I'm so proud of you and the Chronos team, as a Canadian it's really wonderful seeing your journey. I used to watch you just for your random teardowns and tech videos and now you've funded a successful camera company. You inspire me
"High speed cameras for the average consumers".. Thats our main goal at Krontech/Chronos as we saw a huge gap in the market as there wasn't any decent high speed cameras for the mass consumer market and that is the gap we are trying to fill and bring high speed cameras to the main consumer market." - dang, that did not last long.. starts at 15k and 20k and + VAT and Western world tax on top, and your closer to 22k and 27k US. Maybe if you stopped greasing every social media influencer on the planet with Chronos-freebies in the hope of "influencing" on your behalf. You could actually get the price down a bit for the actual buyers that perhaps would be putting hard-earned money after these.. Fascinating mentality.. this greasing of social media influencers that some rancid companies love to pursue and then push the mockup onto consumers.. not sure that is the right approach for a small company.. but fair enough..
@@CopenhagenMusik Sadly that's just how much they cost. The image sensors, testing and R&D work to make a production grade product is very expensive. I'm a videographer and altogether I'm about $70k in for my camera rig and thats not even high speed.
@@CopenhagenMusik well, I paid 10K in a workstation, and I think I'm an "average consumer", 20K seems affordable for such kind of device, if its less than the price of a car, then it is an affordable camera.
@@CopenhagenMusik The base 1.4 is $5k USD. Pricy but still within reach for a lot of people. When I bought mine from the kickstarter campaign for $2,500 USD, a somewhat comparable Phantom, the Miro EX4 (which did 800x600 at 1,200fps) was $20,000 USD.
I'm so sad , as a repair tech I almost cried watching you open it. What an amazing design , so simple and flex cables that are actually long enough. Well done amazing build quality and those type c ports look very beefy.
I would imagine Apple charging 2x the price with all parts soldered down. The part(12:12) he stated using socketed RAM offered more space to slot in the expansions shows a different attitude towards engineering.
Love the swappable lens mount and easily replaceable system MicroSD card! Clean and functional design all-around. Just amazing what an awesome product small dedicated team can do!
Thanks Mike! Right now, the sensor is manually soldered, takes about 15 min so not a huge expense compared to the sensor itself. In the future we'll likely move the passives out of the way and use a selective wave machine machine to automate the soldering.
It's mindblowing to see how far this has come. I still remember quite well the early cameras you made with altera dev/eval boards, and while I do miss the experiments, teardowns, and shenanigans of your channel, I am very happy to see you and your company succeed in the way it has! I still wish I would have had the cash to send your way for one of the original run 1.4 cameras back in the day, they were so cool! Unrelated to function I do notice a distinct lack of equine silkscreen artwork on this particular build, unless I missed it. Cheers, and I applaud you for creating and putting these machines into so many people's hands over the years, it's been a blast to follow, and I always get excited when I see one of those cameras out in the field, used on a youtube video, or otherwise. Keep living the dream!
I'll take a 4k12 with an e-mount. Just one question: Do you accept midas muffler points? Also, bonus points for cat meowing in the background through almost the whole video. haha
Congrats on this evolution! The design looks really well! Looking forward to your crazy setups like the ring you did once. Its so nice to see a maker evolve a succesful company
You guys have come a long since Kickstarter. I'm proud to say I'm still enjoying camera #0018 from your kickstarter campaign. For anyone wondering, the OG model is still working like a charm!
I like how you introduced your new product to the world. Not a polished woo-woo advert that did cost loads of money but a nicely made introduction video including a teardown. By the boss himself. Very neatly designed and thought out. Kudos to the team.
I am in awe how much thought and user friendlyness was put into the design. I will probably never be able to afford or justify buying one, but this is certainly a product I wouldn't hesitate buying if I had the need for it!
Congratulations for the whole team on the new cameras, they look awesome! Nice to see where things have gone since the original Kickstarter campaign, my early Chronos 1.4 number 70 is still working nicely here.
we work with the Ultrascale Plus too and i have to say props to the layouter/designer there. super clean design. filter caps and quality components everywhere. build like a brick. you can be proud showing that off.
Outstanding job on the repair-friendly design! It's such a breath of fresh air to see beautifully designed electronics presented inside-out, instead of the usual anti right-to-repair nonsense.
Kudos to you, Kron team and that well merited success for your high speed cameras. As a entrepreneur who is developing a cheaper, fast DC CCS charger for EVs, your success encourages me to pursue into this way and release my product in the market.
@@tesla500 Yes, it's a "small", wallbox style, 30kW CCS DC charger I'm currently developing. For the moment it's not packaged in an enclosure, I'm testing all my boards on a metal support. Sorry for the crudity of the video, but here it is, DC charging at low power my car : ruclips.net/video/DPXCboEhZZA/видео.html
6:40 is that a soldered down RTC coin cell battery? I always wonder if designers assume that the useful life of a product is shorter than the life of a soldered down battery and it will never need to be replaced.
