U5 Matzleinsdorferplatz, in der nahe Gudrunstrasse? I've been down in those tunnels for a visit, they're extremely cool. Unfortunately we weren't allowed to take any photos.
It's weird seeing what's going to be the bit where the platform is, when they fill the big hole in with concrete, and the sloping-up tunnel that'll be the stairs and escalator, but it's all just flat grey shotcrete. It's like looking at a clay render of it before the textures and bump maps go on ;-)
Better than a greenwashed alternative is to avoid using msterial that is not necessary. Yet one also had to consider the whole lifetime of a product: ten throwaway circuits versus one very durable one etc.
Understandably the first step is to start simple, but that is the essence of my criticism: Too many of these projects become viral hits that stop making any progress after the first symbolic success. Cynics would say these projects all too often stop exactly at the point where the actual challenges start.
And as someone who cares about the environment, I am not sure how I feel about a hundred symbolic projects that go nowhere. Are the substrates of PCBs really the problem? What if people have to throw entire devices with mud PCBs into the bin after a year because the mud PCB couldn't handle the vibration and humidity? Is that environmentally sound?
I'd love to someone really explore alternative PCB materials. But that means living in reality and compsring the whole lifecycle of the result to existing technologies. A automotive tire made of mud is also environmentally sound. It is just that it falls apart after half a block.
I’ve not tried this, but it sounds like a good way to get fast turnaround for very simple circuits:
https://bsky.app/profile/castpixel.bsky.social/post/3mf52azn...
For about two seconds before I cut the power.
If you really wanted to go the route of printing plastic I guess you could fix the heat dissipation issue by using the plastic print to do lost PLA casting of an iron die with which you could cut a much thicker sheet of copper. But if you're going to melt iron you might as well give in and fire clay.
I once encountered a very old ceramic board related to telecoms. I'm not sure about the why but it consisted of a ceramic tablet with some sort of conductive resin printed onto it. A crude sort of layering was accomplished by printing a small spot of insulator on top of the junction where two traces crossed one another. I'd guess the board I saw dated to the mid 80s or earlier.
Systemic change cam be seeded from small ideas. Allow the ideas to be inefficient no matter what they are, their sum will still be tiny compared to the mass industry of established ideas. If you want change ideas are a good place to start. If the ideas are good don't reject them because of their resource use in their embryonic stage, once they are established as good ideas we can turn our mind on how to make them efficient good ideas.
I'm guessing that the issue here might have been that copper as a metal is kind of difficult to trace the source to ethically?
Also, with this method each 3D print is a new instance of using plastic, where with clay you only use plastic once
Actually now that I think about it you could just make pine rosin (pine resin + alcohol) as your adhesive. For the copper laminate this might be harder without steel rollers or a way to cut.
https://picamfg.com/pcb-base-materials/ "FR-2: Phenolic Resin with Paper Reinforcement" / https://epra.eu/en/sustainability/bio-sourced-and-bio-based-... - you could make an entirely natural-derived paper+resin circuit board, with high dimensional stability, and validated by real use.
The only downside is it's not inherently fire resistant.
https://www.bstceramicpcb.com/ceramic-pcb/thick-film-ceramic...
Likely not if you factor in the energy expenditure of gathering some firewood vs. energy expenditure of putting up a power grid.
inb4 "but it's already there" lmao
This has an advantage that the board itself is printed.
After molding and firing (say) 50 of them, those that survive will all look and work about the same. Painting the conductive traces into the printed pathways is an easy thing to get right. And then the parts are soldered on, which is also easy to get right.
The design and the pathways are predefined, and then mechanically copied (printed) over and over.
This reduces the skill required for final assembly.
Wire-wrap and point-to-point methods certainly also work, but they come with increased potential for errors at assembly so getting them right tends to require more skill. Reducing assembly skill is part of how PCBs became commonplace to begin with.
