Hi check out this thing. This is the 360 cam from a company called Gyre Optic and they started out as a kickstart project. They got one and a half million bucks or there abouts. - I Developed this through really funky looking 360-degree camera and this is one of the first early development prototype units.

It's definitely not the finished product, but Matt dropped by he was one of the early backers and there's a reason for it which you'll see in the next couple of months in an upcoming video which I'm sure everyone will like. Anyway, there's a reason why I'm taking some 360-degree camera footage of the louver here anyway. Um yeah, I Thought we'd just take a quick look at this early develop. a prototype.

Doesn't look quite funky. We've got a metal base here. You'll notice all the heatsink fittings on there so they're trying to increase the surface area there. The thing does get quite warm when it actually runs, so they must be running this thing at like you know, really full speed.

Where you know I guess in that there's you know, either an FPGA in there or they're running like an ARM processor without linux. but like a really fast one. Because the interesting thing about this, It's got three HD cameras on here. They're all you know at fixed angles like that with real wide-angle fisheye lenses on them.

That's why they can get full 360-degree coverage around here with only the three cameras. The interesting thing is they do all of the 360 degree videos which stitching in this thing 30 frames per second in real time Hardware all that stitching so it must. They must ever be doing that in some sort of FPGA or some sort of maybe some sort of GPU or something like that. or maybe just a really fast Linux Um, process on something like that where? Guess in anyway or it could be it may not be running an OS like Linux it could be completely proprietary.

Anyway, this clips off here here and here. like this has got a tripod mount the bottom which is not deep enough. We have to actually use a spacer - I get that on a regular tripod so that was a bit of a fail. We're gonna microUSB here which you can get the data out of or charge the thing and it's it's.

got this side rubber around the outside in fact. Well, we'll pair it up in a minute. Concern: I'll show you something really funky. but yeah, there we go Tada, we're in like Flynn and unfortunately we can't see the electronics.

but we do have some photos of the electronics and here they are from the Kickstarter update page. so we can, you know see a good lot of what's inside. This rubber material is actually, um, semi-transparent as you'll see in a minute with the display, it looks like they've glued that onto the body there and it looks like they've probably glued in this into the base of it. So yeah, sorry, but we're not going to not going to destroy.

Matt's camera goes for about 2 500 bucks. How much did you pay for the developer unit map? He was $12.99 12 12 9 / 4 - $12.99 for -. There we go for 2 developer units and you'll see why Matt needs one in the knee in the next couple of months. I'm gonna go on site and he's going to show us something really cool.

Anyway, there is the battery I'm not sure if that is like a standard size or whether they've developed their own one, but that's 1118 milliamp hours 4.37 watt hours which is you know, quite reasonable lithium-ion battery I Like the fact one interesting design aspect of this thing is that they use this board to board interconnect on the bottom here. so presumably or this base gets are really quite hot. so presumably all of the battery at least the battery charging is in there. but because it even gets hot when it's when it's just being used and not charged presumably I would say like voltage regulation all done in here as well.

maybe for different don't rails for the CPUs or and/or FPGAs or whatever it is they're using inside this thing. So I think maybe or your power regulation is done in the bottom there. and the interesting thing about and the reason I say that is because you can get different attachments like this. You can get one that actually screw it like it has an Edison screw attachment and it screws into your Edison screw light bulb socket on your roof so you can just hang your camera from the roof.

That's really quite funky and it is designed to be water proof, hence why they've got the rubber seal on there. It's not great if you really want to be properly water proof. you've got to grease up that ring of course, but it's probably good enough for the odd splash and things like that I'm sure and it's designed in France There we go. I Don't want my French for yours but I made in the People's Republic of China Why can't they make it in France Come on.

I'm sure you can. Anyway, a very early prototype by the website is 360 dot TV They've even got the QR code on there. and there's the battery terminals. What? Actually, considering that the battery goes actually I Just thought, considering that the battery goes into there, maybe they don't have voltage regulation in the bottom? Hmm.

