[mk_stjames]

The System on Module board is an Inforce 6601 SOM. [0]

It uses a Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 and they provide prebuilt Ubuntu Linaro distros for it, preconfigured for the board.

The camera manufacturer likely just tossed it straight in as configured and thus didn't know how the full disk encryption was setup.

This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this project to some undergrad engineering students who've never designed a commercial product before and had no price target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.

See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever manufactured.

[0] https://linuxgizmos.com/tiny-rugged-com-runs-linux-or-androi...

[StopDisinfo910]

> This whole camera design looks like one of those 'we gave this project to some undergrad engineering students who've never designed a commercial product before and had no price target and thus it has a whole damn embedded linux system inside it for merely taking some HD video and stills triggered by some external wiring and saving them to an SD card'.

> See also: almost any specialty medical electronic device ever manufactured.

These are not design mistakes.

When building products in short runs and where the costs of part have little impact on your margins compared to R&D, it completely makes sense to go for a full computer rather than bother with embedded development where everything is more complicated. Medical also has to deal with certification which is a much more significant concern than saving on parts and will often reuse already certified components.

[Neywiny]

I'll admit I only watched a video on it not the report, but it had pictures reportedly redacted at manufacturer request. It showed a teensy 3 and some adafruit qwiic board in there. Obviously the real engineering is in the enclosure. Otherwise it could just be a webcam. But still, it's clearly not a very in depth electrical design. I'm all for SoMs if you can but they don't guarantee you the adventure of custom hardware bringing moving through all the software stacks and whatnot.

[15155]

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

[Interesco]

The 3D-printed (and hot glued?) part in Figure 3 further support this theory (not that 3D prints can't be used in production).

[userbinator]

Indeed this is massively overcomplicated, as one only needs to see what dashcams use to know that you don't need, or perhaps want, an entire OS on it.