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It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like a cellphone that's made of hundreds of
by gruez 1y ago
It's a solid piece of silicon encased in epoxy, so there's nothing really to get crushed. Contrast this to something like a cellphone that's made of hundreds of separate parts and has void space that will get crushed.
- amelius 1y agoWhy isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy?
- bell-cot 1y agoThat would be a problem for the mic and speaker, and has relatively few use cases.
- tom_alexander 1y agoHow 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?
- throwaway173738 1y agouse pogo pins or a board to board connector
- bluGill 1y agoWhich means air space that can get crushed. Either the phone is solid or it isn't.
- JumpCrisscross 1y ago> Which means air space that can get crushed Would note that air isn't the only substance in a phone that compresses under 38 MPa. (Batteries come to mind.)
- bluGill 1y agoAir is the only substance that compresses to any significant amount. When you apply pressure to a battery from one side it may deform, but I would expect that the battery wouldn't be crushed because the pressure is from all sides - unless of course there is air in the battery - I'm not a battery chemist so take everything I say with some salt. Note that I would expect water to seep into a battery at this pressure and that will cause all kinds of issues - including chemical fires underwater. Just not crushed batteries.
- justsomehnguy 1y agoJust like they do it today - a lot of grinding, swearing and overall understanding what the civilization is going in not quite the right direction.
- GMoromisato 1y agoSo what if you can't replace a screen on an epoxy-filled cell phone? That's a small price to pay for knowing that your camera will survive if you take a one-way trip to crush-depth.
- blackoil 1y agoIs this sarcasm? 99.999% people will never take it beyond a meter in a pool.
- GMoromisato 1y agoPoe's Law never fails. I should have accounted for that.
- userbinator 1y agoI'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.
- numpad0 1y agoIt's just not necessary, while having reliability problems of its own.
- dotancohen 1y ago> Why isn't a cellphone filled with epoxy? Added cost and weight are two things that would put off consumers. The phone would also be neigh irreparable, but consumers don't seem to care for that other than replacing their screen.
- amelius 1y agoA conformal coating wouldn't give much more weight.
- dotancohen 1y agoA conformal coating isn't "filled with epoxy", which is the concern I was answering.
- amelius 1y agoThere is very little empty space in a phone, so conformal coating is practically the same as filling it. Anyway, I wasn't disagreeing, just reasoning a bit further.
- cjbgkagh 1y agoThe point of filling it is to remove the compressible empty space so that large pressure gradients won’t crush it.
- estimator7292 1y agoNo, conformal coating and potting are extremely different things done for different reasons.
- amelius 1y agoI'm not talking about which methods are being used, I'm talking about which methods could be used. Further, potting, where you let the epoxy drip off, gives you a conformal coating.
- jjk166 1y agoWhen 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?
- withinboredom 1y agoTo add to that. My son got his phone caught in a reclining chair without realizing it. The fact that the phone bent in half instead of destroying the chair is a nice bonus. Replacing the phone was cheap, replacing a chair would not have been — yes, both are insured, but replacing/repairing a chair takes a hell of a lot longer.
- Panzer04 1y agoI think most would disagree XD. Phones these days are often more expensive than the chair and can be pretty inconvenient to replace, especially if you have nonrecent backups.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- 0_____0 1y agoThe GoPro Session actually took this tack to achieve waterproofness without a secondary case.
- scrumper 1y agoWell, most cellphones aren't subjected to the conditions found under three miles of frigid sea water. Epoxy is also really, really expensive.
- Towaway69 1y agoThermal concerns perhaps - how does epoxy dissipate heat?
- amelius 1y agoSome types of epoxy actually conduct heat quite well.
- Aurornis 1y agoThe 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.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- BurningFrog 1y agoI don't need any extra grams in my phone!
- loloquwowndueo 1y agoBecause then it gets a 0/10 repairability score on ifixit :)
- matheusmoreira 1y agoThat can be avoided by filling it with a fluid that the repairman can simply drain instead. People hydromod digital quartz wristwatches by filling them with oil. This gives them truly absurd water resistances and even improves the readability of the screen somehow.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago“My phone needs an oil change” “I dropped my phone and all the oil leaked out making a mess” Yeah that’s not going to happen my dude.
- marcosdumay 1y agoImagine how much drama they could have avoided if they filled the entire submersible.
- orbital-decay 1y agoFilling dive watches with oil (hydro modding) is pretty popular. It mainly helps with visibility but also increases the depth rating.
- robinsonb5 1y agoShhhh - don't give Apple ideas.
- shadowpho 1y agoBecause 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)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- pfdietz 1y agoThis comment made me wonder how much easier proximity fuzes would have been to develop in WW2 had they had transistors (or integrated circuits). I assume making modern solid state electronics 20,000g shock resistant is much easier than doing the same to vacuum tubes.
- MadnessASAP 1y agoNo need to wonder, proximity fuzes are still used today. And yes, they are much smaller, cheaper, more reliable, and precise.
- pfdietz 1y agoI was wondering how much easier it would have been, specifically in dollar terms. Order of magnitude?
- MadnessASAP 1y agoWell according to this person* by the end of WW2 a proximity fuze cost $18 or $314 today. I figure I could probably put together a resilient fuze using off-the-shelf parts that's at least as good as a WW2 era one for <$100 (potted solid state parts are really frickin resilient to G forces). With some optimisations for mass production I think <$30 is doable. So I'm going to say an order of magnitude easier. Of course factoring in today's markup on military parts and the failings of military procurement, that fuze will actually cost the tax payer $3000-$30000 + R&D. * https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/75940/what-has-happened-to-proximity-fuzes-after-world-war-2 https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/75940/what-has-h...
- dylan604 1y agoSo that's the next phase of making devices thinner? /s
- chrsw 1y agoAre consumer grade cards really reliable though? Not so much against physical damage, but of data integrity over extended periods? "Industrial" SD cards can be 10 times or 100 times more expensive than consumer grade cards.
- MBCook 1y agoSo were the flash chips on the SSDs they found. It didn’t save them.
- PunchyHamster 1y agothe 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
- hinkley 1y agoSay for argument’s sake there was a small air bubble in the resin. Couldn’t that result in cavitation?