As an electronics/embedded designer it hurts somewhat to see this beautiful tough MIL-SPEC technology, only manufactured to the highest of standards.... to be running for just a few minutes...
Why do you think our taxes are so high? Kind of remind you of a tea party.... Almost like the USA had become the very things it was founded against being. Because humans are dumb animals and tune into media or social opinions which and tuned by media.
Even if you were the most evil person in existence, and determined to commit war crimes, you wouldn't waste a Jav against noncombatants. It's just too valuable a resource to waste like that.
Maybe also hold a pressure and temperature probes, since the missile is expected to be used in al sorts of weather and the propellant, the detonators and the double shaped charges might need to be tweaked for very precise timing trigger.
It's probably an orientation sensor so the missile knows which way it is pointing when it can't see the target. The missile trajectory is that it climbs up at a steep angle (in one of the modes of operation) and then pitches down and attacks the tank from above where the armour is thinner, and using infrared targeting. I suspect when the missile is in the climbing phase of its flight, the infrared seeker is not pointing at the target. So in this phase of flight, the infrared seeker head cannot see the target and cannot be used for control and guidance of the missile. The missile needs to know the pitch angle it is currently at so it can then be steered back down towards the target and the infrared seeker will be used to guide the missile in the terminal phase of flight. Just a theory
I work on semiconductor manufacturing equipment and appreciate the technology required to make modern ICs.. but lets be honest, nothing is quite as cool as an Apollo guidance computer!
I used to work for a precious metal recovery company and can tell you, those gold plated chips and edge connectors make these boards [as with most old military electronics] worth a fortune! Modern boards/chips are gold plated measured in microns... old military equipment were absolutely lacquered in gold
I've been watching your channel for a few years and it looks like this video really took off for you. Glad to see it and hope it brings you the subs and views you deserve.
Et toi tu gobes. On est sur youtube mec, en 2023 on peut modifier le visage, la voix, les images. S'il y avait 0.01% de chances que ce soit vrai il n'y aurait pas moyen de le prouver
@@BigSmartArmed It doesn't look like it was fired at all. Considering it was manufactured in 98, I'm guessing it was rescued from a military weapons destruction dump.
@@BigSmartArmed Well, that is a sample picture from Google. The one he has is not the same as the one in the picture. Besides, the Pentagon generally has a 10-15 year shelf life on these missiles which indicates that what I said earlier was probably right considering the date of manufacture. I would bank more on it being decommissioned.
Ich bin Eloka und Funkamateur. Ich finde diese Technik echt unglaublich interessant. Aktive Radar Steuerung, militärisches GPS, Wärmebild Auswertung, Flugsteuerung, ein Speicher für die Flug-Map.
That "multi sensor" gyro is likely ITAR grade! I looked up the Emcore price list for NON-ITAR grade fiber optic gyro cylinders. the high end is ~$45K for ONE, if you buy 200+ quantity they will give you discount to ~$35K each. (non-ITAR)
@@lelabodemichel5162 At 10:54 what is the thing in the bottom left side of the aluminum bulkhead? It looks like another sensor (same cylindrical shape).
Really cool to see one of these up close. Thanks for the video... I won't ask where it came from. (Honestly, it may have had a flaw in it, hence why it still exist. )
Great video - as always! This breakthrough digital technology is not as fun to reverse engineer as analog technology. What's surprising is that the main shaped charge and engine are so small. Gryroscope - what I can tell you - go for it.
I've wanted a peek inside a Javelin for years, very nice. Perhaps it was explained and I missed it, why are there ribbon cables extending out of the side of the airframe? Is it perhaps a testing/debug model?
You can see on the picture of the complete missile at 01:00 these ribbon cables. I think it is easier for manufacturing than using connectors inside the missile.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon I have an empty fuselage section of a Super 530 missile, it also have holes for routing wires in channels outside the main body.
@@msylvain59 Come to think of it, space rockets use an external raceway for cables, too. It just didn't occur to me that smaller rockets would be the same for some reason.
@@NonEuclideanTacoCannon The warhead is clearly a shaped charge and since it's behind the guidance electronics, part of it's purpose is that it will totally destroy the guidance electronics when it detonates, the shockwave and hot gasses are all directed forward by the shaped charge and the vaporised electronics form part of the extremely hot gasses the punch holes in the target. I can't help thinking that this is doubtless still classified in at least some western nations, I'm surprised you were in fact able to get your hands on it.
