the notoriously shit Blowpipe
I am not sure what makes me more surprised: the amount of hig-spec electronic components in that thing, or the fact that this guy got into possession of a missile guidance computer.
@weirdscience2911 russian propaganda
@@nawnaw4709 putin huilo
You can get everything for money in Ukraine right now.
And no, that is not Russia propaganda. Just the reality of war and what happens when a murderous thug attacks his neighbors.
@@casel4154 Ucraine war is pushed, wanted and needed just by the US. All the rest is NATO propaganda.
@weirdscience2911 keep cope, dude
"These are very rare. If you find one, you have to pay the price." But you pay an even greater price if one finds you.
Damn, I was about to say that XD
pay him even greater price and ask him to withdraw this so that you can say it again :) @@fridaycaliforniaa236
Lol👍
Javelin is so powerful weapon so the Ukrainian has to use Chinese drone to deliver it's warhead
@@sallehsallehnewton3258 Cavemen given muskets would use them as clubs...
Wow, great teardown, thanks for sharing.
Hey dave. We'd have no chance ever scoring anything close to something like this in oz, ay? Did you ever get mil spec boards in a mailbag? I vaguely remember something or am i thinking of some high end telecom boards from a mailbag vid.
@EEVblog hi dave like to see ur version of this 😁😁
@@anandasri1330 this would never make it through Australian customs.never.
@@yaghiyahbrenner8902 ship in pieces
I hope he gives it to you for free for 2nd tear down. You can get it working and send it to the sky
wow! Crazy expensive stuff. Definitely open the sensor - I assume it's a gyro/accelerometer of some sort
Maybe also hold a pressure and temperature probes, since the missile is expected to be used in al sorts of weather and the propellant, the detonators and the double shaped charges might need to be tweaked for very precise timing trigger.
If Mike says waw...🤗
Looking forward for next part.
Thank you.
Maybe it would be reasonable to try to CT scan the sensor in a vet clinic before destroying it
It's probably an orientation sensor so the missile knows which way it is pointing when it can't see the target.
The missile trajectory is that it climbs up at a steep angle (in one of the modes of operation) and then pitches down and attacks the tank from above where the armour is thinner, and using infrared targeting.
I suspect when the missile is in the climbing phase of its flight, the infrared seeker is not pointing at the target. So in this phase of flight, the infrared seeker head cannot see the target and cannot be used for control and guidance of the missile.
The missile needs to know the pitch angle it is currently at so it can then be steered back down towards the target and the infrared seeker will be used to guide the missile in the terminal phase of flight.
Just a theory
Hello do you still have your work on the flir lepton ?
The "sensor" is a javelin rate gyro probably made by marconi. It contains flourocarbon fluid and gemstone bearings.
The pink coating at 6:13 is beryllium oxide and is toxic like asbestos.
ПРО токсичность Асбеста ничего нам неведомо , до сих пор все крыши жилых домов в России сделаны из шифера , где асбест главный компонент , у нас есть даже Город Асбест .
@@МигУдачи wtf are you saying it's been proven since ages that asbestos is cancer (pun intended)
私があなたのコメントを読むと思ったら大間違いでした。@@МигУдачи
how do you know it is made of beryllium?
@@МигУдачи There are two types of asbestos, chrysotilly and amphibol, the first is less toxic, and is now used. If it is processed in the speaker, then everything will be fine.
This guy is a genius. Not only is he a great engineer, he is also the inventor of the French accent!
He speaks English because you know this language.
You speak it because it's the only one you know.
@@marinoceccotti9155 Seems like you took that (bad) joke a bit too personally.
He will likely just laugh in your general direction, while tapping his head and calling you silly.
Be kind to my friend Michel. He is making a great effort to do these videos in English, which is obviously not his native language, so he can share the amazing technology inside all his unusual items with the rest of us. You should give him a pat on the back.
In typical fashion I laughed at the bad joke and I also agree with everyone saying Michel is awesome! Maybe this reveals me as a crass American but I don't see the harm in that kind of ribbing. I laugh whenever I'm reminded my accent sounds funny to Europeans, never thought it should be a sore point for people that we all sound odd from far enough away. I love this kind of content, I'm a huge fan of novel and interesting computers!
As always awesome teardown and explanation Michel.
Is there a possibility to shot some good resolution photos of the entire board.
This really proves that the missile knows where it is.
and where it isn't
@@PeechaLaCosh The javelin is self-guiding.
That missile was recovered after it was fired and it missed.
@@BigSmartArmed No. It would be in small pieces if that happened.
I don't think we're in Keiv, anymore, Toto.
