The Iranian Shahed-136’s basic design has seen many changes and additions since Russia began using them, with some featuring interesting payloads such as cameras in a gimbal, making these drones useful for tasks like surveillance. Recently [Michel] got his hands one one such camera that was recovered from a shot-down drone in Ukraine, providing the opportunity for an in-depth look at what hardware is in these cameras.
The teardown thus covers the gimbal mechanism itself as well as the electronics and camera. First up is an Artix-7 FPGA-based board, followed by the range finder assembly. Unsurprisingly the camera feed handling is performed by an Hi3519 SoC, as this appears to be the off-the-shelf option you find all over on AliExpress and similar sites. There’s also an Artix-7 FPGA-based board here, which presumably performs some machine vision tasks or similar.
Continuing the ‘bought off AliExpress’ vibe, the power supply board (pictured above) is quite literally just that. A relay board follows the same pattern, with apparently the entire contents of the camera consisting of off-the-shelf development boards and modules that are readily found for sale online.
For the camera there is a thermal camera presumably for night operations, as most of these drone swarms are launched towards Ukraine at night. Looking at the gimbal assembly it similarly feels like it was sourced off AliExpress, featuring mostly Western components, sometimes with the typical lasered-off component markings and such.
This makes one wonder how much has changed here since nearly two years ago we saw an air data computer from a similar drone that could have been sourced off AliExpress, while the Russian missile teardowns show significantly more custom hardware, presumably because those are harder to source off AliExpress.
So you can order parts for a killer drone off AliExpress now. What an age we live in.
Uh yes. This is a big thing now. I wanted to write about it forever but the landscape is changing so fast…
What’s also tragic is that a notable amount of quadcopter parts are made by toy companies, apparently.
Such as lightweight propellers, gyroscopes and electro motors.
About 10 to 15 years ago, I read, these parts were still expensive,
so toy makers (in Shantou/Chenghai?) started to build them from scratch to be able to build affordable toys.
Which in turn changed the industry (for consumer class products at least).
So maybe this time it’s not war that drove innovation for civil applications, but otherwise round.. Not sure what’s worse.
That being said, it’s just the simplified story, of course. I don’t know much truth there is within that story, either. So please take it with a grain of salt.
Wikipedia has an article about quadcopter history, too.
Apparently, small quadcopter toys were sold in 90s Japan already.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quadcopter#History
You’d have to go back further than 15 years for them to be expensive or anything other than cheap in the military hardware sense (at least when taking the HobbyKing/AliExpress etc procurement methods). Not to say the price hasn’t come down heaps and availability and off the shelf part options exploded, as 20 odd years ago there wasn’t anywhere near the scale of production and the brushless motor and flight controllers now are vastly cheaper than they were and available off the shelf in a much wider range of performance bands.
This is just sad at a conceptual level. Toys meant to bring joy to children are being used for very different purposes…
We hear it at times “guns don’t kill people”.
The electronics at least – you just need a part that will work once for a few hours. Any longer product duration is over engineering.
The payload of what the drone delivers is up to the user and is not available via aliexpress.
No, you can build killer drones from the same parts as your low budget toys. These days, “military grade” is just marketing speak for “very expensive”, not much to do with the sophistication of the underlying tech.
More like marketing speak for long term maintainability, supply chain guarantees etc. Which probably matters for a long term stockpile in peace or cold war time. Which probably doesn`t matter as much in a “produce it just in time and throw it straight at the enemy” scenario.
“Military Grade” isn’t just marketing speak, it translates more with, “More expensive because of defined requirements.”
When you go to your local home store to buy a hammer, you might spend $15 bucks on a hammer. When the military buys a hammer, they make the manufacturer do all sorts of ‘extreme tests’ (does it work way below freezing, does it work at boiling, can I run over it with a tank and it still work, etc.). A lot of the tests seem ridiculous, but they are still an overhead costs that the military forces (and pays) manufacturers to go through.
On the flip side, when the manufacturers turn around and sell the exact same hammer in your local home store, it’s the same model/design/build as what they sold the military, but they drop the “Military Grade” verbiage b/c that line of hammers didn’t go through the same, certified QA process.
It shouldn’t be surprising that commodity equipment is similar and sometimes the same as what the military uses, but the US military spends money under the justification that it will work “in a future war”, whereas Russia, Iran, etc. are going more, “battle tested”.
