clay PCB and feminist hardware at 38c3
clay PCB and feminist hardware at 38c3
We built an Ethical Hardware Kit with a PCB microcontroller made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire...
I just saw this presentation at the Chaos Computer Club conference, for an “Ethical Hardware Kit with a PCB microcontroller made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire. Our conductive tracks use urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices”. It was part of the feminist hardware strand!
Idk, this one is weird to me. I agree that micro electronics production is not conflict free and appreciate a search for alternatives, but clay? From an engineering perspective this isn't just a bad material for PCBs, it's neigh impossible to use. How would that affect device longevity, or recyclability? Their production process is quite failure prone as they mention. Not to mention how their design is easily magnitudes larger than a comparable laminated fiber PCB. Also urban-mined is a needlessly opaque buzzword imo. They mean recycled, right? Just say so, no need for flourishes. Emphasizing that the clay is sourced from a wild forest and burned over a bonfire is meant to feel sustainable via association. There is nothing environmentally conscious about these inefficient methods and it makes this project appear amateurish. Nothing wrong with amateur attempts to help the problem, but somehow I get the feeling no one bothered to ask a PCB fab worker or repair technician along the way. More sustainable PCBs start with open source documentation and freely available replacement parts, not forest clay. Full disclosure, I read the description text on the site and (only) skimmed through the video. Feel free to correct me if I misrepresented anything.
There’s a lot more info on their project page https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Clay-PCB-Tutorial but I think it’s important that I provide context re the PCB being part of their disaster survival backpack! That had lots of other things in it too, tho unfortunately I can’t find the video about it now. But yeah, so the PCB was designed for a kinda worst-case scenario.
As regards the urban mining, yeah it wasn’t quite what I expected: “[we bought] silver paint, commercialised by a German company, that is made with waste silver powder collected by jewellery makers. It's like an urban mining technique of silver dust.” I was expecting them to find things and extract silver from them!
Thank you for pointing that out! I missed the context of the survival backpack and now it makes more sense. When you view this as more of a 'what if' for a somewhat (hopefully) fictional situation this becomes a fun challenge of creating PCBs from limited resources. I'm wondering how I might try to build a PCB under such circumstances now. I'm still not a fan of their 'urban mining' though. If anything I believe there would be better sources for silver in a disaster/post-apocalypse.
Ceramics arent unheard of in terms of pcbs and ic packaging, though forest clay certainly isnt the ideal ceramic by any means. Ceramics also are much harder to work with and create things like vias. They are sometimes used in interposers or for creating interconnects in chiplet designs due to their capacity for high density microvias
There's also electrical properties, such as capacitive coupling between the layers. FR4 circuit boards have known properties that electrical engineers can use in cases where it matters. RF design, in particular.
This isn't insurmountable, of course, and there's plenty of designs where it doesn't matter much. These sorts of things have to start somewhere.
Thats pretty cool. Would be interesting how much of a usable Computer could be build with this approach.