Circular Microcomputers embedded and powered by repurposed smartphone components

by Bluestein • 1 year ago

93 24 1 year ago

I like the idea.

But I think they have smoked too much dope.

150€ excl. VAT for the 'dev-kit', which is nothing else than some low to midrange, RPI-like SBC, soldered together from used stuff(no matter how, roboticcally, by hand) is not competitive.

15 to 50 would be.

bArray• 1 year ago

It's literally cheaper to build this kind of thing from scratch than to try and re-use existing components like this.

Maybe there is still a market at this price point, for example if there are tax breaks, or the price of the thing you are selling is so much that the customer just swallows the extra price.

I still think it would be better if we were to go the way of modular systems. I'm currently building out a controller system that has a modular interface and should be upgradeable as I swap out components and improve it, without adding much to the overall footprint. I think this really is the way forwards with this kind of thing.

garbthetill• 1 year ago

yeah the website says a whole bunch of nothing imo & doesnt really define a problem needing to be solved, perhaps they've struck a deal with phone carrier's to get unsold phones that are destined for the landfill as they have a t-mobile logo on their site, thats the only business aspect I can imagine get 10s of million worth of components for like a 1/10 of the price etc

google is telling me around 400k phone like devices are thrown out into landfills everyday, there might be a market to bring down costs eventually if they get logistics properly moving

msgodel• 1 year ago

You should be able to just reflash the phone and maybe point a small fan at the case. OEMs do everything they can to make that impractical though.

rjsw2• 1 year ago

They seem to be treating the old phone as modular, they mount the old PCB on a carrier board with more I/O, they don't look to be desoldering individual chips.

grues-dinner• 1 year ago

I still think it would be better if we were to go the way of modular systems.

Modularity can be expensive, though. The unused IO soaks up pins and pushes you to bigger packages and up the SOIC/QFP/QFN/BGA chain. You add multiplexers and transceivers and buffers and so on. The traces take board space and layers and the connectors cost a big chunk of the BOM. Separate modules add SKUs and manufacture, assembly and inventory overhead, and the offboard interfaces take space, power and time.

Whenever you have any appreciable volume, it's almost always cheaper to integrate and demodularise, even before you consider the physical size and form factor of the device.

Otherwise all embedded systems would be made of dev boards wearing a hat. Now, yes, there are many systems that use something like a RPi Compute Module or a TI ControlCard, but once you crack a certain volume, it's an easy cost optimisation to "flatten" it into a single PCB.

And the one thing you do not want from designing around a module is the possibility that the supply of surplus OldPhone X3 mainboards or whatever dries up in two years and it turns out the new generation of modules are just a bit different.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

If you only built it for the most popular models of end of life phones, maybe you could get the price point down enough to sell the. At a profit. But for everything else just forget it. A raspi is cheaper with a better community.

voidUpdate• 1 year ago

Disappointed that the microcomputers are not, in fact, circular

uticus• 1 year ago

Agreed.

From the About page: "...we demonstrate the technical feasibility and economical viability of circular business models..." I guess that means circular as in "recycled" parts?

rjsw2• 1 year ago

Circular economy [1] is a well understood term.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy

mystified5016• 1 year ago

These are neither circular nor microcomputers.

Also the entire website reads like an 8th grader trying to pad out an essay to hit the page count requirement. Lots of words just taking up space. Also the same level of language mastery, they really need a proofreader.

hinkley2• 1 year ago

ESL might have something to do with it. That address is in Belgium.

DrNosferatu• 1 year ago

Very nice!

A tax reduction would be fair, in the amount of the effective circularity.

But the price needs to come down - ideally by one order of magnitude.

lproven• 1 year ago

Circular

You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Bluestein• 1 year ago

(Might someday 'AI robots' be knowledgeable enough to make [whatever] ends meet, and just be thrown bulk e-waste to automatically come up with [whatever useful components] can be salvaged - given a certain stock of parts, incoming?

That'd be circular for sure ...)

GianFabien• 1 year ago

It's not the AI that is the challenge. It is the robotics - actuators, vision systems, etc to actually perform the work.

neuroelectron• 1 year ago

Certainly an interesting idea. Hopefully usb-c standardization will make it trivial to repurpose old phones as desktop computers. They should support a hub, usb keyboard/mouse and 4k display output. Powered hub should support a variety of external storage easily as well.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 1 year ago

I love this and I wonder why it hasn't been done sooner considering the demand for RPIs and that your phone's hardware is more powerful.

mrheosuper2• 1 year ago

Lack of document and source code. It's hard to boot a custom OS if you dont have DeviceTree or even being able to modify the bootchain.

Animats• 1 year ago

That's cute, but you need a huge supply of identical discarded phones to make it go.

The Raspberry Pi is, after all, a repurposed tablet computer.

mrheosuper2• 1 year ago

This is exactly what we need. There must be thousands of smartphone being thrown away everyday. Even a cheap android phone has hardware spec than the raspberry pi4. Such a shame that manufactures soft-lock it so that we can not recycle them meaningfully.

Circular Microcomputers embedded and powered by repurposed smartphone components

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