And those other methods still generally want a board of some kind to mount stuff to, anyway, just for practical handling and durability reasons. It might be a perfboard. It might also be a chunk of scrap wood from the shed (we can even add nails and Fahnestock clips to it for fixturing and connectivity!). Whatever it is, it probably still resembles a board.
But with this clay method, the provision of that board is inherent in the process. That has a distinct bit of elegance to it.
(And if we cast all logic and reason aside, then remember: This is supposed to be art. It's OK that different methods of circuit assembly exist, and it's even OK if some or all of them are better in some way.)
"We had the privilege of spending two days with this skilled craftsman, learning how to identify and collect the clay, and how to model and fire it using old, dry branches collected from the forest ground."
But I think the point of this project is to do small-scale production, not develop new techniques for mass manufacturing
Edit: ages ago, I thought of but never finished writing down an idea I had for an "anti-masterwork" for electronics. A traditional "masterwork" demonstrates knowledge of the craft by using standard techniques extremely well. So an "anti-masterwork" would demonstrate knowledge by using nonstandard techniques, or deliberately violating best practices, within the constraint of still having to actually work. A bit of a joke or troll.
One of the subideas was "design against manufacturing". Nonreproducible techniques that have to be done by hand. I considered glass and wood but this ceramic would have fit right in.
With a bit more aesthetic consideration you could even make electronic jewelery using ceramic and glass.
If you’re not familiar with it, the author posts about making everything from olive oil soap to solar cells from scratch.
In a way it's no different from LinkedIn or a VC pitch, the need to hit certain phrases to appeal to the audience.
This isn't satire and it doesn't have to be dismissed. While I don't find increasing the definition and perceived uniqueness of one's personality and identity is necessarily a positive social thing, it's pretty much the most common thing in today's world - so we shouldn't be judgemental of anyone for doing it, even if "their unique terms and identification process" don't match our own.
From a project perspective, I find this to be SO creative and VERY HELPFUL energy in terms of truly starting from a primitives/first principles perspective and shows how having a specific ethos and concept allows for development of new forms.
Like it or not, it's easy to find out the date that oil (petroleum) will run out. It's easy to see the writing on the wall for anyone who cares to see - a high tech utopia Earth will not be. So enjoying the process of pre-emptively creating new tools, new techniques, and flexible terminology - all of this will BE OF AID to all people who must live through this century together.
For example, I had a reaction to their ethical objection:
> During our initial experiments with porcelain, we were immediately aware that the higher temperatures, and therefore electric consumption, were not compatible with our standards for ethical hardware.
If an ATMega IC is in bounds, would solar-sourced electricity be in bounds? Maybe accumulated in rust batteries if lithium is out for supply chain reasons? If you’re seeking to avoid electricity in general, would technologies like bellows and charcoal-making get you where you needed to be?
Of course—as they demonstrated—why do all that, when the local clay and stick fire work just fine! In that sense, my pre-conceived requirements would have gotten in the way of my learning what they learned.
So often we’re stuck so far down the road of “the way things are done” we forget how many of those technology choices reflect path dependence along the road to maturity, rather than the One True Technique… good on the authors for developing within different, human-scale production constraints.
This of course is not scalable. But hacker technology, in its original definition, is not about scalability, but about creative use of existing things.
At scale, solar electricity of course would work better, and likely standard PCB processes would even have a smaller environmental impact. But it's not the point.
I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like.
Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.
Try google:
At what approximate date will all known reserves of petroleum be exhausted, providing that the global rate of consumption and increase in consumption remains steady, and provided that all available resources can be extracted, even if we do not currently have the technology to do so yet?
All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what they were hoping for
What's really interesting, is the boundary they are crossing given this "tech-artistry", which clearly HN is pretty far removed from. It's quite interesting for someone who's seen plenty of this before to observe the polarized response from a different slice of society.
All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what I was hoping for as an internet troll.
No it isn't! This can be estimated, but things can change rapidly. We don't even know when the Strait of Hormuz will reopen, which makes a 5% difference to global production.