It's a 1980s design. Everything used was the absolute state of the art at the time, and from what I read there were a lot of problems with it. Even the most modern version has unresolved issues. The biggest part on the board with the DSP is most likely a TMS34010, a general-purpose 32-bit CPU with special graphics instructions which was just going into production back when this was being developed. The IDT parts on a few of the other boards are most certainly dual-port RAMs and the VLSI chips will be custom glue logic.
Hey, overall as I've watched the Ukraine War I have been researching and learning obsessively about every weapon system in existence....
The thing I don't understand is with the advancement of technology, microcontrollers & especially computer vision object tracking available to the market nowadays, wouldn't it be possible to MASS PRODUCE something similar to a javelin for less than $2,000? **(A daytime version at least)?
I understand a high-end Mid Wave Thermal IR Image Seeker operating at 60-120FPS would be ITAR restricted & add $10k to the overall cost but, still should not cost more than $15k total today...
It seems like most of the cost associated with these guided systems is the software and algorithms....
@@justinhealey-htcohio3798 electronics and cameras did get cheaper over years and you could possibly improvise something with consumer grade parts. However, rest of the missile - gyros, shaped charge, soft launch solid rocket motor, some machined parts, some servos for those fins still do not fit into anything under $2000. And don't forget the control unit ("CLU") which has some good optics to enable targeting from up to 2.5 miles.
Not an expert, but my guess is that at least part of the high cost is related to hardening the electronics and software. Both against environmental conditions and electronic warfare.
@@Jerry_from_analytics Yeah, I've built many different drones (Large and small)... I would have to think that modern consumer grade MCU & MEMS inertial/gyro stabilization IC's Could replace most of the components on the Javelin today.
I was really surprised that he said it's a 64x64 image sensor ADC which really isn't that high of resolution by today's standards.
It really is extraordinary what they were able to accomplish back in the 1980s...
Date of manufacture on at least the big quads is 1997, so I’d guess it’s an early 90s design at the latest?
* The pink stuff gluing the metal plate to the carbon fiber body tube is heat transfer paste.
* Those large VLSI parts are gate array parts rather than FPGAs. Gate arrays are midway between full-custom parts and FPGAs. VLSI used to make gate array chips where the silicon and maybe 1 or two metal layers were standardized, but the top couple of layers of metal were customized. So for the price of taping out (and making masks for) two metal layers, you could get a part with 100x the gate count of an FPGA, without having to pay the full cost (and manufacturing delay) of a full-custom 3-5 metal layer part.
* Hardly any heat sinks! Most of this stuff didn't run long enough to get hot. Must of been a PITA to debug, since it probably got pretty hot during a debug session.
Submerge in mineral oil and do the debugging🤣
The ‘GA’ in FPGA literally Stan’s for ‘Gate Array’. For cost reasons, it was probably cheaper to reproduce the GA in large numbers with the final configuration once the configuration cleared development and testing.
@@derekedmondson9909 Field Programmable Gate Arrays and Gate Arrays are different technologies. The names are misleading, but what can you do.
Gate Arrays are quite a bit less expensive that FPGAs, and use a LOT less power, and are much higher performance. On the flip side, I can reprogram an FPGA in a minute, but a new gate array is... months and at least several hundred thousand dollars.
@@derekedmondson9909 >"reproduce the GA in large numbers with the final configuration once the configuration cleared development and testing"
There's a consideration of security as well - it being safer and actually cheaper to program the FPGAs yourself than to manage a secured trust relationship with a 3rd party for that function. Malicious code and hardware injection is a huge and growing problem in the field
I used to work for an avionics contractor. It’s interesting how similar this is to modern hardware … yet also very different. Everything has FPGAs with 16-layer conformal-coated boards. It all has a 1553/1760 bus with expensive parts and a lot of redundancy (compared to consumer stuff). But look at all those ribbon cables and interfaces! In 2007 we were already working on 16Gb fibre interfaces because the F-35 needed the bandwidth. But many years before that we were making missiles with a lot more resistance to EMI than this appears to have. But it’s a funny mix of new and old. I used to have to look up specs in manuals from 1973.
I was surprised by these ribbon cables too. Aren't they vulnerable to acceleration overload?
That’s really interesting. 👍 Thanks for sharing.
I’ve heard one of the limiting factors now for the F35 is that it’s maxed out in its ability to get rid of all the excess heat created by the avionics/computers. I would bet there’s only so much bleed air from the single jet engine that they’re willing to sacrifice to be used to power & cools all the electronics.