It is amazing what a team can do when the intent is to make a good product that is user serviceable. I feel like even a child could maintain and fix the camera if necessary. I miss your old teardown videos, but am glad the time is being put to good use making such an amazing product.
What an amazing piece of kit! Only thing I would do would be to make the screws on the mount and filter to be captive, to reduce the risk of dropping them into the sensor. Amazing job from you and your team.
When i started watching the content on this channel i didn't understand much of what was said, fast forward a few years and i actually get it now 😂 Excellent work! Interesting use of the MSP430, that little TI chip can do more than i gave it credit for.
It is the only part I could probably work and understand there LOL. Worked with MSP430 and EW430 from IAR for some years. It is pretty decent for many application, speacilly low power and measurement.
Its been great to watch your journey over the past few years starting way back with the xenon searchlight. Great work, thanks for the great content and memories
Dude, words cannot describe how impressed I am with these cameras as you and your team have released bigger and better products. The implementation of as many off the shelf user replaceable/upgradeable parts as possible to bring the price down is absolutely the right way to go, instead of designing horrible proprietary modules with DRM in them and price gouging the end user once they want to upgrade. It greatly benefits the consumer, a concept that seems so foreign these days. I wish you and the rest of your team a spectacular launch, and many more to come! Speaking of standards, if it's not too late in the design I think adding USB C PD capabilities for running the camera would be a huge upgrade. I've pretty much switched to it as my "standard" for battery packs and power adapters. Being able to run the camera off the same power brick and/or battery banks you use to charge your laptop would be awesome. 65w PD power supplies are very common (you can pretty reliably find them at walmart!) and would land perfectly in this unit's voltage range.
You’ve come a long way. I really need to start saving for one. And a very cool video. It’s so cool to get such in-depth videos directly from you. I wish the best to you and your team
I remember finding your channel as a sidebar recommendation next to one of eevDave’s back when you were tearing down other peoples gear, then progressing to prototyping, and now… wow! You have come a long way baby.
when they asked for new equipment wishes at work for the lab. This went right to the top of my list, i really want to do high-speed DIC during fracture test :)
I doubt I'm a normal user of your cameras (just a hobbyist with a love of all things photographic), but I definitely never used the Ethernet port on my Chronos 2.1-HD for anything other than software updates. I certainly wouldn't miss its absence. Congratulations! These new cameras are a bit outside my price range, but I love to see that the company is still doing well and continuing to build upon its foundations.
A fairly decent design to say the least. See some areas where ease of repair could be improved, but here I am needlessly picky. Main thing being the short flat flex cables at 6:37, here a small daughter board on the front assembly to aggregate all these cables into 1 flat flex could have been nice, all though with its own set of downsides. Also slightly surprised that 1 DDR4 channel were enough bandwidth, but I guess 19-ish GB/s is quite fast. (19-ish based on that 2400 MHz module shown at 13:11) Though wouldn't have added much more height to add a second slot for twice the potential recording time, unless it is already pushing the addressing capabilities of the FPGA. The most pesky thing my eye can spot is the trace at 14:00 going up from U5. Carelessly trailing its way up through the ground plane, something just gives the gut feeling of this potentially not being good for signal integrity for that SODIMM memory channel. (I suspect that there is internal ground planes that solves this issue.) Does it support USB-C power? This would honestly be a killer feature. Another nice thing would be if the DC input were going higher than just 24 volts. (this is nit picking, though I guess I have gotten spoiled by Teltonika routers going from 9 to 65 V...) Seeing the BNC go away is both nice and not at once. It is a sturdy reliable connector, but I guess the TRRS jack offers more than 1 trigger channel. (I presume it has 3 channels?) Also, is there a external "shutter" feature? (ie, capture 1 frame per trigger, but still obviously at high frame rates.)
good to see a new version of the chronos ! one thing i am missing though is a sensor plane indicator - would be great to have one for measuring focus distance as well as calibrating the backfocus
This Guy Is So Confident In His Design, He is Willing To Destroy It As Part Of The Promotional Material lol. Well Done. Your Confidence Is Well Founded And Well Earned. Cant Wait To See The Next Version!
question: at 17:47 (approx) the IR filter is removed, and show a close up of the image sensor itself. It is clearly scratched in 2 vertical and one horizontal -- what is this about? It could be some cover or lens artifact? are pixel maps for the sensor available ?
I've been following you since before you released the first Chronos. It's a remarkable accomplishment of engineering and entrepreneurship - every time I see a show using your camera I think "hey, I know who made that!"
Congratulations on an amazing achievement! I know a bc based target archer who would absolutely love to get their hands on one of these for a couple of hours
whoever worked in electronic to even at 1/1000 th of this level, with SW and HW will appreciate the pleasure of such a big thing comming to life and next to produce and ship. This wont happen overnight for sure, long long road with incredible results !!!!!!