Trying to put a precise date on it reminds me of the clergyman who came up with a "precise" date for the creation of the Earth of 4004 BC, by analysing the biblical genealogies.
Nor is it a hard cutoff. Each individual well is like a tap that gradually gets slower and slower, and more and more mixed with water. They are almost always shut off with some oil left in, but exactly how much depends on the oil price at that time.
> a high tech utopia Earth will not be
There are eight billion people on Earth. We're dependent on antibiotics, global food transport, and Haber nitrogen. It's either a high-tech utopia or a much, much smaller number; and we'd better hope that's achieved by falling birth rates and not by one of the other routes.
Press X to doubt.
We will be fine, we will build a high tech utopia or die trying. Anything else is defeatist nonsense.
“FEMINIST HACKING: BUILDING CIRCUITS AS AN ARTISTIC PRACTICE – an international art-based research project financed by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF)”
Doesn’t that kind of invite the worst type of trolls? They seem to imply that feminist = artistically produced, as opposed to professionally produced PCBs. So masculine = professional? But clearly that wasn’t their intention?
Feminism is originally about gender (power-) equality (and so is orthogonal to femininity and masculinity), but has been extended to other forms of power equality. I think that in this context it's about concern for certain things that established practices don't show concern for. Such concern could perhaps translate to certain power dynamics.
[1]: One of the feminist icons in recent popular culture is Ron Swanson from Parks and Recreation, who is also an icon of butch masculinity. I don't know if he would have loved or hated this. On the one hand, the description sounds hippy, which he would have hated; on the other hand, it's about do-it-yourself, non-industrial craftsmenship, which he would have loved.
> She advocates for political organizing based on "affinity"—conscious coalitions and political choices—rather than essentialist identities based on biology or shared oppression.
So, how does a Z80 webserver differ from a PCB made out of clay? Why does this particular project need to have the right kind of ideology underpinning it before we can enjoy it?
If we're uncomfortable or "have questions" because someone brings up feminism as a justification for their geeky hobby... that's on us.
Consider how calling yourself "atheist" or "rationalist" comes with some broad commitments and political tendencies, but not necessarily. We say we are an "atheist" to indicate a particular belief but also perhaps a broad attitude to culture as it stands, but not one thing or the other. Its like the same thing here!
However in a brief visit to Vienna I was blown away by the city. It’s amazing, and wish my city had a fraction the arts, sites and budget that Vienna seems to have had for a huge period of time.
https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Ethical_issues
Instead of just trying to make a rather obtuse guess, you could have instead tried looking around the website. It took me like half a second to find that link, even with the more free form UX.
The term "feminism" as an actual technical definition outside of just like "female empowerment vibes" it might be used for in the everyday language.
And I’m not really clear why this doesn’t extend further into basically all of human suffering in any society. Or perhaps extended upwards and encapsulate systems-thinking and any graph-relationship whatsoever
The term "feminism" as an actual technical definition seems to be quite loose; this strikes me as a 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon definition
You start with this:
>I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.
To which I say - why not? Is this the problem?
Because it creates weird, presumably unintentional implications. One such implication:
> They seem to imply that feminist = artistically produced, as opposed to professionally produced PCBs. So masculine = professional? But clearly that wasn’t their intention?
So feminism, in order to truly exist, HAS to fight against capitalism
That idea that you think these things are unnatural or an odd match is probably why it's a good idea they did it.
If it was a bee keeper group talking about Bee Keeper Hacking: Clay PCB would you be asking them to hide their identity?
I like it a lot. For example, it's obvious that if the NSA wanted to come into a feminist open source phone baseband for an open telephone and say "We men will tell you who you can and can't call" it will be rightly called out as patriarchal nonsense. Yet that's the world we live in today. Just the other day Zoom gave me a password of "OPSexr" on a business meeting (I created the Zoom call myself). Obviously this was a hack by NSA and not a first-party chosen by Zoom (which is professional meeting software) or random (the word doesn't have the entropy of passwords).
The way she writes like this is serious research is throwing me.