@@TheAlexBell Remember it only has to fly once. On the pictures it looks like the flat cables are covered with tape on the outside of the missile, so there is no drag on them. And the unsupported parts inside the body are probably light enough, with large soldered contact area. The cables also are a lot sturdier than the flimsy things you find in modern laptops and smartphones.
But why would you use FPGA in mass production? I thought that you only do FPGAs for rapid prototyping and after you are sure about the hardware you've emulated, you can just mass produce it instead
Wow congratulations for this find, currently I have nothing better than Sidewinder rollerons on my watch list ! All the golden parts are space grade quality, all that for a single use device, how wastefull war is.
Hey war is all about the gold plated military grade toilet seat 🚽 on the taxpayer's dime 😅
The cost of the targets this missile is launched to is a lot higher than the actual missile.
@@h7qvi All COTS stuff at first glance so really not that exotic. The actual cost to the military includes long term storage/packaging/training and disposal so that bumps the price way up. These thingy have to last for many decades in some drafty storage bunker and they have to survive the g-forces involved in launch all that adds up.
@@DelyanT So it's even more wasteful, in that case. Or perhaps that's what you meant.
Yeah, think about how much we wasted stopping the holocaust! Jeez. Sometimes war has it's place.
Random but aesthetically I really love the big multi-chip era of computer hardware. Just looks so interesting.
That's because they were designed by humans and not computers back then.
@@Coecoo
No, still humans. The chips just got smaller. What, you thought boards with tons of chips were designed that way because they looked better and "soulless machines" with no sense of aesthetics took it from us? Obviously what happened was chips got smaller, more powerful, more efficient to the point multiple could be stacked on the same die, that we needed less of them
@@Coecoo More like because the combined power of the entire thing doesn't even hold a candle to a dusty raspberry pi, and less chips = less failure points and less interconnects to manage.
@@cpte3729not entirely humans. Most of the fitting and layout is computer generated because they're much better at optimizing for timing.
And they're rarely "stacked", just placed side by side on the same chip interconnected.
@@cpte3729 Nope, completely false. Please do your research before talking nonsense.
A solid 90% or more chip designs these days are entirely computer generated. Pretty much the only input human has in their creation are entering parameters for the computers to follow, like designating areas for where cable ports need to be.
A large part of the unfeasibility of having human-designed things is large parts thanks to the mainstreaming of multilayered PCBs. Trying to teach humans to efficiently plan out tens of thousands of pathways in a layered 3D structure instead of having a computer do it is wishful thinking at best.
impotant question is "can it run doom?"
It can distribute Doom.
I can recognize that at it least it is not "but does it run Windows?"
it should be "can it run crysis?".oh!! man, "'can it run doom'" is a insult to this guidance computer & its computing capability!!!
@@riajhasib8810Well… Doom was launched at the end of ‘93 and if this is an 80s design I’d say it would be hard to run Doom on it. My two cents…
It can spell Doom.
Of course! Thats why I have those bits in my mega assortment, the javelin missle screwdriver tips! How could they forget the javelin missle screwdriver bits!
It's in my cart as we speak. Don't forget to order it as a high security type so you have the hole in the middle.
Same screws (Torq-set) are also on TOW missile airframe
Imagine all this is made at the same time as consumers were able to first time see a 16bit Intel 286 CPU.
Huh? This item is from the late 1990s and as far as Wikipedia goes the system debuted 1996. 32-bit 386 came to market 1985, way more powerful than the 286.
@@benbaselet2026 you could be right, my understanding was this is 80’s tech and the 286 was release in early 80’s, so that was my thought process.
I had a professor that said he worked for a DoD contractor. He said they would calculate the memory requirements by the max memory allocation per second and multiply it by the max possible run time.
Memory leak? No problem.
I work in aerospace and there’s no such thing as a memory leak because dynamic memory allocation is forbidden
This is 40 year old weapons made back when the USSR was collapsing.
Given the comments on this video, it really seems like when you make videos of this kind, you HAVE TO include a lot of disclaimers, at the very beginning, to let people know that this device is very old and doesn't contain anything sensitive that could be of interest to unfriendly nations. Otherwise, you'll get a lot of people reporting you to various authorities that could potentially make your life difficult depending on who investigates it (traveling to the US and being held up for a while etc). Obviously none of this is sensitive, but authorities can still go through their "due process" and their mistakes/misunderstandings can become your future problems. Federal government mistakes can take a very long time to correct. Simply DURING an investigation, you'll be on a watch list. As you know, government investigations can take years to complete, so there is that angle as well. Basically, it's probably not worth posting this type of content, despite the "cool factor"..... the comments made me re-think posting videos about some of my stuff as well. The more popular a video like this becomes, the more uninformed/ignorant people you're going to get in the comments.