Today I showed your video to a colleague who used to work with high speed cameras in his former job. He likes the design very much but was concerned that there is no filters at the intake fan to keep small debree out, since they are facing forward. I have to agree, that there should be some threads on the outside to mount simple thin air filters to the fans. Other than that he was also very impressed.
Great to see a new camera. Been wondering what Kron Tech has been up to for the past few years. I like the better lens interchangeability and more refined housing. My only nitpick would be the choice in cooling fan. At a $15,000 price point, I'd really like to see a Delta, Nidec or Sanyo-Denki (or other top tier) fan in there. Especially since most 40mm fans seem to live short, terrible lives. Another minor nitpick - don't you think the "Now 4K High Speed is accessible to everyone" bit in the commercial comes off as a bit... presumptuous? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a very competitive price compared to other 4K high speed cameras and 100% worth it, but the "accessible to all" kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The original Chronos 1.4 was accessible to hobbyists. At $15k, the 4K12 is really only accessible to companies.
@@SupremeRuleroftheWorld they weren't nitpicking the value, they were specifically nitpicking the accessible to everyone claim. Don't change the topic.
CFM-4010-03-22 for anyone curious. Its not a no name cheap fan, 4 wire PWM, 10CFM, decent rated life. But a bit noisy. I don't see anything from delta/sanyo/nidec that is comparable on digikey but they probably exist elsewhere.
4k is not necessary for most people. This camera really takes the place of a phantom for smaller creators that might want to own the camera for the cost of renting a phantom for their projects.
After 3 weeks i am watching your video. you and your team worked great . 1000 fps is not a joke in hand camera. nice footage and huge details in 4k. but as a videographer I suggest that you should add weather shield and dust cleaning feature on sensor. battery backup is needed for emargency purpose , if you think it will shoot outdoor scene. lense mount should be fixd or press lock system. because most of the people are not technically expart. I have seen m.2 ssd is so empressive. I think sensor is so sensible. we should think about it. I have seen you added type c port but if you add one thunderbolt port.It will be the game changer. You and your team hardwork will approciate soon..
Awesome job! I remember seeing the video when you were designing the first one and milling the prototypes yourself, crazy there's a whole team now. Those Zynq SoCs are awesome (and you can actually find them in-stock unlike Intel/Altera parts). Have been thinking about working on a linear scanner project involving a CCD or CMOS line sensor, but acquiring single-digit quantities of high-quality image sensors is pretty difficult as an individual -- never heard of GPixel but their sensors look pretty nice.
Incredibly impressive how little there is to the hardware. Obviously there's a lot going on in there overall, but it's a very clean design. Been really fun watching from the old days of the very first videos when you were just farting around with bits of camera and whatnot frankensteined together, all the way up to this. Bravo.
Something that was not mentioned in the resolution topics and wich is so important in terms of post production... the record bitrate.. What bitrate handle (MBits/s at the moment of recording; 100, 200, 400, 500 Mb/s)? What compression use MP4, MOV? Under what codec DNG, DNx? It's the best thing I've seen on RUclips for a long time... joined it with cup of coffee... it was great and very interesting!!!!! ..thanks for the effort!!!! Now I know what could be my next asset for my small production company... already have 1 drone and we don't need another one jejeje!! .. that camera will be a game changer for shure!!
Great work. Will the USB-C support 10GbE adapters? Will it encode in H.265 as well? Looking at the UI, a lot of buttons/sliders are placed close to the edge of the touchscreen. It may make the interface hard to navigate - we'd love to see them moved a little bit further from the edges.
I have yet to find any USB C 10GbE adapters, they are all Thunderbolt on USB-C connectors under the hood and that's sadly not supported. If there are true USB-C native ones they will be supported. H265 is supported yes! I hear you on the UI, I'm very particular about control feel, if these are causing problems they will be sure to be changed.
13:20 yep in my server lrdimms can double the capacity capability from 768gb to 1.5gb.. This also means this camera at 128gb has more ram than my pc at 64gb and most peoples pcs in general!
What an absolute unit of a FPGA! 500K LE is rather large, and all the block RAM and DSP slices definitely add up. Still incredible you have 10 power rails, what a headache! Really cool you're running Linux too! Are you using a custom distro or one of the many customizable mini distros?
glad you are still working on the cameras, now they are getting so close to other alternatives that you might just convert a couple customers. does the software allow for an upgrade of the internal ssd to like 4TB, and what is the maximum supported speed, PCIE4.0x4?
I don't think U13 is a retimer - source signals seem to be AC biased (caps) while output is TMDS (hdmi) so I'm thinking its maybe a displayport to HDMI bridge. unless this is some quirk of zynq hdmi output that it requires AC biasing but even then I'm not sure how that would work.
yeah that's a product built to a function rather than being built down to a price. I'd never be able to afford it privately, but from seeing all the scientific instruments at work, I can tell that this looks exactly like a scientific instrument, including the unpolished software :). Good luck finishing up any remaining HW and SW design
Looks pretty well put together, low screw count, no glue or clips, plenty of space, just 3 PCBs, off the shelf non soldered RAMs and SSD... maybe a better coverage of the thermal pads could be desired and/or better fans, I can imagine some noctua ones installed to have quieter operation and more air flow. But that is something only needed for people that will use it under sunlight on a hot summer day.
i saw this & thought to myself, is this a reupload, because i recall him doing a slomo cam teardown. apparently that was close to 8 or so years ago....time flies
These new sensors use a more parallel column ADC architecture, so you get relatively minimal frame rate boost from windowing in the X direction. As an updside, you get no penalty in frame rate for increasing the X resolution up to about 2500 pixels for those small resolutions.
