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jna_sh
ErroneousBosh
> But they also had some clay from deep beneath Vienna that they got from (iirc) some new metro digging
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 ;-)
atoav
As 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.
itsdesmond
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.
atoav
Yes. And thus using a circuit that has the complexity of a circuit one would put onto a circuit board would be a good demonstration. E.g. showcasing vias and other circuit board technologies.
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.
itsdesmond
You’re bringing so much weird baggage to this. A viral hit? This is a ~2,300 word piece, equivalent to an article in The Atlantic introducing a 30 page PDF tutorial and code repo which is ran as a workshop in hacker spaces and at conferences. It isn’t a proposal for a new scale industrial process seeking VC funding.
You’re critiquing it for not being something you value, but it isn’t trying to be that thing. They’re not doing the thing you think they are badly, they’re doing something you haven’t bothered to understand.
Honestly, I think the only way one could look at this and bring that critique is if they both didn’t look at shit but the pictures and saw the word “feminist” used and began to intellectually infantilize the authors.
jand
> 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.
What can you do to ensure the "real work" can actually be done, more precise paid for? Well, you could demo early in hope to attract coins. Maybe that is happening here.
codebje
I love freeform wire circuits.
skybrian
Interesting experiment, but on the other hand, maybe 3D printing would have less emissions than an open fire?
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...
lrasinen
They're not great for anything that might produce heat. Seeing a MOSFET slowly starting to imitate the Tower of Pisa after dissipating a measly 1 W for a few moments was a sight to behold.
For about two seconds before I cut the power.
fc417fc802
If heat dissipation matters and we're determined to 3D print at home then extruding a clay is probably the way to go. Laser sintering also seems relevant. For anyone concerned about an open fire a small electric oven isn't particularly expensive.
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.
jedimastert
CO2 emissions from burning wood (and charcoal) can considered net-zero by some (I'm not really interested in arguing one way or the other) because all of the CO2 being released was initially trapped out of the air by the plant, not releasing "new" carbon that was initially trapped underground
skybrian
There’s more to pollution than CO2. You’re polluting the neighborhood with smoke, which is bad for lungs. Maybe okay in a rural area if neighbors are far away.
ktm5j
People have been standing around fires since the dawn of fire. Live a little.
ssl-3
I guess we can just keep ordering pre-stuffed PCBs from JLCPCB. This way, the pollution involved in the various processes still exists, but it's hidden from view behind a box of minty-new circuit boards delivered to the doorstep.
Or, you know: If the neighbors take up a serious hobby-scale effort of wood-fired pottery project with local clay that they mined themselves, then... Perhaps we could be supportive of their effort, eh? Isn't that part of what being neighborly involves?
numpad0
There's nothing environmentally friendly about burning woods good old prehistoric ways. It releases tons of particulates and nitrogen oxides and some other toxic hydrocarbons. That's why it's illegal now in many regions to burn trashes in the backyard.
Lerc
Do you not think it might be counterproductive considering every new activity in terms of emissions output? We need to reduce emissions, to do this we need systemic change. It seems unfair to place the burdon of reaching efficiency gains that can only come from economoes of scale onto anything that that has not reached scale.
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.
jszymborski
I'm sure the clay could be fired in an electric kiln powered by renewable/non-emitting power.
Arodex
Wood fired are CO2 neutral (but a problem of pollution with fine particulate at scale in poorly ventilated valleys).
WarmWash
It's an art project
itsdesmond
I want so badly for you to expand on this thought. What are you implying about it by describing it as an art project? What does art mean to you? Are you expanding on or disputing whether it is an experiment? Please, go on.
TranquilMarmot
Meant to be a fun thing to do/experience/learn and not produced on an industrial scale. One small fire pit to harden some clay isn't going to make a material impact on total human CO2 emissions.
jedimastert
That's a cool project, I've actually considered something somewhere but never put the energy into actually doing the work.
