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A phone we were developing could be made crash by taking a photo of it with a Xenon flash camera

The photoelectric effect (where metals emit electrons when hit by light); see https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...

You don't even need that. Xenon flash tubes require quite a powerful surge of high voltage electricity, and it's common for them to emit considerable amounts of radio-frequency interference.

EEVBlog made a video demonstrating that and explaining it generally: https://youtu.be/SrDfRCi1UV0

This happened to an earlier version of Raspberry Pi

Yes the phone used some of the same Broadcom chipset as the (original, I think) Raspberry Pi

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