would you believe looking at this sign that it was only seven months ago that
cron technologies having raised over half a million dollars for their kronos
1.4 affordable high-speed camera on kickstarter moved from the founder's
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
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 curtain of a real startup the silicon
valley vibe is definitely real and this place is seriously cool
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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
loyal's 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 microscopery here
that he uses to hand solder badges 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 cron 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 enter that we're going to take a look at the museum a collection of
development board pcbs screwed to pieces of plywood sitting on a boardroom table
that was clearly along with the chairs around it acquired from some other
company's bankruptcy auction so this this is the first chronos it was
built and programmed single-handedly by cron technologies founder david
kronstein 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 3 500 bucks so he went
you know what screw it imma 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 refined the original
design it wasn't more compact but
it could record at 1280x1024
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
looking things 3d printed metal
wood this was apparently for designing the feel of the grip
and then finally the chronos 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 chronos 1.4 far exceed that camera
he saw on ebay it's got a form factor that is very similar to a
normal stills 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 1280x1024 and frame rates of up to 38
500 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 times 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 RAM with a 35
fpga by contrast the analogous fpgas in
a phantom camera could cost thousands of
dollars the uh the touchscreen is actually from
a chinese manufacturer i think that 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
is just standard notebook ddr3 sodium RAM off of
like 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 a nikon en el4a 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 powerd SATA 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 machined chassis so this one
right here actually got hit by a 300 kilometer per
hour ice ball and survived and 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 gotta go find some more cool
stuff to do so this one right here is a lot of fun this is called a caboose
caboose kaboosh so this was actually
uh how they created the effect in the
stargate portals let's go have a look at it
oh that's beautiful cool
okay so we're all set up uh david's running at uh 1500 frames per second
there uh sean's got 6 000 and then we've
got a third camera here at 6 000 moment of truth time
all right let's have a look dang 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
mohammed room so in here you will find not one not two not three not four but
five of their kronos 1.4 cameras
a flipped over lawn mower 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 can be fun
oh right one last thing hit the lights
four one thousand watt leds
water cooled with about one third of the brightness
of the sun so we don't miss any of the action
let's drop them how do i turn this on
wow is there anything protecting those cameras no not really all right next up
we've got a fujifilm uh tape tape drive
tape like a backup tape three two one
something hit this door pretty freaking hard
wow what the hell it 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 going to do
one Linus taryn
dennis or luke and don't cheat
leave a comment 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 head first end
the suffering so i'm finding your uh your workplace
um very hightest
i'm finding this to be a heightest workplace
okay all right you know what i'm just going to rip this ARM off
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
400 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 a faulty robot
ARM that screws on bottle caps if you can really see what it's doing
as well as armorers and trigger manufacturers and even rocket thrust
researchers because they're 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 yeah software engineers with Linux kernel experience and hardware
with fpga experience fpga experience is the big one so
uh 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
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