I Don't know if then you'd have to feed it through there and then back through this connector back into here and then your voltage regulation goes out. Anyway, that's quite a lot of pins on that board to board interconnect there. It really is quite nice and you can get different attachments, different things to plug on the bottom. So I Really like the design of this thing.

It really is funky. It really is quite small. I mean if you have a look at the size of that I mean it just fits in my hand like that. It really is really is quite novel.

So I'm got an SD card down in there and that's it. So as you can see the clips I haven't done up these two clips here yet. but interesting little clip arrangement I'm not sure the longevity of that but probably seems seems okay and that will of course compress it and help keep the own help and give a constant pressure around all sides on the o-ring which is what you I need. You need even pressure right around so that's you know.

It's not a bad design at all, and by the way, it does these little holes here microphones. It's got a spatial microphone array and spatial microphone technology, but unfortunately we have had no luck whatsoever with the audio on this thing. It is absolutely awful so we don't know if we're doing something wrong. Well, there's something wrong with this development unit.

Keep in mind this is a complete development unit. We have shots and 360-degree footage of the lab. It just says it to a regular Mpeg-4 file. Our 2048 by a thousand 24 resolution on the thing are 30 frames per second with just regular audio embedded in it and you just take out that file saves it to Mpeg-4 in here.

You don't have to convert it on a PC or anything, you just upload that direct to YouTube and YouTube recognizes that it's a wide format you know, 360-degree video and it treats it as such and you can watch it and pan around side to side and up and down in full 360-degree Although what they've done is they've water marked as you'll see. follow the link to go to the real footage here in the lab. They've actually water in the firmware. here.

they've water marked the bottom of the image. so if you pan right down so if you look you know right down like that, you can see that they've watermark the bottom of em is saying this is a development prototype. It's not representative of the final quality, all that sort of jazz. So anyway, it's got two buttons here.

Yes, it does have Wi-Fi like this and it's got a really funky display. Watch this. Come on, you can do it. Look at that.

It's got these LEDs which show up. Now here's a photo of the internal LED array. It's basically got an array of little tiny surface mount diodes on a flat flex and that's how they're getting the display and it's really quite. It's got, you know, it, scrolls and everything like that and we can record video like if I just press that Now it starts recording There we go and press it again and that's the file name.

There we go. It just wrote the Mp4 file and then we've got the various modes over here. We can take a photo, you can take a 360. No, it's waiting.

Yeah oh goodness. but it's really funky. What's the bar graph at the bottom? Matt And that was the battery level. I Thought it was alright.

we're waiting waiting. It really is quite slow and we have had it lock up. We have had an error when we tried to disable the gyro in it. It does have a gyro inside and we so there we go and take a photo so it counts down and then it will take a photo.

Oh we haven't tried burst but yet. multiple photos at once. So and it's time. L Our time lapse, time lapse, photos and that little thing is supposed to be a spanner that goes into your setup and you can set up various parameters.

You can turn the Wi-Fi off and on. There'll be a LED behind that the Wi-Fi lights up and things like that and the what we we originally thought other Wi-Fi might be causing interference with the microphone. it like drops out. but no it seems to make no difference.

So I'm not sure what's going on with the audio but yeah check it out. I Just thought you'd show you this development prototype. It's the first one. They were like four months behind schedule or something actually delivering this thing.

We think they've shipped like just over 50 units to the early backers who wanted one A in early development units, so it's a little bit rough and ready. This firmware issue is the audio yeah, sucks I unless we're doing something horribly wrong and the videos you know, quite pixelated Go over and have a look at it and you can see the Eevblog lab in 360 degree. But I just really like the concept. It really is quite nice package really well.

I mean you know the the envelope design that you have to get your electronics to fit in there and there's no surprise it gets hot. You know to do real-time video stitching at 30 frames per second is just. it requires a whole bunch of grainy processing. So yeah, you know, if it does have an arm process of doing that, it's probably running at you know, 800 megahertz? or you know something like that or must be really screaming along? Or it could be using an FPGA as I said or some sort of GPU chip.

