As someone who was on the product team for a 6000msw video camera, it's probably not filled with mineral oil. I doubt anyone makes subsea camera bodies/optics completely from scratch, and off-the-shelf units are not designed for pressure. In ours we used Sony camera internals, the enclosure was atmospheric, filled with dry nitrogen to reduce condensation, and the sapphire lens was designed to resist 12500psi and reduce distortion from the air-->sapphire-->seawater interface.

Here; the title focusing on the price is implying that the cheap SD card survived ocean floor environment alone. A surprising amount of stress for its price.

Instead, a pressure-proof deep sea camera module was found at the wreckage site. It’s less interesting that an expensive thing rated for ocean depths was intact at ocean depths.

Its like “missing child found after 4 days in Alaska temperatures!”

gasp! How did they survive!

“The child was on holiday in their grandparents’ holiday log cabin, with their grandparents, a log fire, food, water..”

Oh. Clickbait. Hiding the boring bit to make the story appear more of a tease.

The title of TFA is clickbait - it tries to make it sound like the memory card itself withstood extreme pressures.

Can't bit flip errors also destroy encrypted volumes much more easily?

Encryption does not make bit flips obivous, authenticated encryption would.

Citation needed. It might be slightly easier, but most cases where you can get part of the camera, you can get the whole camera. This isn't a little point-and-click with a handy spring-loaded slot either.

They are surprisingly resilient! There was a blog post a couple of years ago by someone who found a digital camera in the sea which must have been in the water for months. The author could look at the photos to see if they can find the original owner of the camera.

No serious commercial product should be using a Teensy under basically any circumstance.

The longer I last in this world the more products I realize are the result of telling a few people who don't know what they are doing to "make it kind of work."

In this context? Certainly. This is more examples of their using untested, uncertified equipment. Anyone who’s ever worked in O2-enriched pressurized environments should at least be instantly concerned about whether this device had been properly rated for fire prevention.

the plural part is the key here, the bigger area means any uneven forces have more chance of bending and cracking stuff.

It was also in casing already prepared for that type of environment

No need to wonder, proximity fuzes are still used today. And yes, they are much smaller, cheaper, more reliable, and precise.

How would you do screen replacement? That is a common repair since people drop their phones and currently you can get your phone repaired by some teenager in a booth at the mall. If you fill the phone with epoxy, how are you detaching the screen, and getting a new ribbon cable through the epoxy?

I'm sure there are some companies who want to do that, as long as they can convince people it's better for security or something.

When was the last time your phone stopped working due mechanical PCB damage?

Typically the limiting factor on your phone is the screen breaking, your battery life getting too short, wear and tear on components like buttons or the charging port, and factory defects. Epoxy isn't going to help with any of those. The only thing it would help with is exposure to water, but if other parts of your phone like your screen aren't water proof, what's the point?

Epoxy adds weight and manufacturing cost. It introduces design challenges as you need to balance the thermal expansion of the various parts. It's an extra step that can go wrong, and makes repair of other defects far more difficult. What benefit is there for the typical consumer that outweighs these costs?

The GoPro Session actually took this tack to achieve waterproofness without a secondary case.

The heavy components on a cell phone PCB are reinforced with spot applications of adhesive to the PCB.

Filling the entire cell phone with epoxy wouldn’t help. The parts that break on drops are external like the screen.

This SD card was enclosed in a sealed metal container so it wasn’t exposed to water.

  > Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?

Well, most cellphones aren't subjected to the conditions found under three miles of frigid sea water. Epoxy is also really, really expensive.

Filling dive watches with oil (hydro modding) is pretty popular. It mainly helps with visibility but also increases the depth rating.

Because then it’ll become unrepairable. It’s a tricky trade-off that cell phones/tablets-laptops have to deal with. Easy to repair vs durable vs cost/time. And Apple (for example) cares about repairability because they also need/want to repair phones (warranty/trade in for example)

It's just not necessary, while having reliability problems of its own.

Because then it gets a 0/10 repairability score on ifixit :)

Thermal concerns perhaps - how does epoxy dissipate heat?

I don't need any extra grams in my phone!

Shhhh - don't give Apple ideas.

That would be a problem for the mic and speaker, and has relatively few use cases.

Imagine how much drama they could have avoided if they filled the entire submersible.

Why didn't they just build the sub out of camera enclosures? /s

It clearly received a nasty shock when the sub imploded; that's why the internal components were so broken.

Although the entire enclosure was shaken around enough to tear bits off the PCB via sheer inertia and crack the CPU (hence the need for the recovery process described).

A month? Those are rookie numbers!

Write an image to a smallish SD card using dd (to remove most of the blocks from wear-levelling circulation), mount without -noatime, and you should be able to get the lifespan down to a few hours!

remember the noatime mount option for the root fs!

I haven’t bothered working out how to install one on mobile. I just don’t visit websites with shitty ads.

I think you mean HN readers.

i was also in shock, then someone reminded me there are iphone users.

the horror.

paying thousands of dollars just to be forbidden to block ads.

>They must have crazy margins on that camera and producing custom board is very cheap.

It's expensive in time and expertise to do a custom board, and to debug a custom board. All to what, save 20$ on a bom which might not even be 1% of the profit per unit?

Far more efficient to just ship the dev board. They could have perhaps picked a better dev setup to start with, but if it looks stupid and it works...

In my country, people call dashcams "black boxes". They can be quite useful if you also want audio and video.

I keep thinking about the teenager.

Who didn't want to go and didn't feel safe, but who was pushed to come along by his father because it was his father's birthday.

> There is something slightly romantic…

if he was alone i would absolutely agree with you full stop.

but it looks like they may have been entirely underselling just how backyard amateur their company was just to get people to give them money.

i totally adore books and documentaries and tales of explorer types pushing their ideas to the limit but it quickly crosses a line when they:

a) downplay dangers to innocent people, and

b) refuse to understand their own ignorance and believe the people who have already literally done their idea are somehow “fools”

the person who is trying to “disrupt” but doesn’t have a deep understanding of the often very good reasons why an industry may do things a certain way is the fool. not the ones who already repeatedly make it work.

we need to encourage adventurousness but also wisdom.

The camera was an off the shelf part (from a very specialty shelf I suppose). It had an SD card built in because some people might not have a thing to stream to; it's probably good for demos and cheap enough to be good for a bullet point. Given the rest of the components inside they probably had enough margin that they weren't optimizing for costs. The value add was in the pressure vessel, and that seems to have mostly worked.

They probably used it for testing only, hence why it had irrelevant footage.

They might have forgot to remove or just didn't care.

It seems the manufacturer of the camera didn't even know (at least in the part of the org communicating with the NTSB) that their storage was encrypted. In any case the media recovered were from testing/non-dive environments, and during an actual dive footage would presumably be recorded directly to the onboard computers (which were irrecoverably destroyed).

Oceangate should take the blame for a lot of things but probably not this.