@@tesla500I see the new Chronos cameras can lower bit depth to 8 and 10 bit to increase framerate. Can a firmware upgrade be implemented on the 1.4 and 2.1 cameras to have this ability as well?
Seems like some good improvements. But to see the LAN port being removed is a bit sad. I'm probably one of the dozen people that actually used it (exclusive), but maybe it's due to my workflow. There is a thread about it on the forum. I hope some of the UI improvement will trickle down to the older cameras. Especially the API and web version never worked right for me. Also, as previously mentioned by others, I also dislike the types of fan. Personally I would like to have bigger ones, even if that increases the case size. I care more about the noise and lifetime of the fan than the body size. The fan of my 2.1HD is running on it's last live, but no need to ship the camera around the globe for a fan replacement, I can do this on my own. Thanks to the repair friendly design ;)
I wonder if you'd be able to save raw high speed data to the 1TB NVMe if you did it with JPEG frames (at least at 1080p/1000 fps so quality was acceptable)... have you considered this? An FPGA JPEG encoder would need to be used but you've got a pretty big device there.
Shane Colton did this with the Freefly cameras, he managed to squeeze a realtime wavelet encoder into an ultrascale. He explains it in detail on his blog, it's a major pain in the ass.
@@AKAtheA Some can - depends on the technology. The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe can sustain write speeds of 1.5GB/s once cache is full. That would require each 1080p frame to fit within about 1.5MB for 1000fps, which feels just about plausible for medium-quality applications, but would allow for minutes of record time.
BTW, this is just an idea. But why don't you have a competition among Chronos owners to see which can make the most creative video and have the winners get a brand new Chronos 4K12 or Q12 camera. I think that would be a great idea!
I'm so proud of you and the Chronos team, as a Canadian it's really wonderful seeing your journey. I used to watch you just for your random teardowns and tech videos and now you've funded a successful camera company. You inspire me
From Canadia? Sick!
"High speed cameras for the average consumers".. Thats our main goal at Krontech/Chronos as we saw a huge gap in the market as there wasn't any decent high speed cameras for the mass consumer market and that is the gap we are trying to fill and bring high speed cameras to the main consumer market."
- dang, that did not last long.. starts at 15k and 20k and + VAT and Western world tax on top, and your closer to 22k and 27k US.
Maybe if you stopped greasing every social media influencer on the planet with Chronos-freebies in the hope of "influencing" on your behalf.
You could actually get the price down a bit for the actual buyers that perhaps would be putting hard-earned money after these..
Fascinating mentality.. this greasing of social media influencers that some rancid companies love to pursue and then push the mockup onto consumers.. not sure that is the right approach for a small company.. but fair enough..
@@CopenhagenMusik Sadly that's just how much they cost. The image sensors, testing and R&D work to make a production grade product is very expensive. I'm a videographer and altogether I'm about $70k in for my camera rig and thats not even high speed.
@@CopenhagenMusik well, I paid 10K in a workstation, and I think I'm an "average consumer", 20K seems affordable for such kind of device, if its less than the price of a car, then it is an affordable camera.
@@CopenhagenMusik The base 1.4 is $5k USD. Pricy but still within reach for a lot of people. When I bought mine from the kickstarter campaign for $2,500 USD, a somewhat comparable Phantom, the Miro EX4 (which did 800x600 at 1,200fps) was $20,000 USD.
Holy smokes! What an impressive upgrade! I'm really looking forward to seeing more from these cameras. Congrats to the whole team.
Thanks very much Ben! Yeah everyone is excited to see more
I'm so sad , as a repair tech I almost cried watching you open it. What an amazing design , so simple and flex cables that are actually long enough. Well done amazing build quality and those type c ports look very beefy.
@rossmanngroup will sure shed some tears
@@brauchmernet Louis would be screaming praises at them for not welding it shut.
I would imagine Apple charging 2x the price with all parts soldered down. The part(12:12) he stated using socketed RAM offered more space to slot in the expansions shows a different attitude towards engineering.
God it's so nice when products are designed so carefully and in a consumer friendly way. Really glad to see the Chronos team is doing so well!
Hearing but not seeing the cat has caused immense sadness 😿
One of the reasons I watch The Signal Path channel videos is for the cat appearances. 😺
Meowmwowmwowewowowowow
Love the swappable lens mount and easily replaceable system MicroSD card! Clean and functional design all-around. Just amazing what an awesome product small dedicated team can do!
yeah the microSD OS card with cover is a great idea.
