Body Design Options

1 Fact Collection

All Oshpark PCBs (all boards inside Beta beside Microzed) are FR408 (180Tg) with 1.64mm thickness.

2 From the AXIOM Beta campaign

3 Collected Comments/Ideas/

KurtAugust (http://www.magiclantern.fm/forum/index.php?topic=11787.msg131241#msg131241):

a lot of camera bodies only have one threaded hole in the bottom. One you attach a follow focus, it quite often becomes very difficult to get this to be rock solid. Having more holes for a 15mm bars attachment would solve this

Outputs directly on main electronic board. It really doesn't take much of an impact to have a dead headphone output. For example. Too often, protruding elements are only thought of when designing the body itself, while the cable that goes in it should be considered part of the system

Wouldn't be possible to have the Beta built as a cage directly? With a lot of mounting points built in? For monitor arm, 15mm bars, heavy duty base plates etc.

intracube:

would like the camera dimensions/size to be similar to the Alexa

anton (http://octoray.co.uk/axiom/):

big and sturdy body goes well with a sealed design when the case is a 120mm*120mm*40mm piece of milled aluminium which can be cooled by external fins/fan if needed

Bertl:

it currently looks like you will be able to do that by separating the sensor module from the beta board :)

I'm all for different designs, the only real design I want to see is the skeleton. I.e. a very basic framework which holds together the PCBs for development. Probably not even featuring sides or back, just a base and maybe the fan holder for the top but that's trivial to make and we will probably make it plastic So, best to get together and figure out the perfect case. Gather feedback from the community (probably best via mailing list). It needs to be a little flexible atm, because we haven't fixed the PCB design yet, so there might be small variations in sizes, but that shouldn't be a big problem I guess.

The Beta Board itself will match the size of the attached development board, so 4x2.25" on the MicroZed and PicoZed and 3.4x2.15" for the Parallella (not sure that will be interesting for movie folks though)

Troy S:

On the housing, I forgot to mention that it is worth having six to eight beefy 3/8ths of an inch, Standard Coarse Thread body set points, female. For additional stability and support via spuds / thread.

kontrakatze:

I see some problems regarding active cooling. It not only injects dust into the camera, making it neccessary to dissasable the unit for cleaning, but also sets up a background hiss from the fans. This background hiss could make it impossible to mount mics close to the body as they would capture the hiss.

Timaloney wrote:

The only reason why one would even keep to that form factor is if it came with a built in EVF (i.e. Mirrorless still camera) or rear LCD (i.e. Blackmagic Cinema Camera), which it won't. Even if it did that form factor assumes MOST users will use it like a still camera in front of face (with bolex pistol configuration at best). I personally would prefer a rectangular shape more akin to the modular spec designs out there for the Gamma version. Something like real cinema cameras like the Amira or Aja CION even. Even just giving it a back mounted battery solution with sturdy top handle would get one more than half way there for shooting right out of the box or rigging over a user's shoulder with said user providing their own EVF. Although the Hasselblad design would be a great in between design that could make everyone happy, both handheld and shoulder mounted alike. Of course that would require for peripheries like a optical viewfinder,battery interface, and possibly detachable control handle

4 Other cameras as inspiration