I wonder if I could make an investment group dedicated to developing and creating kits for the preservation of digital society in the event of systemic collapse.
The Society Preservation Society.
Information @Elucidating@mastodon.socialImagine: kids with long range ham networking, kids of electrical motors, metal-foil books with concrete instructions on how to synthesize charcoal efficiently, how to refine common metals (in particular lead and tin) safely, how to synthesize paper and ink in a variety of climates, etc.
The idea is to be able to recover a 1980-1990s level of tech within 10 years, w/ a sustainability focus.
@Elucidating I've considered it. A few good university engineering libraries would go a long, long way.
Not 1990's, maybe, but rubble to 1880's within a generation, with far better medicine and infrastructure, sould be pretty possible.
@Elucidating I know people at my local hackerspace who could start with the metaphorical cave and box of scraps and in three months would have a small steam engine, in a year would have a big one, and in a few years would have a factory to make big ones.
Internal combustion engines are harder 'cause you need the chemical industry to go with them. Basic electricity isn't super hard but miniaturization is. So, maybe more like the 1930's.
You'd spend a lot of time building tools to build tools.
@icefox I submit going straight to solar and wind turbines is smarter, but I'm not a mechanical engineer.
I think the idea is to basically bottle the data durably then get as fast as possible into electricity; since it's so much mor eeffective.
@Elucidating That would be nice! Don't know how practical it would be, but it would be nice.
It's hard to put lead-acid batteries on a tractor. :-(
@icefox It's hard to refine fuel.
@Elucidating "Internal combustion engines are harder 'cause you need the chemical industry to go with them."
@Elucidating On the up side, maybe we could finally switch the USA to metric!
@icefox @Elucidating @vertigo @vfrmedia reminds me a story about P.O.Ws who built a radio from scraps in the camp. My big worry about switch to digital radio is that in situation like this there would be nothing to receive via analog means.
It might happen though that future garbage bins will contains lots of reusable chips and PCBs.
@saper @Elucidating @vertigo @vfrmedia Good point! The garbage bins of today contain a lot of them, but it's hard to find specs and reverse engineer them....
Actually I was recently thinking that if you had docs and schematics for a 6502 processor, you could probably take it to the early 1960's and get a good corner on the minicomputer market. You could cut out lots of R&D just by having proven designs already.
@icefox @saper @Elucidating @vertigo my experiences of gutting defective/discarded "modern" electronics is you might get a few discretes (especially in the PSU section if this isn't burned out), LEDs (both visible and IR) but many SMD chips really aren't worth the effort trying to extract (if its even possible) even if full datasheets are online (they often are but you may discover its a custom chip or even for a "normal" function a pinout that isn't easily reusable on a different PCB)
@vfrmedia @icefox @Elucidating @vertigo Late XX and XXI century will be remembered as a #civilization with zero documentation of what they were building.
Future historians will fight about the interpretation of some idea called the #intellectual #property
@saper @vfrmedia @Elucidating @vertigo Yeah, probably. It's sort of depressing. But in terms of industry and logistics, small, cheap chips are so powerful and plentiful that there's not much point in making them serviceable. Pulling and reverse-engineering (simple) surface mount chips actually isn't infeasible, it's just not too practical.
However, the enormous nerd in me loves the idea of a post-apocalyptic civilization building electronics based on scavenged AVR's and 6502's from the 1980's.
@Elucidating If you can make graphite rods, you have everything you need to make capacitors and resistors. Caps can be made from aluminum foil. (Maybe not as tiny as commercial units today, but they *can* be built.) Resistors can be built with #2 lead pencil or with a graphite rod. Inductors are just spools of wire.
@Elucidating
This leaves only diodes and transistors. One could argue that you can mine galena for making diodes, but it's touchy and fickle. Not reliable at all. If only we could find a way to make/replace semiconductors with easily acquired or manufactured stuff around the home or workshop.
@vertigo @Elucidating I'm fairly certain that semiconductors were made in Europe using locally sourced materials in my lifetime (perhaps into the mid/late 1980s) and its only comparatively recently the whole World has become dependent on China and SE Asia for this production; and even then the raw materials are not necessarily directly found where the chip fabs are (they must still be mined elsewhere and transported several hundred km).
@vfrmedia @vertigo @Elucidating in one of the world wars people would make radios with rusty razor blades, quartz, a high impedance earbud, and wire. The oxide layer on the blade created a low-quality but functional diode. No battery required, but AM stations only for obvious reasons.
@Jirikiha @vertigo @Elucidating
With Radio Caroline on the doorstep here (TX site only about 53km away) and having a quantity of items like high impedance telephone earpieces I'm tempted to experiment with making one of these (or a modern equivalent) - as I've then got something to listen to (I'm not as much a fan of football or whiny political discussions which AM radio here in the UK is otherwise full of)
@Jirikiha @vfrmedia @Elucidating Like I said in another post, you can use galena to make a diode. Probably higher quality than a rusty razor blade, but still not a transistor. You can't make an amplifier out of it. (Not that I'm aware of, and certainly not one that handles lots of power; the diode effects disappear if you use any wire bigger than a "cat hair" diameter.)
@vfrmedia @Elucidating Yeah, it's the whole "fab" thing that ruins it for me.
Those are, in essence, fancy glass factories, and that's not something one is bound to have in their household. You could literally build every electronic part you need in your house with stuff you can buy at the local home depot, *except* for semiconductors.
I'm thinking more (perhaps from European perspective) of era from post WW II to 1970s; you might not have a components factory in your home workshop; there *would* be one in nearby towns or at least in your country; and you could buy an item made in a factory in UK, NL or DE with (mostly?) local materials and labour to a common set of specifications (or find a similar substitute) and (provided the rest of your circuit was correct) everything should still work..
@vfrmedia @Elucidating Sure, but I thought the point to this thread was homebrewing in the event of a major collapse. Maybe I'm wrong?
@vertigo @Elucidating there would eventually be a limit to what could be (efficiently/safely) homebrewed , assuming society was still able to deal with metalwork and electrical engineering *some* kind of factories would surely start operating again. Unfortunately the book I had from 1920s with such an example is long mislaid but it described how to build serviceable (electric) telecoms equipment from metal strip, hand wound coils but even then items like batteries were usually store bought 1/2
@Elucidating @vertigo and also signalling lamps were widely available (sold for bicycle lamps etc) but you encountered more items like Lechlanché cells that were factory built assembliles but renewable (for instance you'd replace the zinc outer or the chem
@vertigo @Elucidating *chemicals inside (retaining the ceramic pot the cell was stored in and the outer pot) rather than just replacing the entire cell; this being multiplied for a battery of cells (signalling then only used 4,5 to 6V). Ditto with lead acid cells that could be recharged (but some nastier chemicals to deal with), building a battery from individual 2V cells was also much more common practice then. IMO even to get to 1970s/80s tech level you would still need *some* sort of factory.