Nice! I always thought that side BNC was a bit ugly and unnecessary!
How do you solder that sensor pin array with the passives buried in the middle ?
Thanks Mike! Right now, the sensor is manually soldered, takes about 15 min so not a huge expense compared to the sensor itself. In the future we'll likely move the passives out of the way and use a selective wave machine machine to automate the soldering.
@@tesla500 Maybe you could glue-dot the passives and selective-solder it all in one go. What could possibly go wrong...?
Beautiful piece of engineering. Hats off to you and the team.
Kitty wanted to be on camera also, You should show her for extra points:)
It's mindblowing to see how far this has come. I still remember quite well the early cameras you made with altera dev/eval boards, and while I do miss the experiments, teardowns, and shenanigans of your channel, I am very happy to see you and your company succeed in the way it has! I still wish I would have had the cash to send your way for one of the original run 1.4 cameras back in the day, they were so cool!
Unrelated to function I do notice a distinct lack of equine silkscreen artwork on this particular build, unless I missed it.
Cheers, and I applaud you for creating and putting these machines into so many people's hands over the years, it's been a blast to follow, and I always get excited when I see one of those cameras out in the field, used on a youtube video, or otherwise. Keep living the dream!
I'll take a 4k12 with an e-mount. Just one question: Do you accept midas muffler points?
Also, bonus points for cat meowing in the background through almost the whole video. haha
Congrats on this evolution! The design looks really well! Looking forward to your crazy setups like the ring you did once. Its so nice to see a maker evolve a succesful company
:D Its Bitluni!
You guys have come a long since Kickstarter. I'm proud to say I'm still enjoying camera #0018 from your kickstarter campaign. For anyone wondering, the OG model is still working like a charm!
I like how you introduced your new product to the world. Not a polished woo-woo advert that did cost loads of money but a nicely made introduction video including a teardown. By the boss himself. Very neatly designed and thought out. Kudos to the team.
I am in awe how much thought and user friendlyness was put into the design. I will probably never be able to afford or justify buying one, but this is certainly a product I wouldn't hesitate buying if I had the need for it!
Congratulations for the whole team on the new cameras, they look awesome! Nice to see where things have gone since the original Kickstarter campaign, my early Chronos 1.4 number 70 is still working nicely here.
we work with the Ultrascale Plus too and i have to say props to the layouter/designer there. super clean design. filter caps and quality components everywhere. build like a brick. you can be proud showing that off.
That's AWESOME!!! Finally an affordable, portable slow motion 4k camera!!!! Looks really great!!!!
Outstanding job on the repair-friendly design! It's such a breath of fresh air to see beautifully designed electronics presented inside-out, instead of the usual anti right-to-repair nonsense.
@rossmanngroup will be proud of you!
Kudos to you, Kron team and that well merited success for your high speed cameras.
As a entrepreneur who is developing a cheaper, fast DC CCS charger for EVs, your success encourages me to pursue into this way and release my product in the market.
That's fantastic! Thank you so much. I'd like to hear more about your CCS charger, got any more info?
@@tesla500 Yes, it's a "small", wallbox style, 30kW CCS DC charger I'm currently developing. For the moment it's not packaged in an enclosure, I'm testing all my boards on a metal support. Sorry for the crudity of the video, but here it is, DC charging at low power my car : ruclips.net/video/DPXCboEhZZA/видео.html
6:40 is that a soldered down RTC coin cell battery? I always wonder if designers assume that the useful life of a product is shorter than the life of a soldered down battery and it will never need to be replaced.
Strange choice, given all the other user-replaceable parts.
Not a showstopper if it fails, and hardly difficult to replace though so not a big deal
I wonder if its a Li-ion rechargeable cell.
Might be a supercap as is common in a lot of cameras.
Very nicely done. It's amazing how quickly you've ramped up your sophistication through the generations.
it's been so long! I was just revisiting some of your old youtube vids. 10+ years ago.
Exceptional work by the whole team! Congrats!
It is amazing what a team can do when the intent is to make a good product that is user serviceable. I feel like even a child could maintain and fix the camera if necessary. I miss your old teardown videos, but am glad the time is being put to good use making such an amazing product.
What an amazing piece of kit! Only thing I would do would be to make the screws on the mount and filter to be captive, to reduce the risk of dropping them into the sensor. Amazing job from you and your team.
When i started watching the content on this channel i didn't understand much of what was said, fast forward a few years and i actually get it now 😂 Excellent work! Interesting use of the MSP430, that little TI chip can do more than i gave it credit for.
It is the only part I could probably work and understand there LOL. Worked with MSP430 and EW430 from IAR for some years. It is pretty decent for many application, speacilly low power and measurement.