Montés sur la plaque alu centrale, le cylindre que tu observais et dont il y a l'air d'y avoir un équivalent monté à l'horizontale également, m'a l'air d'être un élément de centrale inertielle. Un p'tit moteur à la vitesse bien contrôlée et dont les écarts mesurés doivent permettre de calculer les écarts de position en rapport avec la trajectoire programmée du missile. Belle électronique !
C’est effectivement un gyroscope de variation angulaire mais il n’y en a qu’un, l’autre machin n’est qu’un cylindre en métal, peut-être un contrepoids.
The sensor is the rate gyro, dual axis. Requires plus and minus 15V at 400Hz 3 phase to spin up the motor in it, the circuit no doubt used the overkill aerospace mosfets as part of the motor driver. I always though military weapons stuff was extremely wasteful of high tech stuff😢
Stupid question: why are most of the chips packaged in a golden package? I know about different properties of different pcb materials for example, and I know that a simple epoxy package might not be enough. Is it to protect from EMR? Why not have a "normal" metal can for that? The golden packaging seems to be common is super serious hardware so it must have some specific property!
If you're someone who makes these, you could consider, oh i dont know, pinching one of those ribbon cables in a nondescript place right along the edge that is to connect to the head ports. It would still read data and validate but if the right pins were cut the head wouldnt ever go off when used. Just something for humans that care about other humans to consider. Ya know. Hint hint wink wink.
I cant even get an aircraft accelerometer shipped without a huge amount of ITAR paperwork and hoops to jump through. This guy picks up a javelin missile guidance system from the market 🤷
I would have loved a breakdown of that thing. Like why are there two connected PCBs? Why are there so many individual chips? What do the individual chips do? It just looks so complex. I would love a "SmarterEveryDay" video about it with one of the engineers. Just breaking down the complexity and explaining the design decisions. I get that there are certain constraints on building such a device. But I feel like my Intel or AMD processor at home could also guide a missile. There would be obviously a lot of overhead like the OS, massive unnecessary latency and so on. But I feel like you could design a much simpler system with just 2 chips. I'm also shocked that the infrared sensor is only 64x64 pixels. Also are other military devices equally complex with custom designed circuits? I have so many questions 😂
The answer to all those questions is this was designed at the same time the Nintendo Gameboy came out. At the time this was as compact as it could be. Today you could get everything here into the CPU that powers a smart light switch.
Anyone have any idea what that giant golden TI ASIC is in the left hand side at 9:16? Googling the numbers on it don't reveal any info, just found one for sale on ebay.
As others already said, sad to know this beautiful and super expensive piece of engineering is designed to be used only once, then it self-destructs. But even more sad that the sole purpose of its existence is destruction and to kill people.
I was speaking in general, every modern missile must have a guidance system of similar complexity and build quality. Yes, I wasn't aware this is an anti-tank missile, but still, the tank has crew in it, so it will still kill people, unless it is targeted towards the engine which might absorb enough energy to leave the cabin somewhat intact. Yes they will be military casualties and not civilian, but does it matter that much? The tank personnel were also civilians just months or weeks before, and a lot of them has families. A lot, if not most of them don't want to be there, but they are forced to. @@JaakkoF
@@mrnmrn1 Well, sure the tank crew also has people in it and their lives matter. I suppose it's a good thing to reflect on the tragedy of war now and then - guess most people just accept it as a fact of life, maybe get desensitized a little as long as it happens somewhere else.
Remember that it's designed to sit in storage for decades, get dragger around mud, snow and rain, bumped and manhandled for a long time and then perform reliably and flawlessly doing a million things per second without mistakes for a few seconds.
There's more to this design than DSP. The gyro, other sensors and analogue front end will for sure have better performance than a low cost MEMS gyro and multipurpose micro. And can it time travel back to the late 80s and do it for $2 then?
This video will be the origin story of a highly-convoluted story in the future, involving time travel, a French engineer, secret missile technology, and a spy called 'Igor'.
To me at 0:44 that looks like the hellfire-r9x “the ginsu missile” named after the knife due to the sharp blades that jettison to kill the target and it carries no explosive payload.
