lafelabs

I agree that that is a very hard problem. Part of what I find interesting about this platform(Instructables) is that it poses a possible solution. Suppose that you could scan the inside of broken electronics "trash" with your phone and part numbers would link you to data that exist on how hackable that particular part is. If such a system were automated, even if 9/10 of the parts are unusable, over time you could get whatever you needed. Clearly that's not possible now, but I think it's research worth pursuing because the sheer quantity of electronics in landfills globally is astronomical and growing.

yep, solderless breadboards are the way to go for prototyping, this is all about more permanent circuits.

I like it! That term should come back hopefully.

An excellent question. This solves a very particular niche: for hobby electronics it's not needed, nor for "professional" electronics like building custom audio stuff. And soldering irons are available very cheap at every radio shack now. The answer is that this is one component of a much larger system that I'm slowly rolling out in pieces. In the end I want to build automated systems that take in electronic trash, remove it, sort it, test it, and re-incorporate it into newly fabricated circuits. To do this I end up solving a lot of very strange problems that don't maybe make total sense on their own. The other half of the answer is I'm trying to make technology that I feel comfortable teaching to people way outside the technology bubble who have no tools or skills relevant…

An excellent question. This solves a very particular niche: for hobby electronics it's not needed, nor for "professional" electronics like building custom audio stuff. And soldering irons are available very cheap at every radio shack now. The answer is that this is one component of a much larger system that I'm slowly rolling out in pieces. In the end I want to build automated systems that take in electronic trash, remove it, sort it, test it, and re-incorporate it into newly fabricated circuits. To do this I end up solving a lot of very strange problems that don't maybe make total sense on their own. The other half of the answer is I'm trying to make technology that I feel comfortable teaching to people way outside the technology bubble who have no tools or skills relevant to electronics, and also no place to work on a nice bench with tools that can be kept dry etc. I should probably edit the first step to reflect this, but I have a bunch of other updates that I'll probably put out first, since I've got some new ways of doing the enclosures etc.

Yeah agreed, definitely outside or under a fume hood is the way to go here. I was on a balcony with a breeze.

Yeah the color blind thing is a very good point! This is also a problem for resistor color codes as they stand now, and I'm not sure how that works. When I started this project I had no idea how complicated color really is. Then I found a couple giant books at the library on color technology and realized I bit off a bit more than I could chew with the use of color for machines. Even for the not color blind, telling brown and red and purple apart can get very sketchy in a lot of cases I think. Ah well, it's more art than technology perhaps in this case. That's part of why I'm moving to all black and white for the coding. It's way easier for both the human mind and the computer.

I think the black and white version with just filled rectangles can work with blind people and sighted and also machines by using a carved relief into a solid object for the coding. This is readable by a blind person using their finger, by a sighted person using shadows or ink, and by a machine using not just cameras but some much simpler capacitive pickup. Ultimately I think where I'm heading is stone and metal for the format for long term storage.

info on how to encode this way is here:https://www.instructables.com/Encode-a-Message-in-Roctal-Octal-That-Rocks/

Thank you. And thanks for the tape recommendation, I had to google it that looks fun. I've been using multiple duct tape colors ripped into strips to make edge patterns, but that's labor intensive.