Its been great to watch your journey over the past few years starting way back with the xenon searchlight. Great work, thanks for the great content and memories
Dude, words cannot describe how impressed I am with these cameras as you and your team have released bigger and better products. The implementation of as many off the shelf user replaceable/upgradeable parts as possible to bring the price down is absolutely the right way to go, instead of designing horrible proprietary modules with DRM in them and price gouging the end user once they want to upgrade.
It greatly benefits the consumer, a concept that seems so foreign these days. I wish you and the rest of your team a spectacular launch, and many more to come!
Speaking of standards, if it's not too late in the design I think adding USB C PD capabilities for running the camera would be a huge upgrade. I've pretty much switched to it as my "standard" for battery packs and power adapters. Being able to run the camera off the same power brick and/or battery banks you use to charge your laptop would be awesome. 65w PD power supplies are very common (you can pretty reliably find them at walmart!) and would land perfectly in this unit's voltage range.
You’ve come a long way. I really need to start saving for one.
And a very cool video. It’s so cool to get such in-depth videos directly from you.
I wish the best to you and your team
I remember finding your channel as a sidebar recommendation next to one of eevDave’s back when you were tearing down other peoples gear, then progressing to prototyping, and now… wow! You have come a long way baby.
Exceptional work from the entire team! Congrats! 🎉
Very impressive teardown. Incredible how much goes into camera!🤩
This is so damn cool. I was just thinking of you and your company the other day. It pleases me to hear that you're still pushing your ideas further.
This is the type of high speed camera others have to take as example for modularity and repairability..
Awesome camera, no words.
I did that whistle thing when you finally flipped the mainboard.
Mega congrats.
when they asked for new equipment wishes at work for the lab. This went right to the top of my list, i really want to do high-speed DIC during fracture test :)
20:15 Highspeed cat interrupt signal received.
I doubt I'm a normal user of your cameras (just a hobbyist with a love of all things photographic), but I definitely never used the Ethernet port on my Chronos 2.1-HD for anything other than software updates. I certainly wouldn't miss its absence.
Congratulations! These new cameras are a bit outside my price range, but I love to see that the company is still doing well and continuing to build upon its foundations.
A fairly decent design to say the least.
See some areas where ease of repair could be improved, but here I am needlessly picky.
Main thing being the short flat flex cables at 6:37, here a small daughter board on the front assembly to aggregate all these cables into 1 flat flex could have been nice, all though with its own set of downsides.
Also slightly surprised that 1 DDR4 channel were enough bandwidth, but I guess 19-ish GB/s is quite fast. (19-ish based on that 2400 MHz module shown at 13:11) Though wouldn't have added much more height to add a second slot for twice the potential recording time, unless it is already pushing the addressing capabilities of the FPGA.
The most pesky thing my eye can spot is the trace at 14:00 going up from U5. Carelessly trailing its way up through the ground plane, something just gives the gut feeling of this potentially not being good for signal integrity for that SODIMM memory channel. (I suspect that there is internal ground planes that solves this issue.)
Does it support USB-C power? This would honestly be a killer feature.
Another nice thing would be if the DC input were going higher than just 24 volts. (this is nit picking, though I guess I have gotten spoiled by Teltonika routers going from 9 to 65 V...)
Seeing the BNC go away is both nice and not at once.
It is a sturdy reliable connector, but I guess the TRRS jack offers more than 1 trigger channel. (I presume it has 3 channels?)
Also, is there a external "shutter" feature? (ie, capture 1 frame per trigger, but still obviously at high frame rates.)
good to see a new version of the chronos ! one thing i am missing though is a sensor plane indicator - would be great to have one for measuring focus distance as well as calibrating the backfocus
This Guy Is So Confident In His Design, He is Willing To Destroy It As Part Of The Promotional Material lol. Well Done. Your Confidence Is Well Founded And Well Earned. Cant Wait To See The Next Version!
question: at 17:47 (approx) the IR filter is removed, and show a close up of the image sensor itself. It is clearly scratched in 2 vertical and one horizontal -- what is this about? It could be some cover or lens artifact?
are pixel maps for the sensor available ?
Thank you so much for this teardown!
this is so awesome to see coming out of Canada!!
He's alive 😊 Hope to see more vids again!
I've been following you since before you released the first Chronos.
It's a remarkable accomplishment of engineering and entrepreneurship - every time I see a show using your camera I think "hey, I know who made that!"
Brilliant to see the new Chronos, well worth the wait. Let's hope you find some time to show us more of its capability. Its been a year!
Absolutely brilliant! It must be an awesome feeling for all involved to see all that work coalesce into such a cool product! Love the tear down video!
Great job team! Remember seeing the first version many years ago... so cool and amazing!
Very well done. Thanks for giving us the technical tour!
Congratulations on an amazing achievement! I know a bc based target archer who would absolutely love to get their hands on one of these for a couple of hours
whoever worked in electronic to even at 1/1000 th of this level, with SW and HW will appreciate the pleasure of such a big thing comming to life and next to produce and ship. This wont happen overnight for sure, long long road with incredible results !!!!!!
