[aqme28]

>Too many things could have gone wrong here, but they did not. The design is subpar in my opinion, for somebody who worked on a Mars rover. Custom printed board plus a bunch of smartphones, seriously?

What would you propose? The best design is often the easiest/cheapest one, and this looks like pretty simple.

[AstralStorm]

Those are very much not cheapest unless he had them lying around.

There are ready made cheap boards with identical functionality to a cellphone, few dollars a pop. And yes, they run Android.

That said, this way he can claim it had something valuable inside in case it is still taken.

[HeyLaughingBoy]

What hardware hacker doesn't? I have at least 2 Android phones and one Windows phone lying around my house in various states of functionality. Hell, I've got $200 Peltier coolers and $400 peristaltic pumps in boxes somewhere sitting unused.

I don't even know what this Mark person did, but going by comments here, if I wanted to build something similar, the only thing I'd have to go out and buy would be the glitter stuff.

Don't discount the stuff us weirdos have in our basements :-)

[ryanmercer]

>I don't even know what this Mark person did, but going by comments here,

Oh man, watch the video on his YouTube. It's pure comedic gold. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo

[raverbashing]

> made cheap boards with identical functionality to a cellphone, few dollars a pop. And yes, they run Android.

With a camera, battery and 3G modem? Got any links?

[derefr]

I guess technically, you only need one cellphone (one camera + battery + 3G modem), and the other three sides could have been implemented as action cams connected to the phone over a USB hub.

One phone (or one phone’s SD card) may not have had the IO bandwidth to receive video from four cameras at once, though.