Clay PCB Tutorial

https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Clay-PCB-Tutorial

by j0r0b0 • 3 months ago

243 133 3 months ago

feministhackerspaces.cargo.site

amelius4• 3 months ago

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-system4• 3 months ago

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

balamatom2• 3 months ago

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

josh-wrale• 3 months ago

I'm thinking of finer grained applications. Would CNC before firing work? Perhaps finer grained printed stamp plus air-drying clay?

kennywinker5• 3 months ago

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?

WarmWash2• 3 months ago

Truly stonepunk

Teknomadix• 3 months ago

Stoned punks for sure.

fallat• 3 months ago

I feel like foregoing the whole PCB would be better, and just wirewrap, or "free-air" solder.

amelius4• 3 months ago

How would you handle LQFP or BGA packages?

svens_• 3 months ago

What do you think the minimum pad clearance is for the clay?

You can dead bug an LQFP if you absolutely have to…

namuol• 3 months ago

https://youtu.be/edERx4x5eY0

https://mitxela.com/projects/soldering_wlcsp

ssl-32• 3 months ago

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.)

skybrian3• 3 months ago

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...

WarmWash2• 3 months ago

It's an art project

itsdesmond6• 3 months ago

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.

lrasinen• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

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.

jedimastert7• 3 months ago

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

skybrian3• 3 months ago

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.

numpad02• 3 months ago

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.

amelius4• 3 months ago

That link sounds interesting but I can't open it :(

skybrian3• 3 months ago

Seems temporary, try again.

jedimastert7• 3 months ago

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

Arodex• 3 months ago

Wood fired are CO2 neutral (but a problem of pollution with fine particulate at scale in poorly ventilated valleys).

jszymborski• 3 months ago

I'm sure the clay could be fired in an electric kiln powered by renewable/non-emitting power.

Lerc• 3 months ago

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.

deadeye• 3 months ago

Interesting project but I can't tell, is the language used supposed to be satire?

nicole_express• 3 months ago

The "Arduina" comment definitely made me think it might be at least a little satirical in nature

jedimastert7• 3 months ago

It's not, the entire site appears to be a serious examination of technology and hacking ethics through a feminist lens

jedimastert7• 3 months ago

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

rcxdude3• 3 months ago

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.

pjc504• 3 months ago

It's a bit Sokal Hoax, in that you have to be quite familiar with this kind of thing to be able to distinguish it from satire. But a lot of "artist's statements" are written that way. If you go into a museum and find an incomprehensible objet d'art with a small explanatory plaque next to it, the plaque will be written like this.

In a way it's no different from LinkedIn or a VC pitch, the need to hit certain phrases to appeal to the audience.

chasil• 3 months ago

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."

kennywinker5• 3 months ago

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

jedimastert7• 3 months ago

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.

pjc504• 3 months ago

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• 3 months ago

I love that idea (the "anti-masterwork")

fxtentacle2• 3 months ago

I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.

“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?

JCTheDenthog2• 3 months ago

And it's taxpayer funded, to boot. I definitely wouldn't be happy as an Austrian if I knew my taxes were going to something like this (meanwhile hobbyists elsewhere do projects like this on their own dime).

oulipo26• 3 months ago

[flagged]

kennywinker5• 3 months ago

Where do you see taxpayer funding? It looks like the hack space has gov funding - but i didn’t see any acknowledgement of grants for this project.

pron3• 3 months ago

Governments have long funded artistic projects. I'm sure some people oppose government funding for the arts, but there's nothing unusual about it. Obviously, not all artists get government funding, but such funding is an established process.

kube-system4• 3 months ago

Probably not, generally Western Europe has a very different opinion compared to the US when it comes to funding the arts.

Drupon• 3 months ago

Euros generally understand that taxes aren't purely for what they themselves want to be done.

lostlogin• 3 months ago

It’s hard to tell how it works as and the link is dead. https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Supporters

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.

oulipo26• 3 months ago

Well if you were a creative/researcher-type of person, the mere fact that you don't understand what she hopes to gain would push you to read about it. You'd discover the very real links between tech and gender inequalities (or the reinforcement of other minority inequalities) and you'd have learn something

fwipsy5• 3 months ago

I think parent comment is probably aware of gender inequalities in tech.

mlyle• 3 months ago

This is going to really confuse future archaeologists.

beepbooptheory• 3 months ago

The opposite of feminist is not masculine. You are conflating feminist with feminine which does indicate why your are maybe confused here. Feminism is not about being partisan like this, and you are operating through a strawman of so-called "second wave feminism" which is like over half a century old and defunct to everyone but guys who get angry at stuff like this.

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!

3form• 3 months ago

What are you asking about exactly? About classifying the project as feminist or the perceived feminist = artistic implication?

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?

setr3• 3 months ago

To which I say - why not?

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?

jedimastert7• 3 months ago

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 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.

setr3• 3 months ago

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 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

iamflimflam1• 3 months ago

You would hope that people who visit hacker news would be willing to spend a few minutes doing some research, but I guess that does get engagement.

pron3• 3 months ago

Feminism is not femininity and so is not to be contrasted with masculinity [1].

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.

culi5• 3 months ago

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.

fwipsy5• 3 months ago

I think "feminist" here means "socially conscious," not "small-batch/artistic."