Today I showed your video to a colleague who used to work with high speed cameras in his former job. He likes the design very much but was concerned that there is no filters at the intake fan to keep small debree out, since they are facing forward. I have to agree, that there should be some threads on the outside to mount simple thin air filters to the fans. Other than that he was also very impressed.
Welcome back!
Great to see a new camera. Been wondering what Kron Tech has been up to for the past few years. I like the better lens interchangeability and more refined housing. My only nitpick would be the choice in cooling fan. At a $15,000 price point, I'd really like to see a Delta, Nidec or Sanyo-Denki (or other top tier) fan in there. Especially since most 40mm fans seem to live short, terrible lives.
Another minor nitpick - don't you think the "Now 4K High Speed is accessible to everyone" bit in the commercial comes off as a bit... presumptuous? Don't get me wrong, I'm sure it's a very competitive price compared to other 4K high speed cameras and 100% worth it, but the "accessible to all" kind of rubbed me the wrong way. The original Chronos 1.4 was accessible to hobbyists. At $15k, the 4K12 is really only accessible to companies.
hobbyists dont really need 4k12. that fpga alone is a 6500 dollar part. the price very resonable for what you get.
@@SupremeRuleroftheWorld they weren't nitpicking the value, they were specifically nitpicking the accessible to everyone claim. Don't change the topic.
CFM-4010-03-22 for anyone curious. Its not a no name cheap fan, 4 wire PWM, 10CFM, decent rated life. But a bit noisy. I don't see anything from delta/sanyo/nidec that is comparable on digikey but they probably exist elsewhere.
4k is not necessary for most people. This camera really takes the place of a phantom for smaller creators that might want to own the camera for the cost of renting a phantom for their projects.
can you please desolder the ZYNQ chip and the image sensor?
What would you like to see under there?
After 3 weeks i am watching your video. you and your team worked great . 1000 fps is not a joke in hand camera. nice footage and huge details in 4k. but as a videographer I suggest that you should add weather shield and dust cleaning feature on sensor. battery backup is needed for emargency purpose , if you think it will shoot outdoor scene. lense mount should be fixd or press lock system. because most of the people are not technically expart. I have seen m.2 ssd is so empressive. I think sensor is so sensible. we should think about it. I have seen you added type c port but if you add one thunderbolt port.It will be the game changer. You and your team hardwork will approciate soon..
Awesome job! I remember seeing the video when you were designing the first one and milling the prototypes yourself, crazy there's a whole team now. Those Zynq SoCs are awesome (and you can actually find them in-stock unlike Intel/Altera parts). Have been thinking about working on a linear scanner project involving a CCD or CMOS line sensor, but acquiring single-digit quantities of high-quality image sensors is pretty difficult as an individual -- never heard of GPixel but their sensors look pretty nice.
That is a impressive product! Thank you for the teardown!
wouldn't thermal paste help improve thermals for the FPGA/SoC ?
I saw it was using pads as a thermal interface with the heatsink
Incredibly impressive how little there is to the hardware. Obviously there's a lot going on in there overall, but it's a very clean design. Been really fun watching from the old days of the very first videos when you were just farting around with bits of camera and whatnot frankensteined together, all the way up to this. Bravo.
Did I hear your cat (Trixy?) during the teardown ? We need a cat update 😊
Introducing your own product with a teardown is the ultimate "first!".
Something that was not mentioned in the resolution topics and wich is so important in terms of post production... the record bitrate.. What bitrate handle (MBits/s at the moment of recording; 100, 200, 400, 500 Mb/s)? What compression use MP4, MOV? Under what codec DNG, DNx?
It's the best thing I've seen on RUclips for a long time... joined it with cup of coffee... it was great and very interesting!!!!! ..thanks for the effort!!!!
Now I know what could be my next asset for my small production company... already have 1 drone and we don't need another one jejeje!! .. that camera will be a game changer for shure!!
Great work. Will the USB-C support 10GbE adapters? Will it encode in H.265 as well?
Looking at the UI, a lot of buttons/sliders are placed close to the edge of the touchscreen. It may make the interface hard to navigate - we'd love to see them moved a little bit further from the edges.
I have yet to find any USB C 10GbE adapters, they are all Thunderbolt on USB-C connectors under the hood and that's sadly not supported. If there are true USB-C native ones they will be supported. H265 is supported yes! I hear you on the UI, I'm very particular about control feel, if these are causing problems they will be sure to be changed.
I love the interchangeable lens mounts. Someone should make an inexpensive non-high-speed camera body that uses such a system.
I wonder if he knows we are only here for the cat 🐈
Look at this madlad building a camera
i am sooo mindblown xD i literally posted a comment asking krontech if they will make a 4k version of the 2.1hd camera too soon
I did the same thing earlier in the year and recently if they were going to make a 4K one too. Hehe
13:20 yep in my server lrdimms can double the capacity capability from 768gb to 1.5gb..
This also means this camera at 128gb has more ram than my pc at 64gb and most peoples pcs in general!
