Less interesting, and not really avionics, but still part of the system. Was…
Manifold Pressure sensor, Vision Microsystems, 1999 vintage.
Dan wrote:
Less interesting, and not really avionics, but still part of the system. Was…
Manifold Pressure sensor, Vision Microsystems, 1999 vintage.
Beautiful!
IO390 wrote:
insulation between the motor wires was pulled too far back
Certain types of wire insulation shrink as they heat up. It is likely the insulation had the proper reach when originally assembled. A bad design no doubt, especially with the soldered wire ends extending beyond the PCB: worst case they should have been shaved flush.
Also heat damage and heat-protection system autoshutdown are the #1 cause of high-power electric system failures (EV flight RC as well as real-life-sized) so am surprised no attempt has been made at heat sinking on this pump.
Antonio wrote:
real-life-sized)
I just re-read that report and it was not the overtemp protection but the over-volt protection that kicked-in stopping power to the prop drive motors. Point is still cooling management is a key element on power electrics. THis is a better example.
Here is another interesting one – an Iskander missile guidance system.
Full of US parts, but at the low volumes involved (say 1k batches) this cannot be prevented.
Hardly surprising, and a lot of these parts are commodity parts (e.g. the bipolar transistors, passives, etc) churned out by the billion. Altera FPGA and CPLDs seem to have been popular in Russia for years so they probably have significant on-the-shelf stocks from before the war anyway.
Yes; it is impossible to stop production of 30 year old weapons. I think people trying to do that just don’t realise how old this stuff is that’s being used in Ukraine.
And that is on both sides. 30 year old obsolete old junk supplied by the West is a match for Russia’s state of the art 
I wonder if Russia made those FOGs. The laser diodes mounted inside them are American.
The other thing is the small size and ubiquity of a lot of these components – how hard would it be for a Russian agent to order a bunch of them off Mouser, supply them to the local embassy, then have them smuggled out in the diplomatic bag? How many laser diodes can you get in a briefcase? Quite a lot!
Indeed – the USSR embassy in Vienna and the “diplomatic bag” was the choice route, for all including a VAX11-780
And you have time on your side – you have many years to accumulate stocks.
And that’s before you find the chinks will sell you almost anything… and nowadays their e.g. IR imaging products are pretty good, and they make copies of STM32 CPUs and such.
Historically anything could be obtained via Israel; ironically I bought some milspec 6 pole relays that way (great for LOC+GS+flags switching) which were export-controlled due to being spare parts for the Iranian F4 fleet
There will still be stuff which can be controlled but it won’t be semiconductors – because even a $10 STM32 is plenty fast enough for any missile. It will be stuff like miniature FOG parts, I guess.