Even today, there are a bunch of somewhat modern missile PCB parts (from MBDA iirc) on sale for ebay, with FPGAs etc, which have been on there for years haha. No one recognizes them, so that's that. Lots of stuff leaks out in strange ways, unfortunately. I don't want to risk my own industry standing by getting involved, like most people...
I've always loved your French accent, it sounds very pleasant!
You watching too much holywood crap movies. The fact the the video itself is on RUclips is the proof that nobody care about thoses old junk. For theses califonians oligarchs the word niger is way much dangerous than a javelin.
Nowadays export controls are quite strict, trade has become too transparent for government agencies. In the old days, we sold the sensors from the US and French missiles to a Russian military institute and no one cared.
LDM #355: Patriot MIM-104F PAC-3 missile guidance computer - Part 1: teardown
I cant even get an aircraft accelerometer shipped without a huge amount of ITAR paperwork and hoops to jump through. This guy picks up a javelin missile guidance system from the market 🤷
Nice find Michel. When only the best will do. Impressive electronics board and mini IMU!
I work on semiconductor manufacturing equipment and appreciate the technology required to make modern ICs.. but lets be honest, nothing is quite as cool as an Apollo guidance computer!
The guidance section on it's own is not regarded to be a weapon,
but the seeker section is !
Best Amazon product unboxing ever.
Mil-spec on the inside, amateur rocket enthusiast on the outside.
I've wanted a peek inside a Javelin for years, very nice. Perhaps it was explained and I missed it, why are there ribbon cables extending out of the side of the airframe? Is it perhaps a testing/debug model?
You can see on the picture of the complete missile at 01:00 these ribbon cables. I think it is easier for manufacturing than using connectors inside the missile.
@@lelabodemichel5162 Oh I see now. I suppose the warhead fills the entire volume inside of that next segment.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon I have an empty fuselage section of a Super 530 missile, it also have holes for routing wires in channels outside the main body.
@@msylvain59 Come to think of it, space rockets use an external raceway for cables, too. It just didn't occur to me that smaller rockets would be the same for some reason.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon The warhead is clearly a shaped charge and since it's behind the guidance electronics, part of it's purpose is that it will totally destroy the guidance electronics when it detonates, the shockwave and hot gasses are all directed forward by the shaped charge and the vaporised electronics form part of the extremely hot gasses the punch holes in the target. I can't help thinking that this is doubtless still classified in at least some western nations, I'm surprised you were in fact able to get your hands on it.
Designed by the guy who said something about 640k of RAM being more than enough. This illustrates the stupidity of people who say cutting China/Russia off from next-gen fabs will reduce their military might. Our latest and greatest, "cutting edge" ATGM capable of taking out any tank on the battlefield is perfectly fine running on fewer resources than my kid's disposable electronic toy. Any random commercial FPV drone in Ukraine right now dwarfs the Javelin in complexity. This is hardly unique. Even our most advanced F-22 fighter is running on i960s designed by Intel in the 80s.
I'll disappoint you. Javelin performed very mediocre, to say the least.
A very expensive and capricious toy for rich NATO fools. In winter, in the cold, the batteries quickly ran out and there were a lot of problems with them. The missiles ended up in the real world, and not in an advertising brochure for the Pentagon, and almost always missed, as can be seen from this video at the beginning where the failed missile simply lies on the ground.
The main thing is a cumbersome, capricious and insanely expensive system that is not applicable in a real war because It cannot be produced by hundreds of tens of thousands a year, and for its price, it will ruin any half-buyer.
Now tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, trucks and enemy soldiers are destroyed by Russian FPV quadrocopters for $300, which are printed on a 3D printer in 2 hours - they fly 10-12 km with an RPG rocket and penetrate any NATO equipment.
Javelin - flashed for 2-3 months, and now everyone has completely forgotten about it; they have been gone for a long time.
As real war field conditions demonstrated this thing is perfect example of overengineering in most bad way. Operator's feedback is mostly negative. Too many fails and various problems leading to odd behavior and very low combat efficiency, even when being used by well trained operators. Price per unit is enormous. Simper and much cheaper AT systems demonstrated much higher efficiency.
"dont ask me where i found this" Michel le terroriste ahhaha
Very impressive. I love the aesthetic of purple ceramic and gold top ICs.
I was qualified in these back in my military days. After discharging I started a career in software engineering. I always wanted to understand the key components in the guidance system. Thank you for this.