40 years ago I took delivery of a box at my place of business in Belfast. I was expecting a resin sample from a chemical company and the box arrived by conventional courier. Instead it contained multiple carefully packaged cylindrical electronic devices. The address label for my firm had been stuck over the original destination "Short Brothers", a local defence contractor. The contained covering letter revealed the sender to be Graseby Dynamics, an English defence contractor, and the contents were described as the revised design of the Javelin missile warhead firing mechanism. I contacted Shorts and the police. and within 30 minutes my premises were crawling with plain clothes state security. The items were taken away and I was interviewed at some length. Somehow the press got hold of the story and it made the front page of the local paper. My business partner was by coincidence a friend of a department head in Shorts. He later revealed that a government junior minister had lost his job over this, and there had been several individuals severely disciplined both at Shorts and Graseby. I never did get my resin sample.
Working in Northern Ireland during that period must have been quite a mind blowing (no sick pun intended) experience. I was working on the mainland and it was bad enough there if you were a defense government employee.
The Javelin you saw parts for was actually an entirely different missile, a MANPADS developed in the 80's based on (and as a replacement for) the notoriously shit Blowpipe
I am not sure what makes me more surprised: the amount of hig-spec electronic components in that thing, or the fact that this guy got into possession of a missile guidance computer.
You can get everything for money in Ukraine right now. And no, that is not Russia propaganda. Just the reality of war and what happens when a murderous thug attacks his neighbors.
Hey dave. We'd have no chance ever scoring anything close to something like this in oz, ay? Did you ever get mil spec boards in a mailbag? I vaguely remember something or am i thinking of some high end telecom boards from a mailbag vid.
The "sensor" is a javelin rate gyro probably made by marconi. It contains flourocarbon fluid and gemstone bearings. The pink coating at 6:13 is beryllium oxide and is toxic like asbestos.
ПРО токсичность Асбеста ничего нам неведомо , до сих пор все крыши жилых домов в России сделаны из шифера , где асбест главный компонент , у нас есть даже Город Асбест .
@@МигУдачи There are two types of asbestos, chrysotilly and amphibol, the first is less toxic, and is now used. If it is processed in the speaker, then everything will be fine.
Be kind to my friend Michel. He is making a great effort to do these videos in English, which is obviously not his native language, so he can share the amazing technology inside all his unusual items with the rest of us. You should give him a pat on the back.
In typical fashion I laughed at the bad joke and I also agree with everyone saying Michel is awesome! Maybe this reveals me as a crass American but I don't see the harm in that kind of ribbing. I laugh whenever I'm reminded my accent sounds funny to Europeans, never thought it should be a sore point for people that we all sound odd from far enough away. I love this kind of content, I'm a huge fan of novel and interesting computers!
It's a 1980s design. Everything used was the absolute state of the art at the time, and from what I read there were a lot of problems with it. Even the most modern version has unresolved issues. The biggest part on the board with the DSP is most likely a TMS34010, a general-purpose 32-bit CPU with special graphics instructions which was just going into production back when this was being developed. The IDT parts on a few of the other boards are most certainly dual-port RAMs and the VLSI chips will be custom glue logic.
Hey, overall as I've watched the Ukraine War I have been researching and learning obsessively about every weapon system in existence.... The thing I don't understand is with the advancement of technology, microcontrollers & especially computer vision object tracking available to the market nowadays, wouldn't it be possible to MASS PRODUCE something similar to a javelin for less than $2,000? **(A daytime version at least)? I understand a high-end Mid Wave Thermal IR Image Seeker operating at 60-120FPS would be ITAR restricted & add $10k to the overall cost but, still should not cost more than $15k total today... It seems like most of the cost associated with these guided systems is the software and algorithms....
@@justinhealey-htcohio3798 electronics and cameras did get cheaper over years and you could possibly improvise something with consumer grade parts. However, rest of the missile - gyros, shaped charge, soft launch solid rocket motor, some machined parts, some servos for those fins still do not fit into anything under $2000. And don't forget the control unit ("CLU") which has some good optics to enable targeting from up to 2.5 miles.
Not an expert, but my guess is that at least part of the high cost is related to hardening the electronics and software. Both against environmental conditions and electronic warfare.
