Gadgetory

would you believe looking at this sign that it was only seven months ago that Kron Technologies having raised over half a million dollars for their Cronos one point for affordable high speed camera on Kickstarter moved from the founders garage into what could probably be best described as the founders much more bigger much more better garage well it was so things are a little rough around the edges in this group of seven or eight somehow they weren't exactly sure when I asked them of big nerds basically happy well hey it's true it's true and you know it as I was saying this group of big nerds hasn't got the place fully set up yet in a conventional sense but in some ways that's what's really exciting about it come with me and take a peek behind the curtains of a real startup the Silicon Valley vibe is definitely real and this place is seriously cool if you're into that sort of thing speaking of being into that sort of thing if you're into high-quality computers this video is brought to you by Origin PC they build beautiful custom desktops they sell high performance laptops and they offer lifetime 24/7 tech support they use only high quality products like samsung's 960 pro m2 SSDs which offer amazing performance visit Origin PC today through the link below to learn more the place looks like a typical office that is at least until you actually poke your head into any of the actual workspaces so this is loyals cubicle where in addition to a laptop on a stand and an extra monitor he's got another extra monitor and he's got an oscilloscope for measuring electrical signals off of probes as well as a gorgeous piece of microscope rehear that he uses to hand solder a bages which are sort of last-minute quick fixes to bad boards or bad batches of boards or the very very delicate leads that you see on a board like this which are required to probe CPU functionality or Ram signaling so it was actually through this board here that Kron technologies was able to get two sticks of memory working bumping their maximum capacity to 32 gigs that is double what similar competitors can offer but how did we get here to answer that we're going to take a look at the museum a collection of development board PCBs screwed two pieces of plywood sitting on a boardroom table that was clearly along with the chairs around it acquired from some other companies bankruptcy auction so this this is the first Chronos it was built and programmed single-handedly by Kron technologies founder david cron Stein he loved the cool stuff that Mythbusters was doing back in the mid-2000s but as a student he couldn't afford even the inexpensive Olympus that he found on eBay for 3500 bucks so he went you know what screw it I'm gonna make my own so this first iteration here completed in 2008 was made of off-the-shelf development kits that were relatively limited compared to what's available in the Maker scene today it was only capable of 640 by 480 resolution at 240 frames per second max so not game-changing but it worked and it only cost him 500 bucks that is to say if you don't count time the second gen refines the original design it wasn't more compact but it could record a 1280 by 1024 and add up to 500 frames per second so now we're getting somewhere by the third gen it was 2012 or 2015 depending on how you count and thanks to a foldable board design the PCB along with all of the other components could be fitted into a custom 3d printed ABS housing so this was the first one that was capable of looking like an actual camera then we've got some kind of prototype you looking things 3d printed metal wood this was apparently for designing the feel of the grip and then finally the Kronos 1.4 so this is the actual camera that shipped to Kickstarter backers back in mid summer last year it's not that cheap in fact I'm sure the irony of a price tag that his 2006 self wouldn't have been able to afford isn't lost on David but the capabilities of the Kronos 1.4 far exceed that camera he saw on ebay it's got a form factor that is very similar to a normal spills picture camera it takes standard c-mount lenses and it can capture burst shots and video either raw or converted to mp4 at resolutions of up to 1280 by 1024 and frame rates of up to thirty eight thousand five hundred frames per second if you wanted something comparable from one of the big guys in the space you could get that and it would probably have more features so David's team knows that they need to continue to add functionality through firmware updates going into the future but it would cost you four to five fines as much or more so knowing that price is one of their advantages David's team is building their cameras in this workshop here behind me right here in Canada around standard commodity parts with careful attention to whether they or their users really need something fancier especially if it comes at the cost of creating or buying something proprietary the arm cortex a8 based CPU that runs the user interface is actually about nine years old but in general h.264 encoders haven't really changed that much in that time outside of the very high-end so they're sticking with it for now and there are a ton of examples of this kind of thing a lot of work was put into making it possible to pull data off the sensor at high speed into the ramp with a $35 FPGA by contrast the analogous FPGAs and a phantom camera could cost thousands of dollars the touchscreen is actually from a Chinese manufacturer I think yep there's