This is a freakin' fortune in gold and IC's. No wonder these systems are pricey as hell 😂 Artwork of engineering.
A rare glimpse into a marvel of engineering that few people can ever truly appreciate. Please, do more of these!
And anyone who DOES get to fully appreciate it, doesn't get to do so for very long.
@@simongreen9862 plus this is not just all made by 1 person. Typically your average embedded software or hardware guy only has a narrow view into a couple of components that make up such a system. And the system engineer will probably have an overall understanding on how it all fits together but he wouldn't be able to reproduce the product by themselves. It's very much need-to-know basis.
So calculations on this whole board had to be faster than the missile itself. Quite impressive for that era.
What a great find Michel! well done, Isn't it sad all that beautiful engineering for a destructive cause
such a waste of work for just a few seconds of flight time. This is heartbreaking. A disposable missile should be kept simple and cheap.
Fascinating, I used to service the launchers (FCE) and training computers (analogue - op amps performing calculus) in the 80s, and it’s predecessor (blowpipe) but never got to see ordinance though 👍
This is the american anti-tank guided missile FGM-148 Javelin, not the British anti-air missile that you serviced. Still, thanks for sharing your story!
@@supersarge24 Jav is used by the UK as well so that's probably why he said that
Great video! That was so high end cutting edge stuff and crammed in that, I bet just manufacturing the carbon fiber shell made a few people tens of millions.
Millions yeah, it would be dry fibre wrapped around a mandrel and run through an RTM press that would have been the bulk of the cost and charged up-front to the government. In the 90's / early 2000's they were probably using a template fixture for manual drilling and cutting, rather than CNC. The resin is probably phenolic and the PPE for the manual processing was probably pretty crap
Yikes, wonder how much of that can be cramed into a single ESP32 these days.
I bet this is what russian missiles will use in the future once they run out of parts, haha! A missile powered by a smart lightbulb sounds like a bright idea! 🤣
@@user-lp2op9uu1w did you notice Russia has thousand kilometers of border to its strategic partner China?🤦♀️
A lot of technology in that for it to get used once and blown up.
It's going to take something 10x more expensive along when it does.
it's just planned obsolescence at extreme :D
Such an amazing find! There’s actual real gold in those components! Amazing stuff; the components look like mil-spec radiation hardened devices, like the same components you’d use that makes up a rover to be sent off to Mars! No expense spared in this unit (because…thank you tax payers!). However, it’s a shame all of the engineering put into that, along with extremely expensive components…to exist as a single-use subassembly!
Yes they are all Radiation and extended temperature resistant.
Unfortunately the reality of the world is taxpayers pay with dollars or probabillity raises that they could be "paying" with their own lives.
The components in here are not extremely expensive at all. The chips and electronics are dirt cheep. The reason why these things cost over $100,000 is because it's a problem that the department of defense has been dealing with for a long time. It's called price gouging! You see these missiles probably cost anywhere from 5000 to 10000 to make. But they're going to sell it for hundreds of thousands of dollars because they set the price and they know that the governments going to pay up. The Pentagon gets priced gouged on everything, from office supplies toilet paper to missiles. We're talking about pins that cost less than a dollar getting charged $80 per pin and over $100 a toilet roll. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop, Textron and more. All of them price gouge the hell out of the taxpayers it's the biggest scam nobody ever talks about. It's basically why we have to pump so much damn money into defense because the United States it's basically getting scammed by United States companys.
@@videosuperhighway7655 Ceramic mil-grade chips with gold plated lids doesn't mean rad hardened, especially not in the 80's.
@@patman0250 Don't be so dense. The reason they cost 100k is because the 'cost' of the weapon is far higher than just the bill of materials and labor to assemble them. They're not selling flatpack chairs here.
depressing how much effort and complexity we put into weapons of destruction
Hello Michael,
Do you think you can do a presentation of old EGPWS from Airbus?
Also all callouts of the FWC Flight Warning Computer.
May be you can get in contact with Airbus in Toulouse and they can send you one or may be more modules for free for education purposes.
Ta chaine est juste extraordinaire ! Merci pour ce bijou ! ^_^
Imagine what they can have now as a top secret now if this was designed in 1986...
All the electronics has been replaced with a Raspberry Pi Zero.
I love your Accent! and very interesting video, this is something very unusual to see. and a great find indeed!
thank you, Mon ame! 😀
superexpensive military grade electronics for single-time use 😵
the vehicle one of these gets aimed at is going to be more expensive... not to forget the humans operating it...
This sensor looks a lot like a dynamically tuned gyro (DTG). If so, there must be two of them.
