And we've back to clay tablets! Cuneiform would be fitting.
Clay PCB Tutorial
121–130 of 163 posts
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#122I feel like foregoing the whole PCB would be better, and just wirewrap, or "free-air" solder.
Perhaps.
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.)
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#123As an electonics labs person I applaude all efforts to mske our practise more renewable. However this is a circuit that I would have wired without PCB at all, directly point to point, wire to pin. 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.
They’re investigating “can circuits be produced from”, not asserting “this is a better medium for this exact circuit”. It is a tutorial on creating clay PCBs at all, a demo of the technique.
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
>The "Arduina" bit is clearly a joke How familiar are you with subversion of gendered language in feminist spaces? Calling it an "Arduina board" would not be out of the ordinary at all. Which, by the way, they would definitely know, and I very much doubt they are satirizing feminists.
Yes I would say I am quite familiar with such spaces and have even read relevant theory. The subversion of language is sometimes poetic, sometimes just "play". Regardless, the fact that so much of this masc-biased website's energy is being sucked in on this little prickle is evidence that the strategy is quite effective
>The subversion of language is sometimes poetic, sometimes just "play".
...And the vast majority of the time, activism.
>Regardless, the fact that so much of this masc-biased website's energy is being sucked in on this little prickle is evidence that the strategy is quite effective
In the same way that covering yourself in feces is effective to keep undesirables away, yes. It works. It keeps everybody away, though, and make people think less of you.
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#125I understand but if they succeeded, it would mean that they would be destroying even more the environment as they would be able to take mud from everywhere
The materials they are hoping to replace are some of the least accessible, extracted with some of the most caustic industrial processes. What are you even talking about?
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article acknowledges this, and says they chose clay over ceramics for electricity consumption. Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power
>Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power 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
The reason the power grid exists is because enough people want to do enough of this kind of activity that if we were still burning wood to do it there would be no trees left. Scale does matter, and this kind of 'sustainability' can't sustain a fraction of the people on the planet.
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#127I understand but if they succeeded, it would mean that they would be destroying even more the environment as they would be able to take mud from everywhere
The materials they are hoping to replace are some of the least accessible, extracted with some of the most caustic industrial processes. What are you even talking about?
They talk about conflict materials but this is replacing FR4, which is pretty cheap. It's basically glass and glue.
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#128Interesting project but I can't tell, is the language used supposed to be satire?
Honestly, the language isn't super off or abnormal in other circles, maybe it's a lot more telling that when posted on a tech-oriented site it's seen as ridiculous
I think it feels naive, to me. It's a fun project in terms of experimenting with techniques and materials, but it's very far from relevant in terms of the more abstract goals and ideas they discuss.
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, that's exactly the focus of modern feminist studies. Figures like Donna Haraway have pushed for a field of study that goes beyond identities of womanhood. > She advocates for political organizing based on "affinity"—conscious coalitions and political choices—rather than essentialist identities based on biology or shared oppression.
If the goal is to decouple feminism from feminine identities, which by definition means it then also needs to apply to masculine identities, then I think they need a new name. Also, it appears that >99% of feminism researchers are publishing their scientific papers with a feminine name. I can easily understand why the general public might confuse the 2 groups with each other. Which brings me back to the question: wha…
The Democratic Republic of Congo holds between 60-80% of the world’s coltan reserves, a key input to capacitors and other discrete electronics. UN investigators have identified systematic rape and sexual violence as a strategy of armed groups controlling regions containing these minerals, over 113k individual instances in 2023 alone. Phones keep getting made.
To me, this project is arguing that we don’t necessarily need to tolerate systemic rape, exploitation, economic inequality, and other forms of violence to have our little circuits.
Re: Clay PCB Tutorial
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The name of the site and I think the group itself is "feminist hacking", the entire point of the research group appears to be examining the ethics of technology and hacking through a feminist lens. 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 wi…
I mean, the technical definition provided “the movement to end sexism, sexual exploitation and sexual oppression'” is expanded quite rapidly into including racism and then labor practices (which I’m very much struggling with the jump; the link appears to be that both involve power relationships?). And I’m not really clear why this doesn’t extend further into basically all of human suffering in any society. Or perhaps…
> expanded quite rapidly into including racism and then labor practices
The jump you referring to is a quote with a reference attached. But in short terms so that might be useful to Google, but in short the concept of intersectionality means that things like feminism and anti-racism and other forms of prejudice can potentially be inter-related in terms of using different forms of marginalization as tools to enforce a hierarchy.
> which I’m very much struggling with the jump; the link appears to be that both involve power relationships? 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
Not to really go off the rails too much but you sort of just given a not too bad description of anarchism, so like yeah it wouldn't necessarily be a leap to extrapolate that and plenty of people do