one here off of digi-key or mouse or something like that and the RAM this is what actually holds the buffered video because the data rates are so high it's just standard notebook ddr3 sodium Ram off of Lake Newegg and this philosophy of openness continues in the user accessories so you can just use off-the-shelf laptop adapters to power it if you want a battery pack you just need to pick up an icon Iain el4 a battery pack and in terms of storage so once you dump off of the RAM onto something more permanent you can use a standard SD card you can just use a USB device you can use powered eSATA and coming soon they've even got Ethernet so what we end up with is a finished product that is surprisingly robust thanks to the thick aluminum machines chassis so this one right here actually got hit by a 300 kilometer per hour ice ball and survived then this one was actually pulled into an industrial filing machine and now obviously the LCD didn't make it but the rest of the internals actually did survive with only minimal damage to the outside of the chassis so behind me here David is actually capturing colored water droplets at 1500 frames per second and this is absolutely incredible now the monochrome version does give you a little bit higher effective resolution and it requires only half as much light which is really really important for high-speed videography but it doesn't have quite the wow factor of the color one okay we got to go find some more cool stuff to do so this one right here's a lot of fun this is called a kaboosh kaboosh kaboosh so this was actually oh how they created the effect in the stargate portals let's go have a look at it okay so we're all set up David's running at 1500 frames per second there Sean's got 6,000 and then we've got a third camera here at 6000 Loma truth time ah all right let's have a look hey that's beautiful of course we're not done yet though what slo-mo video would be complete without some destruction for that we will need what they call the low hem room so in here you will find not one not two not three not four but five of their Chronos 1.4 cameras a flipped over lawnmower that you can drop stuff in a reinforced plywood whatever that means cage as well as a mesh roof and the world's most technologically advanced dropping mechanism a dowel with a piece of string this gonna be fun oh right one last thing hit the lights for 1,000 watt LEDs water-cooled with about one third of the brightness of the Sun so we don't miss any of the action Wow is there anything protecting those cameras all right next up we've got a Fuji film tape tape drive tape like a backup tape whoa something hit this door pretty friggin hard Wow what the hell looks like there was a party in here and everyone was invited and for our last trick the guys who put spray foam into our warehouse expansion destroyed all of our cardboard cutouts from LTX last year see they're all stained and stuff so I'm gonna let you the viewers vote leave a comment with who you want to see shredded because we're only gonna do one Linus Taryn Dennis or Luke and don't cheat leave a comment if it really works really oh all right let's see if we can figure out how to put me into the lawnmower here all right I think I'd rather go in headfirst end the suffering I'm finding your your work place very high test I'm high I'm finding this to be a high disc workplace okay all right you know what I'm just gonna whip this arm so that was a lot of fun and at three to four thousand dollars a pop depending on how long of a record buffer you want these things are actually within the reach of affluent hobbyists who want to load up an air cannon with bouncy balls and record the hilarity or whatever else but the main market for these and they're apparently shipping upwards of four hundred of these devices per year now at the current rate and this is ignoring Kickstarter our research institutions universities the manufacturing sector I mean you can imagine it would be a lot easier to you know debug faulty robot arm that screws on bottle caps if you can really see what it's doing as well as Armorer's and trigger manufacturers and even rocket thrust researchers because there's so much lower cost than the other options available that you could have several of them giving you multiple angles on it at a time something that's absolutely invaluable they even support synchronizing the cameras so you can record stereo 3d of what's going on 6,000 plus frames per second so I'm really excited about what these guys are doing I was absolutely thrilled to find out that they're in my backyard in Burnaby British Columbia and I wish them all the best apparently they're hiring right now what was it software and hardware engineers so sorry it was yeah software engineers with Linux kernel experience and hardware with FPGA experience FPGA experience is the big one so yeah these guys have got big plans wish you guys the best of luck because what you're doing here is awesome and speaking of plans that are awesome ting is our sponsor for today ting is the mobile carrier that's focused on customer service and customer satisfaction and with ting it's awesome because you don't need a one-size-fits-all plan you pay for only what you use with the average ting bill coming in at just $23 a month per device per month I've said month twice but it's okay you guys get the point and you don't have to skimp on customer service either when you call ting 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