There is only one sensor on that section.
@@lelabodemichel5162 At 10:54 what is the thing in the bottom left side of the aluminum bulkhead? It looks like another sensor (same cylindrical shape).
@s102tk Nothing electrical, just a metallic cylinder. Maybe a provision for another sensor.
I'm french and i understand perfectly what you say in english. Curious. Thanks for the video, it's so beautiful !
Merci mon ami!
The missile knows where it is at all times
Only because it knows where it isn't at all times
Stupid question: why are most of the chips packaged in a golden package? I know about different properties of different pcb materials for example, and I know that a simple epoxy package might not be enough. Is it to protect from EMR? Why not have a "normal" metal can for that? The golden packaging seems to be common is super serious hardware so it must have some specific property!
Heat dissipation, anti-oxidation and reflectivity.
Probably because of extended temperature range.
anti-oxidation you dont know how long they sit in storage
Hermetically sealed with helium leak tests. It's all about long term storage and the reliable operation.
This likely is a design prototype or a manfacturing functional test technician training model, that someone had secretly kept in their garage for decades.
Why do you think that? The easiest explanation is that in the poorest country in Europe, people can take stuff meant for war and mark it as used and sell it afterwards. Not a jab at Ukraine, just the simplest explanation.
@@ligius3 the pcb circuit boards are all exposed and don't have thick plastic conformal coating
I think you are right.
1. The umbilical cable is intact, so this cannot possibly be from a dud.
2. None of the cables are creased like they would have been after being folded when the complete missile is assembled.
dude you neeed gloves, military aerospace stuff have al kinds of nasty coatings to keep them operating in all environments without corroding for a long time. aerospace engineering have a large set of exceptions to normal environmental rules, and if this thing was made in the 80:s it is before many of the rules we have today was created.
Beautiful piece of design, seems a shame to blow it up. What really amazes me is how anybody could reverse engineer this, Russia at a minimum seems to have been able to do it. Just to work out the PCB layout would be hard enough let alone the FPGAs etc
I think these devices are re-engineered rather than reverse-engineered. If you know someone was able to make a missile with such and such specs it's easy to be motivated to make something like it or better.
@@BertoldVdb I agree, but then the Russians have the Kornet which is more powerful (more penetration, cheaper, between other features), but less famous, for obvious reasons in western countries. So, perhaps it was interesting for Russians to reverse engineer the Javelin to only develop countermeasures for it, not to actually use it the the battlefield. IMHO, its design looks over-complicated (and probably very expensive) for what could be achieved using a more streamlined design. But, in its defense, this could probably be due to a design legacy and the result of being manufactured as a military commercial product, so part of its complexity was needed to justify the price tag for its vendor to market it to the Pentagon.
@@pepepistola9258 the kornet is beam riding, the only way to do a top attack is to manually fire the missile in a higher arc then steer it down. man in the loop. javelin is fire and forget, and has multiple launch modes. completely different systems *edit* before anyone says it, yes, i know it can be controlled by an automated targetting computer on some vehicles - vehicles can be destroyed or obsfucated. its still not fire and forget.
I doubt Russian engineers will bother to reverse engineer this. This is old as crap.
@@hrissan And is still the most potent portable AT weapon in the world.
That "multi sensor" gyro is likely ITAR grade! I looked up the Emcore price list for NON-ITAR grade fiber optic gyro cylinders. the high end is ~$45K for ONE, if you buy 200+ quantity they will give you discount to ~$35K each. (non-ITAR)
Если ты не обманул, и это действительно платы от Джавелина, то большое тебе спасибо, добрый человек. Интересно было взглянуть на электронику зарубежных боевых ракет.
Когда хохлы начнут это продавать на Авито? Я бы купил.
We love Ukraine.
@@mathieucaron4957 вы хотели сказать, что любите покупать любовь у продажных украинских девушек?
Can you do the same for Russian-made missiles?
Very interesting, thanks a lot for posting! "You must ensure the missile goes to the target and not in your garden." - made my day=) I am curious about Part 2, and yes, I'd love an analysis / deep dive into the 64x64 Infrared Imaging Sensor and ADC specifically. Essentially, the sensors first stage. Maybe some aspects of the actors section as well. 330MOPS, 60MFLOPS in the DSP .. ok;) FPGAs proc power .. no idea. I guess all the processing magic will be buried in the bitstreams (ROMs, FPGAs, DSPs ..), hard to extract or analyze, so I'm not waiting for a Javelin emulator for Android soon;)
If I were developing a new Russian Javelin today, would this information help me? I think no. The engine, thermal camera, optics, servos, shaped charges - yes. But this electronics is very obsolete and over engineered. With new principles of neural networks and modern computers the guidance task can be done much better.