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
belval
For me the next step should explore how to cut out the firing part of the process altogether, pottery looks cool but the process requires a lot of energy. Perhaps it could be done on a piece of wood planed by hand? You can get those fairly flat. Then use copper tape (or laminate your own copper really) with some homemade adhesive?
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.
analog31
Amusing historical note, that's where the word "breadboard" came from. Wooden cutting boards were readily available, and people would make circuits by screwing down tube sockets and other components.
pjc50
Dredged from memory is the "phenolic" circuit board, popular before about 1990.
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.
jna_sh
For what it’s worth, these can be fired in a campfire! No kiln or anything necessary.
amelius
Ceramics are already used a lot in electronics. Ceramic capacitors are the most well known. But you can find it in resistors, inductors and even PCBs. See for example:
https://www.bstceramicpcb.com/ceramic-pcb/thick-film-ceramic...
kube-system
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
balamatom
>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
kube-system
Well, the atmega fab was already there and that isn’t quite clean either :)
But there are many clean ways to generate electricity and electric kilns are quite efficient compared to heating over an open flame.
I like the artistic element of this exercise, just thought that line of reasoning was a bit off.
rcxdude
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.
poulpy123
You need a grid infrastructure to build and ship the rest of the electronics as well as to use the board.
It's a fun dit/artistic project but the political discourse used to describe it is absurd
itsdesmond
Dope. Reminds me of the https://highlowtech.org/ research group at MIT Media Lab early 2010s, specifically kit-of-no-parts from Hannah Perner-Wilson and Leah Buechley. They were doing copper electroplated clay dead-bug circuits and other wild shit.
fallat
I feel like foregoing the whole PCB would be better, and just wirewrap, or "free-air" solder.
ssl-3
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.)
amelius
How would you handle LQFP or BGA packages?
svens_
What do you think the minimum pad clearance is for the clay?
You can dead bug an LQFP if you absolutely have to…
Brian_K_White
[flagged]
kennywinker
How well did Albert Hanson’s flat foil board handle BGAs?
Instead of looking for flaws, try looking for the insight. I’m reminded of this blog post that was on hn recently https://scottlawsonbc.com/post/shooting-down-ideas
foltik
What a rude and shallow thing to say about a creative project.
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josh-wrale
I'm thinking of finer grained applications. Would CNC before firing work? Perhaps finer grained printed stamp plus air-drying clay?
kennywinker
i don’t think air dry clay would work very well - it has none of the thermal properties that real clay has, and would probably burn up on soldering?
chasil
I am wondering what of this could be used in high-volume industrial processes.
"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."
jedimastert
I think the entire point of the project and potentially the research group is looking at manufacturing while explicitly/intentionally steering away from high volume and industrial processes.
kennywinker
You can buy clay industrially, if you don’t care where it’s from.
But I think the point of this project is to do small-scale production, not develop new techniques for mass manufacturing
pjc50
I think they're sufficiently opposed to high-volume industrial processes as a concept that they would select techniques that cannot be scaled in that way. Part of the art, I suppose.
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.
tripzilch
I love that idea (the "anti-masterwork")
harvie
Can you just lay pieces of copper wire in the slots and fire it again to melt them into the clay surface?
swiftcoder
Not on an open fire, I think. In a proper temperature-controlled electronic kiln, yes
pugworthy
This would fit in some ways with the Simplifier site.
If you’re not familiar with it, the author posts about making everything from olive oil soap to solar cells from scratch.
motbus3
I 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
itsdesmond
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?
rcxdude
They talk about conflict materials but this is replacing FR4, which is pretty cheap. It's basically glass and glue.
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Got to take part in this when they ran it at Creative Coding Utrecht. They had brought a variety of clays for us to use, most wild dug from forests in Austria. But they also had some clay from deep beneath Vienna that they got from (iirc) some new metro digging. It was a lot of fun and the end artefact is very pleasing.