Comment by intothemild
Comment by intothemild 2 days ago
It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.
Comment by intothemild 2 days ago
It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.
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?
So 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.
Just like they do it today - a lot of grinding, swearing and overall understanding what the civilization is going in not quite the right direction.
Filling dive watches with oil (hydro modding) is pretty popular. It mainly helps with visibility but also increases the depth rating.
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?
To 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.
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?
Because then it gets a 0/10 repairability score on ifixit :)
That 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.
Imagine how much drama they could have avoided if they filled the entire submersible.
This 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.
No need to wonder, proximity fuzes are still used today. And yes, they are much smaller, cheaper, more reliable, and precise.
It wasn't in the crushed part, it was in the camera's shell, and the camera was mounted outside, if I understood properly.
The picture looks like the camera + storage SD card were in a sealed metal tube that was untouched.
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).
Heat and wear are the greatest dangers to flash memory, and this was found in a cold dark place, with presumably plenty of life remaining.
It continues to amaze me how indestructible SDCards are.
Until they're sold as supplemental hard drives (cough Transcend Jetdrive cough). Then they'll fail if you even look at them strangely.
It also amazes me how incredibly unbrowseable tomshardware is now with all the ads and pop-ups.
It also amazes me that people are using the internet w/o an adblocker in the year 2025
It has poor compatibility on the iOS version that I've got installed, sadly.
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.