Just stunning, so beautiful - thank you for sharing these insights! Btw: What a mean butterfly :)
Sadly no Patreon notefication, but I'm so glad you are back, hoping for more regular uploads ❤
What an absolute unit of a FPGA! 500K LE is rather large, and all the block RAM and DSP slices definitely add up. Still incredible you have 10 power rails, what a headache! Really cool you're running Linux too! Are you using a custom distro or one of the many customizable mini distros?
I’m excited to see if this is the HS cam I’ve been waiting for. Midway through the vid and hoping to hear about the dynamic range
Glad to hear you like it! Dynamic range is 11.3 stops (68dB) in 12-bit mode
glad you are still working on the cameras, now they are getting so close to other alternatives that you might just convert a couple customers.
does the software allow for an upgrade of the internal ssd to like 4TB, and what is the maximum supported speed, PCIE4.0x4?
why is having the firmware loaded into a removable sd card not a standard practice? are there security concerns or something else?
When will you do more lawn mower drop-n-shred? That series has so much untapped potential
Thing of beauty is a joy forever.
What is the limiting factor for the maximum frame rate?
I don't think U13 is a retimer - source signals seem to be AC biased (caps) while output is TMDS (hdmi) so I'm thinking its maybe a displayport to HDMI bridge. unless this is some quirk of zynq hdmi output that it requires AC biasing but even then I'm not sure how that would work.
yeah that's a product built to a function rather than being built down to a price. I'd never be able to afford it privately, but from seeing all the scientific instruments at work, I can tell that this looks exactly like a scientific instrument, including the unpolished software :). Good luck finishing up any remaining HW and SW design
Looks pretty well put together, low screw count, no glue or clips, plenty of space, just 3 PCBs, off the shelf non soldered RAMs and SSD... maybe a better coverage of the thermal pads could be desired and/or better fans, I can imagine some noctua ones installed to have quieter operation and more air flow. But that is something only needed for people that will use it under sunlight on a hot summer day.
Great design, looks very repairable and robust.
amazing technology. maybe next step to make the ccd imager a replaceable module as well, saves a lot of design time in the future perhaps.
i saw this & thought to myself, is this a reupload, because i recall him doing a slomo cam teardown. apparently that was close to 8 or so years ago....time flies
Impressive! But why is the max framerate so limited? According to the specs shown the throughput falls to about 0.1 gigapixels per second.
These new sensors use a more parallel column ADC architecture, so you get relatively minimal frame rate boost from windowing in the X direction. As an updside, you get no penalty in frame rate for increasing the X resolution up to about 2500 pixels for those small resolutions.
@@tesla500I see the new Chronos cameras can lower bit depth to 8 and 10 bit to increase framerate. Can a firmware upgrade be implemented on the 1.4 and 2.1 cameras to have this ability as well?
Seems like some good improvements. But to see the LAN port being removed is a bit sad. I'm probably one of the dozen people that actually used it (exclusive), but maybe it's due to my workflow. There is a thread about it on the forum. I hope some of the UI improvement will trickle down to the older cameras. Especially the API and web version never worked right for me. Also, as previously mentioned by others, I also dislike the types of fan. Personally I would like to have bigger ones, even if that increases the case size. I care more about the noise and lifetime of the fan than the body size. The fan of my 2.1HD is running on it's last live, but no need to ship the camera around the globe for a fan replacement, I can do this on my own. Thanks to the repair friendly design ;)
How about the dynamic range?
For the IP address configuration do you plan on having IPv6 support, even if it is hidden behind another menu?
I doubt we'll get the world converted to IPv6 this century
But... Will it mow?
Pay attention to that gorgeous kitty!!
Can you power it via USB-C?
Very nice teardown, how come the trigger board is so complicated?
I wonder if you'd be able to save raw high speed data to the 1TB NVMe if you did it with JPEG frames (at least at 1080p/1000 fps so quality was acceptable)... have you considered this? An FPGA JPEG encoder would need to be used but you've got a pretty big device there.
Shane Colton did this with the Freefly cameras, he managed to squeeze a realtime wavelet encoder into an ultrascale. He explains it in detail on his blog, it's a major pain in the ass.
NVMe SSD can't sustain the claimed speed once their buffer cache is full, so...what would be the point?
@@AKAtheA Some can - depends on the technology. The Samsung 980 Pro NVMe can sustain write speeds of 1.5GB/s once cache is full. That would require each 1080p frame to fit within about 1.5MB for 1000fps, which feels just about plausible for medium-quality applications, but would allow for minutes of record time.
Oh wow the power of fpga than tradisional asic .thanks for sharing sir
that poor bee! haha amazing shot!
You've sure come a long way since the BronyCAN days, eh? Congrats!
love the SEAM/SEAF my fav
I can't afford one, but the design is impressive, I wish all cameras were constructed like that.
BTW, this is just an idea. But why don't you have a competition among Chronos owners to see which can make the most creative video and have the winners get a brand new Chronos 4K12 or Q12 camera. I think that would be a great idea!