[HN Gopher] A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Po...
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A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70
instant camera
Author : picture
Score : 88 points
Date : 2022-02-10 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.righto.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.righto.com)
| riffic wrote:
| there's a charles and ray eames promotional film about this
| camera.
|
| https://www.eamesoffice.com/the-work/sx-70-polaroid/
|
| Watch the film:
|
| https://youtu.be/zpv8J8e9gWI
| yardie wrote:
| I'm impressed that surface mount components existed in the 1970s
| and in consumer electronics that early. I've taken apart VCRs and
| game consoles from the 80s and they were DIP mounted and through-
| hole circuit boards for all of the ones I've come across. I
| didn't realize the SX-70 was so cutting edge.
| dboreham wrote:
| I believe they always existed, but were not widely used until
| the late 1980s when pressure to reduce size and cost became
| dominant and pin counts on packages rose above the limit for
| DIP. I worked in the industry at the time and remember the
| transition. You had to ask assembly houses if they had reflow
| capability, automatic pick and place, etc, otherwise they
| couldn't manufacture SMT.
| unobtaniumstool wrote:
| I was surprised by that too. I took apart a lot of electronics
| as a kid and distinctly remember it being mostly components
| with leads.
| kens wrote:
| Texas Instruments' surface-mount miniDIP chips were "new and
| risky but cheap", and one of the innovations that made their
| second design of the Polaroid circuitry successful. Aerospace
| had been using a lot of surface-mount in the 1960s, e.g. the
| Apollo Guidance Computer. But consumer electronics didn't
| really use surface mount until about 1990. I've wondered if
| there was any particular reason surface mount wasn't popular
| sooner.
| buescher wrote:
| I first saw surface mount parts in a camcorder viewfinder -
| flea market find - I picked up in 1985 or 1986. I don't think
| I even read about them until the 90s otherwise. I was
| surprised the first time I found out how far back they went.
| There must have been a huge chicken-and-egg problem involved
| in bringing them to the mainstream.
| monocasa wrote:
| Do you know anything about the manufacturing process? I
| always connect most of the benefits of surface mount with
| reflow soldering and pick and place machines. I doubt they
| used pick and place in 1972 for consumer goods, but maybe you
| can just have assembly line workers placing by hand before
| before the line runs through a reflow oven?
| buescher wrote:
| There's such a thing as a manual pick and place machine. I
| agree, though, it would fascinating to know how these were
| assembled.
| ghaff wrote:
| I never knew that aspect of the AGC. I knew the core memory
| was "sewn" by women at Raytheon but I wasn't aware it wasn't
| just standard core. The guy who ran software at the
| Instrumentation lab (and had literally written the book on
| orbital mechanics) did once give a talk where he related an
| anecdote of some of the astronauts visiting Raytheon to, as
| he put it, reinforce that they should really be careful lest
| these nice young men die.
| mulmen wrote:
| The AGC is a fascinating device. It used 60% of the ICs
| produced _in the United States_ in 1963.
|
| If you are interested in the AGC I suggest this excellent
| video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1J2RMorJXM&t=454s.
| morsch wrote:
| I think he has, in fact, shown a passing interest in the
| AGC in the past. ;)
| http://www.righto.com/search/label/Apollo
| mulmen wrote:
| Haha! I didn't look at the username!
| kens wrote:
| Author here for your Polaroid camera questions :-)
| jdkee wrote:
| Will you be investigating the sonar system developed for later
| cameras such as the SLR 680?
| s800 wrote:
| So the integrator circuit implies it determines the exposure
| time during the exposure? Meaning, the metering is ongoing
| during the shutter opening?
| kens wrote:
| Yes. It's a pretty clever circuit. You can think of film as
| integrating the amount of light that falls on it, so the
| photodiode integrator is computing the same thing. So the
| film will get enough light at the same time the integrator
| gets enough light. By closing the shutter at that time, the
| film is properly exposed.
| foldr wrote:
| The Olympus OM series had some particularly ingenious
| integrative metering modes, including metering light
| reflected off the film itself.
| https://www.dpreview.com/forums/post/24653220
| [deleted]
| ravila4 wrote:
| I have a couple of these cameras. How difficult is it to get an
| OpenSX70 circuit PCB printed and installed? Is this something
| achievable by an average tinkerer?
| kens wrote:
| I don't know the details of the OpenSX70 boards; I just
| looked at the Polaroid chips :-)
| anonymousisme wrote:
| The film packs included the (flat) battery, and the (non-
| rechargeable) battery always had plenty of charge left after the
| film pack ran out. I salvaged those batteries and used them in
| many electronic projects.
| polpo wrote:
| Polaroid even capitalized on this a bit - they produced a radio
| that ran on the batteries in spent film packs in the 1980s.
| Koshkin wrote:
| As a programmer, electronics looks like fun. (After dealing with
| all kinds of thick and dense infrastructure stacks, it's
| refreshing to see how things work at the lowest level - where the
| "stack" below is just Nature herself.)
| junon wrote:
| "Instant camera" is a phrase I haven't heard in what feels like a
| lifetime. Amazing how quickly they lost prevalence.
|
| Hearing it feels like a fever dream, I had to question if I knew
| the phrase at all.
| gkop wrote:
| FWIW they are still a thing:
| https://duckduckgo.com/?q=instant+camera&ia=shopping&iax=sho...
|
| My subjective, anecdotal sense of trends is that instant
| cameras were big in the 80s, faded in the 90s, and made a small
| (but sustained) comeback in the mid-2010s.
| ghaff wrote:
| The dates will differ but a lot of things (think vinyl
| albums) probably follow some sort of mainstream, obsolete,
| retro lifecycle.
| stickfigure wrote:
| These were common at Pivotal when I was last there. Everyone
| gets a snapshot for the pairing board. I bought one and did
| the same thing at my last company.
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(page generated 2022-02-10 23:00 UTC)