Avicebron• 3 months ago

Except "free-range feminist eggs" is sort of a weird sentence.

oulipo26• 3 months ago

It mostly is the (simple) recognition that capitalism is inherently anti-feminist (read about it if you want to learn more).

So feminism, in order to truly exist, HAS to fight against capitalism

logicallee• 3 months ago

I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”.

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).

jayd16• 3 months ago

The site/group is Feminist Hacking. They happen to do a fun project and put it up.

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?

chromacity• 3 months ago

Everyone has an identity. We have people with near-religious beliefs about AI, people who cram functional programming where it doesn't belong, etc. Our hobby projects are often a consequence of these identities and make no sense otherwise. A guy who builds a web server on a Z80 CPU is doing something fundamentally pretty stupid, but we like it, right?

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.

tptacek• 3 months ago

The intent is to gently exclude the kinds of people who would be hung up on this question.

VegaKH• 3 months ago

"We are investigating alternative hardware..."

The way she writes like this is serious research is throwing me.

kennywinker5• 3 months ago

This is the way that artists speak when describing a new technique or process they have come up with. It’s also something I haven’t seen done before, so it’s legit research to me.

oulipo26• 3 months ago

Serious research always start by looking like play. Read Feynmann if you want to know more

lucid-dev3• 3 months ago

New generations have new language and are attempting to define themselves through their usage of certain terminology and re-framing of words (Arduino -> Arduina).

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.

fwipsy5• 3 months ago

What date is that? Petrochemicals aren't all stored in a big tank somewhere. My model is that there are many marginal sources which are not cost-effective to exploit, but which could be exploited with better technology or at a higher cost. I do not think we will ever extract all of these; instead, the cost of extraction will increase gradually, shifting incentives towards other energy sources.

I don't think anyone really knows what the future will look like.

paulgerhardt• 3 months ago

Some napkin math suggests July 11, 2478 AD assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch.

Closer to March 19, 2063 if you just mean crude oil supplies only.

lucid-dev3• 3 months ago

2072. This date hasn't changed from 4 years ago.

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?

The fact that we do not know what the future will look like, means we should make our best efforts to understand certain likely scenarios, and adjust our own behavior and actions accordingly in order to be a part of designing a future that is attainable and practicable given the current conditions/inertia at all socio-economical levels.

culi5• 3 months ago

The language bit is dual purpose. For one it's clearly tongue in cheek. Furthermore, it's a way to scare off people who would get set off from a little bit of language play. It's a way to make an online space free of people they don't want without actually putting up hard borders or moving it to a less public space. (Personally I think it's a wonderful strategy)

All the commenters here that are too set off to engage with the article are exactly what they were hoping for

lucid-dev3• 3 months ago

While I appreciate your perspective, I'll note that for a certain group of people that I know personally, this language is NOT tongue and cheek. Though I find myself to be neither a woman nor an artist, I know people who are both - and this language is becoming more and more common as people reach for a way to set themselves apart from a social precedent and past language that they feel is neither inclusive nor representative of their own ambitions or experience.

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.

MiiMe192• 3 months ago

Me after prefixing every word with length greater than or equal to 7 characters with the n word in my article as a way to scare off people who would get set off from a little bit of language play. It's a way to make an online space free of people I don't want without putting up hard borders or moving it to a less public space. (Personally I think it's a wonderful strategy)

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.

alwa• 3 months ago

I share your supportive and generally charitable attitude here. I don’t have to understand the constraints they choose for themselves in order to admire that they’re working within them.

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.

nine_k• 3 months ago

What I liked about their approach is that they picked things that would otherwise be considered trash (clay and dead tree branches from under their feet) and used them in a creative and productive way.

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.

piloto_ciego• 3 months ago

- a high tech utopia Earth will not be.

Press X to doubt.

We will be fine, we will build a high tech utopia or die trying. Anything else is defeatist nonsense.

pjc504• 3 months ago

it's easy to find out the date that oil (petroleum) will run out

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.

belval• 3 months ago

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.

jna_sh2• 3 months ago

For what it’s worth, these can be fired in a campfire! No kiln or anything necessary.

analog31• 3 months ago

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.

pjc504• 3 months ago

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.

pugworthy• 3 months ago

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.

https://simplifier.neocities.org/

atoav3• 3 months ago

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.

itsdesmond6• 3 months ago

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.

atoav3• 3 months ago

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.

codebje• 3 months ago

I love freeform wire circuits.

jna_sh2• 3 months ago

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.

ErroneousBosh• 3 months ago

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 ;-)

itsdesmond6• 3 months ago

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.

sucrosesucrose• 3 months ago

Quintessentially nu-germanic site.

motbus3• 3 months ago

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

itsdesmond6• 3 months ago

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?

rcxdude3• 3 months ago

They talk about conflict materials but this is replacing FR4, which is pretty cheap. It's basically glass and glue.

userbinator• 3 months ago

TL;DR: basically 1960s thick-film hybrid technology[1], but now drenched in 200% more eco-virtue-signaling BS. Stopped reading after the first few sentences as this is clearly preaching to a choir I'm not in.

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

btbuildem• 3 months ago

And we've back to clay tablets! Cuneiform would be fitting.

harvie• 3 months ago

Can you just lay pieces of copper wire in the slots and fire it again to melt them into the clay surface?

swiftcoder• 3 months ago

Not on an open fire, I think. In a proper temperature-controlled electronic kiln, yes

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