Unfortunately, we don't have any internal photos. if anyone does have any more info on it or maybe the developers can if they're watching this, can leave it in the comments maybe and tell us it's not open hardware as it matt not open-source No, no, we don't think it's open source hardware, so it's you know, just a regular commercial product. But it's been recording for almost 5 minutes now as you can see. and let's get a look at the thermal profile of it.

and sorry about the overhead light and crap like that, but you can see that it is the bottom that really gets quite warm even though it's not being charged. There we go that top. It's actually that part of it that gets really hot, so the lower part of the bottom. So that's where all the processing is.

So there you go. you can see where all the processing is happening. In all the voltage regulation, they're going to have some loss in there. Your DC to DC converters aren't going to be.

You know they're only going to be 90% efficient tops. So yeah, there's lots of pair in there. Of course there's no, you know, there's no air flow at all. There's no way they can do that.

It's all passive radiator with the heatsink. There you go. That's just the thermal. Look at the 360 cam.

after six minutes it will will warm up a bit more. But yeah, it's getting up to like 45 degrees or something. so it's getting a little bit toasty in there right about now to be warmer inside. of course.

I'm not sure if they like Phil I Don't think they feel it with like a you know a gel or you know a thermal compound that like potted or anything like that to get the heat out. So who knows that how they're getting the heat from the main processor in there. which would be the thing that's contributing most of the power dissipation in this things. and you can see some misalignment in the like my thumb to the thermal image there.

That's just the camera because I'm actually closer than the 30 centimeter distance there. but there you go. 45 degrees. so I'm not sure if the processor is got some you know heat spreader or heat sink on top to actually spread that power.

Whether or not they're flipped, the processor you know is pressed on the other side like is on the bottom side of the board down here. that that would be how if I was designing this thing. that's how I do it. I would put the I would put the processor on the bottom of the board and then put a thermal pad between it and the base of the unit.

But don't you? The poor old battery is trapped in there of course. and but yeah, you can see because the o-ring seal. There's not much hate that's getting from like the where it's being generated through to the base of the unit like this. So yeah, it's just it's you know it's helping of course, but it's not happening too much.

It doesn't help that you've got all the plastic over the top of the thing either. So anyway, there you go. There's a quick thermal look at that. It's been running for nine minutes now and little bit warm, but yeah, she'll be right.

no worries. And I'm not sure if the battery gauge is linear or not, but yeah, after like 10 minutes of you, she saw where it was before it had like bars up to here and it's yeah, it's um, it's really sucking the juice out of this thing assuming that that's a linear bar graph and what voltage they drop out out I don't know, but I'm going to give them better for the doubt that they've got their bene battery management correct in that respect, but you know there's there's only a four watt hour battery. so I'm not sure what the quoted battery life of this thing is if it's in the spec, so I'll annotate on there. but yeah, it's really chewing the power.

Hmm, but it's got to do a lot. I mean 30 frames per second stitching from three HD cameras in real time? That's just that's crazy. and this is connected to a charger now and you can see that the processor hotspot is now up to 50 odd and the bottom is now up to 45. So that's to be expected because you're generating heat in the bottom that's going to radiate to the top as well, increasing that the average temperature in the top half.

so you can't shoot video while it's doing USB charge in, but that's just another data point for you about 50. We've only had it going for like a few minutes on the USB charge of five minutes. And here's their our development kit box that they shipped it in. there.

we go first batch whoo and today it opens up and Turner folds out. Beautiful bit of a wank there. but I you know it's how do you package something like that. There's got to be a fair bit of, you know, wasted space in your packaging, but that's nice foam packaging.

Really like that. It's really cute. Sammy Okay, early development prototype and they've implemented it quite nicely. It's just it.

You know it's got a lot of issues and needs some ironing out, but there you go there's the Joy Optic 360 cam. Hope you liked it. Catch you next time you, you.