On Sun, Dec 6, 2020 at 10:38 PM Punk-BatSoup-Stasi 2.0 <punks@tfwno.gf> wrote:
On Sun, 6 Dec 2020 22:00:40 -0500 Karl <gmkarl@gmail.com> wrote:
(yes, I do get components for my electronics projects from the landfill)
I used to desolder boards, and I've visited electronics recycling places.
There are no recycling places here, so I do the recycling myself =)
I haven't gone into a literal landfill myself ;p Once I found a dumpster full of desktop computers.
I picked most of my stuff off the street. Some came from dumpsters. Last thing I picked was a couple of 40kg digital scales. And oh, I have a bunch of retardphones, some from the 90s, some newer, and guess what? The newer the phone the more useless as far as recycling goes. The newest ones don't have any discrete components at all. Some of the chips don't even packages. They are uniform blocks of silicon.
I haven't seen that, and it sounds a little strange to me. Do you have a photo? I usually plan to use phones by installing apps on them using their existing operating system. With Kivy you can write python that runs the same on iOS and android. Here in new england we say 'dumbphone' for the phones that have a black and white display and don't kidnap your eyeballs and social connections with advertisements, to counter 'smartphone'. 'smartphone' i think usually gets some descriptor around how it is watching you all the time without your consent. 'retardphone' is more appropriate but nobody in my communities understands that the danger warrants and causes the name, yet.
Same thing with printers : the old ones have many parts that can be remade into a '3d printer', but the new ones have a small board with some kind of SoC which is completely useless, unless you have their 'propietary' manuals. And even then the chip is likely to be locked.
The manuals or at least some information used to be findable on the internet if one learned the meaning of the numbers on the chip package. Sometimes they were in chinese, though. I've never pulled a microcontroller from a printer, though; I've only looked at smaller chips in that kind of space. I found an article once on reverse engineering chip circuitry using a confocal microscope and some analysis software. My friend had a confocal microscope, but I only learned he had it around 2013 when my life stopped.
It's usually designed to break in some stupid way where most of the components still last for years and years. I never figured out how to glitch microcontrollers to reprogram them with the fuses blown,
I've found a few microcontrollers but they are useless without manuals, even if the fuses were not blown.
I found manuals on the website of the chip manufacturer. I was able to order more chips from them, to experiment with, too, for cents-per-chip.
but I understand that there is much better material available on how, nowadays 7 years later.
Actually as times goes by stuff gets more and more miniaturized and integrated...and becomes un-recyclable.
Very precise tools needed eventually.
but HEY, this is SCIENTIFIC PROGRESS and the FREE MARKET, and SCIENCE WILL EXPLAIN EVERYTHING and <insert more technofascist slogans here>
We are Science. We leap off the cliff of faith into the happy community of workers below. Somebody's always caught us before! Of course, the scientific community/ies are thinking about all this stuff with a lot of potential wise deliberation. Their power is just filtered by the journals, funders, institutions, and communities they work with.
You could make a puppet to continue my side of the argument, saying something like 'home 3d printing is way better than industrial factories' over and over again.
Yeah, I don't disagree with the concept, but it's easier said than done.
The concept of the puppet or of the printer? Maybe I see where you're coming from better. 3d printers are used by people who don't need them, for fun. So it's hard to use them where the concept would be needed; the concept isn't reasonably designed for a real-world community. They're more like a daydream that is discovering the value of helpfulness but hasn't found it yet. Makerspaces started making medical supplies in the usa for this coronavirus thing, but they weren't on top of it. The makerspace model could have expanded medical capacity instantly by spreading the norm of helping and learning to help, rather than the help itself, but instead corporations and governments want to be in control and the makerspaces and mutual aid efforts are still kept relegated to hobby-types who happen to be interested, rather than recognised as a solution that can be far faster and more effective than centralised aid.