@@Jerry_from_analytics Yeah, I've built many different drones (Large and small)... I would have to think that modern consumer grade MCU & MEMS inertial/gyro stabilization IC's Could replace most of the components on the Javelin today. I was really surprised that he said it's a 64x64 image sensor ADC which really isn't that high of resolution by today's standards. It really is extraordinary what they were able to accomplish back in the 1980s...
* The pink stuff gluing the metal plate to the carbon fiber body tube is heat transfer paste. * Those large VLSI parts are gate array parts rather than FPGAs. Gate arrays are midway between full-custom parts and FPGAs. VLSI used to make gate array chips where the silicon and maybe 1 or two metal layers were standardized, but the top couple of layers of metal were customized. So for the price of taping out (and making masks for) two metal layers, you could get a part with 100x the gate count of an FPGA, without having to pay the full cost (and manufacturing delay) of a full-custom 3-5 metal layer part. * Hardly any heat sinks! Most of this stuff didn't run long enough to get hot. Must of been a PITA to debug, since it probably got pretty hot during a debug session.
The ‘GA’ in FPGA literally Stan’s for ‘Gate Array’. For cost reasons, it was probably cheaper to reproduce the GA in large numbers with the final configuration once the configuration cleared development and testing.
@@derekedmondson9909 Field Programmable Gate Arrays and Gate Arrays are different technologies. The names are misleading, but what can you do. Gate Arrays are quite a bit less expensive that FPGAs, and use a LOT less power, and are much higher performance. On the flip side, I can reprogram an FPGA in a minute, but a new gate array is... months and at least several hundred thousand dollars.
@@derekedmondson9909 >"reproduce the GA in large numbers with the final configuration once the configuration cleared development and testing" There's a consideration of security as well - it being safer and actually cheaper to program the FPGAs yourself than to manage a secured trust relationship with a 3rd party for that function. Malicious code and hardware injection is a huge and growing problem in the field
I used to work for an avionics contractor. It’s interesting how similar this is to modern hardware … yet also very different. Everything has FPGAs with 16-layer conformal-coated boards. It all has a 1553/1760 bus with expensive parts and a lot of redundancy (compared to consumer stuff). But look at all those ribbon cables and interfaces! In 2007 we were already working on 16Gb fibre interfaces because the F-35 needed the bandwidth. But many years before that we were making missiles with a lot more resistance to EMI than this appears to have. But it’s a funny mix of new and old. I used to have to look up specs in manuals from 1973.
I’ve heard one of the limiting factors now for the F35 is that it’s maxed out in its ability to get rid of all the excess heat created by the avionics/computers. I would bet there’s only so much bleed air from the single jet engine that they’re willing to sacrifice to be used to power & cools all the electronics.
@@TheAlexBell Remember it only has to fly once. On the pictures it looks like the flat cables are covered with tape on the outside of the missile, so there is no drag on them. And the unsupported parts inside the body are probably light enough, with large soldered contact area. The cables also are a lot sturdier than the flimsy things you find in modern laptops and smartphones.
But why would you use FPGA in mass production? I thought that you only do FPGAs for rapid prototyping and after you are sure about the hardware you've emulated, you can just mass produce it instead
Wow congratulations for this find, currently I have nothing better than Sidewinder rollerons on my watch list ! All the golden parts are space grade quality, all that for a single use device, how wastefull war is.
@@h7qvi All COTS stuff at first glance so really not that exotic. The actual cost to the military includes long term storage/packaging/training and disposal so that bumps the price way up. These thingy have to last for many decades in some drafty storage bunker and they have to survive the g-forces involved in launch all that adds up.
@@Coecoo No, still humans. The chips just got smaller. What, you thought boards with tons of chips were designed that way because they looked better and "soulless machines" with no sense of aesthetics took it from us? Obviously what happened was chips got smaller, more powerful, more efficient to the point multiple could be stacked on the same die, that we needed less of them
@@Coecoo More like because the combined power of the entire thing doesn't even hold a candle to a dusty raspberry pi, and less chips = less failure points and less interconnects to manage.
@@cpte3729not entirely humans. Most of the fitting and layout is computer generated because they're much better at optimizing for timing. And they're rarely "stacked", just placed side by side on the same chip interconnected.
