'It's cheap but it's not disposable': why fast tech is a growing waste problem

theguardian.com

2 points·PaulHoule··3 comments

In a perfect world this stuff would all be standardized and modular, with documented replacement parts.

Nearly all random consumer items could be done with about 15 different PCBs, total, with a dollar or two of extra cost from unused features.

A fan and a frother and a keyboard cleaning blower are all just USB chargers with a BLDC driver.

A microwave and a washing machine can share the same controller, people probably won't complain too much about the extra cost if they understand that it means the board will always be replaceable, even 50 years from now.

They could even run some kind of bytecode VM that they just don't change, so the same firmware still works in different CPUs.

Everything could be open, optionally smarthome integrated with a firmware update, and swappable like IBM PC parts.

It doesn't appear to be the kind of things businesses do, but from a technical and consumer perspective it seems totally feasible.

I see AVR-8 microcontrollers in many devices (continuous hot water heaters) and as an Arduinio fan I can totally see places where they could be used: for instance to drive a gas pump including the buttons, measurements, valves, mag stripe readers and serial link for credit card payments and/or remote control by the clerks.

Rumor has it Russia was importing washing machines so it could extract microcontrollers to put into weapons.

I'd have a hard time imagining gas pumps using just an AVR, because they have some pretty large LCD screens and fancy cryptography for tap to pay.

And I'd imagine anything that big and expensive would use Ethernet or something, rather than messing around with any low level serial link business.

But one could just make an embedded Linux based controller as one of the standard modules.

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