The "carrier" that everything rides on within the housing is clearly FDM printed as well. I assume these cameras (rated to 6,000 meters) are rather low volume products.
It honestly makes sense. You are paying for the pressure engineering, and can take advantage of an off the shelf camera system. Maybe use a special lens or filter or something but why bother customizing the software/hardware of the camera much.
They probably should still know what it's doing though...
>What's with the entire dev board crammed in there? Is that... normal?
Yep. I designed boards for cameras like this (and the vehicles they are mounted on) for 20 years. When you're only going to sell ~30 a year, and it's going into a $7k enclosure, the extra $7 for the dev board you used during prototyping isn't even a consideration. Go ahead and design around the breadboard, at this low volume it's WAY cheaper than the time to re-design the support circuitry from scratch and it gives you time to start working on the NEXT project that has already been sold to customers with a delivery date quickly looming.
Many times I have heard the tech stack for the subsea industry called "Shop & Glue."
I have seen engineers slap Teensies on a PCB and call it a day, so it’s definitely normal. It’s faster than having to route your MCU, USB, debugger, etc. manually, so there isn’t really a drawback as long as it physically fits there.
Common misconception. A handful of capacitors, SPI NOR flash, an inductor, and a crystal is way easier to place and route than a restrictive module that completely disables your ability to use SWD/JTAG on an otherwise excellent MCU.
The "carrier" that everything rides on within the housing is clearly FDM printed as well. I assume these cameras (rated to 6,000 meters) are rather low volume products.