@@cpte3729 Nope, completely false. Please do your research before talking nonsense. A solid 90% or more chip designs these days are entirely computer generated. Pretty much the only input human has in their creation are entering parameters for the computers to follow, like designating areas for where cable ports need to be. A large part of the unfeasibility of having human-designed things is large parts thanks to the mainstreaming of multilayered PCBs. Trying to teach humans to efficiently plan out tens of thousands of pathways in a layered 3D structure instead of having a computer do it is wishful thinking at best.
Of course! Thats why I have those bits in my mega assortment, the javelin missle screwdriver tips! How could they forget the javelin missle screwdriver bits!
Huh? This item is from the late 1990s and as far as Wikipedia goes the system debuted 1996. 32-bit 386 came to market 1985, way more powerful than the 286.
I had a professor that said he worked for a DoD contractor. He said they would calculate the memory requirements by the max memory allocation per second and multiply it by the max possible run time. Memory leak? No problem.
Given the comments on this video, it really seems like when you make videos of this kind, you HAVE TO include a lot of disclaimers, at the very beginning, to let people know that this device is very old and doesn't contain anything sensitive that could be of interest to unfriendly nations. Otherwise, you'll get a lot of people reporting you to various authorities that could potentially make your life difficult depending on who investigates it (traveling to the US and being held up for a while etc). Obviously none of this is sensitive, but authorities can still go through their "due process" and their mistakes/misunderstandings can become your future problems. Federal government mistakes can take a very long time to correct. Simply DURING an investigation, you'll be on a watch list. As you know, government investigations can take years to complete, so there is that angle as well. Basically, it's probably not worth posting this type of content, despite the "cool factor"..... the comments made me re-think posting videos about some of my stuff as well. The more popular a video like this becomes, the more uninformed/ignorant people you're going to get in the comments. Even today, there are a bunch of somewhat modern missile PCB parts (from MBDA iirc) on sale for ebay, with FPGAs etc, which have been on there for years haha. No one recognizes them, so that's that. Lots of stuff leaks out in strange ways, unfortunately. I don't want to risk my own industry standing by getting involved, like most people... I've always loved your French accent, it sounds very pleasant!
You watching too much holywood crap movies. The fact the the video itself is on RU-vid is the proof that nobody care about thoses old junk. For theses califonians oligarchs the word niger is way much dangerous than a javelin.
Nowadays export controls are quite strict, trade has become too transparent for government agencies. In the old days, we sold the sensors from the US and French missiles to a Russian military institute and no one cared.
Designed by the guy who said something about 640k of RAM being more than enough. This illustrates the stupidity of people who say cutting China/Russia off from next-gen fabs will reduce their military might. Our latest and greatest, "cutting edge" ATGM capable of taking out any tank on the battlefield is perfectly fine running on fewer resources than my kid's disposable electronic toy. Any random commercial FPV drone in Ukraine right now dwarfs the Javelin in complexity. This is hardly unique. Even our most advanced F-22 fighter is running on i960s designed by Intel in the 80s.
I'll disappoint you. Javelin performed very mediocre, to say the least. A very expensive and capricious toy for rich NATO fools. In winter, in the cold, the batteries quickly ran out and there were a lot of problems with them. The missiles ended up in the real world, and not in an advertising brochure for the Pentagon, and almost always missed, as can be seen from this video at the beginning where the failed missile simply lies on the ground. The main thing is a cumbersome, capricious and insanely expensive system that is not applicable in a real war because It cannot be produced by hundreds of tens of thousands a year, and for its price, it will ruin any half-buyer. Now tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, trucks and enemy soldiers are destroyed by Russian FPV quadrocopters for $300, which are printed on a 3D printer in 2 hours - they fly 10-12 km with an RPG rocket and penetrate any NATO equipment. Javelin - flashed for 2-3 months, and now everyone has completely forgotten about it; they have been gone for a long time.
@@simongreen9862 plus this is not just all made by 1 person. Typically your average embedded software or hardware guy only has a narrow view into a couple of components that make up such a system. And the system engineer will probably have an overall understanding on how it all fits together but he wouldn't be able to reproduce the product by themselves. It's very much need-to-know basis.
Fascinating, I used to service the launchers (FCE) and training computers (analogue - op amps performing calculus) in the 80s, and it’s predecessor (blowpipe) but never got to see ordinance though 👍
This is the american anti-tank guided missile FGM-148 Javelin, not the British anti-air missile that you serviced. Still, thanks for sharing your story!