I’ve always joked that the infamous $10000 hammer is:
A $500 hammer, with that cost justified because of the extreme conditions the hammer needs to operate in
$9500 worth of government mandated paperwork proving that you did not rip off the government. Thank you Earned Value Mediocrity System!
I’m in favour of making triggers of explosives Military Grade.
And with chips military grade means higher temperature tolerances btw, which in very hot (Middle East maybe) or very cold areas (Russia and areas near it maybe) can be rather crucial.
On a related note, I read that spinning up a F35 to work in the cold regions like northern Canada takes several hours.. while the Grippen for instance does not need that.
But anyway, I think it’s probably important that if you bought them the people firing them don’t get blow up themselves, seems a requirement to me, but I’m sure there are leaders (too many of them) that don’t give a damn if a percentage of their own people gets blown to smithereens.
Also, “military-grade” on consumer electronics (mainboards) doesn’t mean much.
It depends, I think. Military equipment uses same or similar electronic parts as their civil versions for sure, but build quality might be different.
Less plastic, more metal or higher quality plastic and some rubber parts, at least.
Better shielding, modular design in which components can be changed.
More security features, such as locks or the possibility to add a chain etc.
I’m thinking of radio transceivers and laptops, for example.
The military versions are more rugged.
It’s like comparing a normal laptop with a Thoughbook model, maybe.
The installed HDDs in the latter might be slower, more shock resistant models.
SSDs might be SLC or MLC rather than whatever is now common in consumer industry.
Maybe we could say that military equipment is closer to lab equipment or medical equipment than to consumer/office equipment.
Because on paper it has to comply to higher standards than ordinary consumer equipment has to.
Generally speaking, I mean. The current situation with the quadcopters isn’t exactly an ordinary one.
These are disposable items produced in large quantities, rather.
Actually, the parts are not always all the same; for instance, TTL applications(remember TTL?), the civilian parts had 74** prefixes, while the more more rugged(and costly) chips were 54** series, with, among other specs, wider temperature ranges. And yes, conformal coatings and other ruggedizing techniques were involved l.
They are not western components, they are all made in China. Very cheap components because is a one way drone.
Artix is from AMD, an American company
The trademark is from AMD, the design is from Xilinx (bought by AMD). The chip is from Taïwan, that’s where it’s made with Chinese silicon plus Chinese rare earth plus Tawaïnese labor. Same for many (if not all) the parts in this.
Made with ASML machinery (which is a Dutch company)
Why the ï in Taiwan?
Mum, mum, I want a Shahed kit for Xmas !
So, so cool. Wish it weren’t being used to hurt people but well, I cannot help but be impressed with the tech
I have the same exact buck regulator board and relay board in my drawer right now!!!
This is insane! These are hobby grade modules/boards that they are using in their actual warfare drones…and they’re working well!!!!
I mean, why wouldn’t they? And they are one-use only anyway.
When you only have to work for a few hours, and it doesn’t even matter that much if you have failures in flight often – even if only 25% of the drones actually worked properly that other 75% still has a good chance to work well enough to eat up air defence resources… Then its simple numbers – build 1 bulletproof 100% reliable one way attack drone with enough computing power to navigate and select a target even in a EW rich environment at long range, or build 40 cheap one way attack drones for the same money – its disposable either way, and you might actually want to build some of both as that cheap garbage makes it far more likely your good weapons get through.
“a good chance to work well enough to eat up air defence resources”
Which has a much greater success rate – even if the drone never would have hit its intended target, if it causes air defense resources to be expended, it achieved a benefit
What’s the surprise if even space missions as Ingenuity Mars quadcopter use hobby hardware?
And it worked well.
Anyone remember that bloke from NZ who talked about building a DIY cruise missile 20 years ago? His plan back then was to use a DIY pulse jet for propulsion, desktop PC hardware for the guidance, and launch from the back of a pickup truck doing ~100km/h. I think his target price was 5000USD.
I seem to remember he attracted a bit too much attention and shelved his plans, or at least stopped publishing. The tech only seems to have become more accessible since then.
Bruce Simpson – He was interviewed on the Amp Hour:
https://theamphour.com/538-missle-man-with-bruce-simson/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Simpson_(blogger)
When I buy from Aliexpress it’s my wife that kills me…