Those sensors look like gyros, two in different orientations
So how is Guantanamo this time of year?
Absolutely fascinating. Thank you so much for this video, all the components and board arrangements are typical 90's high tech. My old IBM thinkpads are just like that, full of boards atop other boards full of big custom chips and components. 😊
Sure, but those components are all of military grade, they are built to resist at broader ranges of temperatures....I'm not sure about the specs, but probably they are much better than any retail component of the same period!
I would blueprint that whole thing and make many copies of it to share with my friends...
IF I had any friends...
Looks like they made sure no one recovered the guidance system. The main charge would mess it up pretty bad.
The warhead is behind the electronics for having the best penetration distance without needing a probe as with previous generation missiles that had the warhead in the front.
And today you could just use a raspberry Pi as main pcb lol
As others already said, sad to know this beautiful and super expensive piece of engineering is designed to be used only once, then it self-destructs. But even more sad that the sole purpose of its existence is destruction and to kill people.
It is a defensive weapon at least
For this to kill people, the operator of said weapon needs to point it at people. This was designed to destroy a tank, not people.
I was speaking in general, every modern missile must have a guidance system of similar complexity and build quality.
Yes, I wasn't aware this is an anti-tank missile, but still, the tank has crew in it, so it will still kill people, unless it is targeted towards the engine which might absorb enough energy to leave the cabin somewhat intact.
Yes they will be military casualties and not civilian, but does it matter that much? The tank personnel were also civilians just months or weeks before, and a lot of them has families. A lot, if not most of them don't want to be there, but they are forced to. @@JaakkoF
@@mrnmrn1 Well, sure the tank crew also has people in it and their lives matter. I suppose it's a good thing to reflect on the tragedy of war now and then - guess most people just accept it as a fact of life, maybe get desensitized a little as long as it happens somewhere else.
@@JaakkoFTanks quite often have people in them.
1989 and has a processor that does 330 MIPs .. Roughly 200Mhz Pentium equivalent, 1996. WOW..
Antiquated today, yes.. at the time? WAY ahead.
Now I understand how that military chip manufacturer was able to create their own graphics card 3DFX out of nowhere and bring it to market. These missiles are basically flying webcams with video processors on them guiding the missile to the infrared/heat target.
@hakimmohamad6216 because it's not true lol. i think the only graphics card that was a result of military development was the intel i740 which was actually a joint project with lockheed martin and an outgrowth of their simulation systems, but it was really shit. SGI (where the 3dfx team originated) didn't make military hardware either
The sensor is the rate gyro, dual axis. Requires plus and minus 15V at 400Hz 3 phase to spin up the motor in it, the circuit no doubt used the overkill aerospace mosfets as part of the motor driver. I always though military weapons stuff was extremely wasteful of high tech stuff😢
That thick PCB will have loads of circuit tracks, making a reverse engineering project near impossible - but I'm sure someone somewhere will have done that. Great video, thank you Michel.
What’s a circuit track?
Not really an obstacle for a vacuum plate and a precision surface grinder. Take it down layer-by-layer and take pics.
Don`t underestimate the patience of a Chinese
Sure you can have highly skilled engineers reverse engineer a many years old design, but it might be better to use that talent to design a new device to the latest standards. The magic is really in the software though.
NO need to reverwse engineer anythihng now. Today a 4 man team of decent engineers can achieve in 6 months what this thing was capable of back in the day. There is a RUclipsr who managed to propulsively land a model. I'm sure an ATGM would be an easier task for someone with those skills.
64 x 64 is quite low resolution but in high sampling frequency should provide enough information. I originally heard its 16 x 16 and it sounded bit a stretch 😅
Beautiful circuits. Never thought a missile would carry this level of sophisticated electronics.
If you're someone who makes these, you could consider, oh i dont know, pinching one of those ribbon cables in a nondescript place right along the edge that is to connect to the head ports.
It would still read data and validate but if the right pins were cut the head wouldnt ever go off when used.
Just something for humans that care about other humans to consider.
Ya know. Hint hint wink wink.
Great video - as always! This breakthrough digital technology is not as fun to reverse engineer as analog technology. What's surprising is that the main shaped charge and engine are so small. Gryroscope - what I can tell you - go for it.
ur not going too
Where you got this? Asking for a friend from CIA
So would this run some type of OS like VX works or something? Or is it some type of industrial computer topology?
Real time OS I guess, like "Integrity OS"... looks like just a random OS but it is used for veeeeery special US military applications 🤫
It can be a simple program without any OS that contains of main loop and interrupts.
Anyone have any idea what that giant golden TI ASIC is in the left hand side at 9:16? Googling the numbers on it don't reveal any info, just found one for sale on ebay.
Tbh this is the kind of content i watch youtube for
After the video from @perepolox shooting Javelin, it is no surprise that its electronics is very similar to those in modern PC video cards.
This is wild, but 100% true: my dad designed the aluminum assembly that holds the high-power transistors on the back end on the "C block" version.
This is weird to come across. I never used the internet to search it.. Anyway, I modified mine to for auto target acquisition people entering my property with two XM556 Microguns that pop up the ground with multi-laser guidance. That and my thermal and night vision the board has a lot of stuff to play with. A deer entered and when it alerted me on my phone, I allowed it to go to mince meat mode. incredible.
Either way, no more Mormons come to my door
Many thanks for the video. Beside electronics made to highest standards, the most interesting part is the cost of the missile at around $78,000, that's incredibly high for such part made in series of tens of thousands or more. So this is how weapons manufacturers and lobby get extremely rich.
You are forgetting R&D costs…
@@M3ntalMaze Serial production with some updates...
So there are flat cables just hanging on the outside? Isn't that a big risk on f****** up the trajectory? Hmmmm
American here with hands on experience in military electronic parts supply (night vision parts specifically). I'd recommend everyone saving this video. Nice on covering the serial too. Theres a dumb law (ITAR) we have that defines electronics (even well known decades old ones) as "arms" and must not be shared with foreign nationals (including allies) unless it has State Dept. approval. Since Google is an American company and we don't own any of what we ever upload, RUclips may be forced to "bend the knee" to our "competent" (when it wants to be) gov't at some point (if it gets popular enough). Just wanted to point that out. I'm no lawyer but thats what I've always been told. Regardless I like this content. Thank you.
I just wanted to further add that I don't know how sites like "thefirearmsblog" (TFB) gets away with tearing down and showcasing night/thermal/fusion vision devices amongst other things. Ones in current use (AN/PSQ-36s) were clearly "demilled" (literally they drilled the sensors). Older stuff (up to early 2010s) the gov't generally doesn't care for the most part (teardown sites and vids are still up). Heck I found a FWS-I technical manual pdf copy by Googling. But again you never know with both RUclips and the US gov't. Or just in general (how bout megaupload).
I was looking for coments on this topic. That was my first thought when I saw the title. I hope he will not be travelling to the US ;)
ITAR isnt dumb jealous one.
I'm also frequently around defense related electronics, specifically aerospace. This, given it's part of an active system, shouldn't be on the internet.
Edit: I should add our adversaries certainly already has some of this stuff(plus the actually useful stuff would be the lines of code), but it's still a dark grey area that would just best be avoided.
@@valrabellkeys9867 yep this is a very bad idea.
Your English is so strongly accented I barely understand what you are saying, please write pertinent things on the screen, or try to neutralize your accent and enunciate more clearly when speaking. I am not a native English speaker so I understand it can be hard and it's easier to be lazy and speak with a strong accent, but to use it as the international language requires clear speech.
So interesting the flat cables are just on the outside like that.
Michel comment t'as eu un Javelin???
Réponse mercredi dans le prochain épisode (et en Français!)
I've been watching your channel for a few years and it looks like this video really took off for you. Glad to see it and hope it brings you the subs and views you deserve.
Neat to see. I've been curious to see the electronics as well as what makes them so expensive.
(As a side note, as an American, I don't know if I could have made this video without a knock on the door, or being put on some list 😛)
Awesome PCBs. It's sad to see that usualy that high quality electronic assembly is only working for a few minutes and then usually scrificing itself.
Me: buying chips; Rich french dad: buying anti tank missle
They did a wonderful engineering job.
That missile was recovered after it missed.
@@BigSmartArmed eles devem ser ruins então, bom mesmo são os mísseis russos que dão meia volta e destroem a propia base de lançamento 😅
@@BigSmartArmed It doesn't look like it was fired at all. Considering it was manufactured in 98, I'm guessing it was rescued from a military weapons destruction dump.
@@moshet842The recovery pic shows full deployment. Ukros have a huge black market for complete and chopped weapon systems.
@@BigSmartArmed Well, that is a sample picture from Google. The one he has is not the same as the one in the picture. Besides, the Pentagon generally has a 10-15 year shelf life on these missiles which indicates that what I said earlier was probably right considering the date of manufacture. I would bank more on it being decommissioned.