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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
I guess we can just keep ordering pre-stuffed PCBs from JLCPCB. This way, the pollution involved in the various processes still exists, but it's hidden from view behind a box of minty-new circuit boards delivered to the doorstep.
Or, you know: If the neighbors take up a serious hobby-scale effort of wood-fired pottery project with local clay that they mined themselves, then... Perhaps we could be supportive of their effort, eh? Isn't that part of what being neighborly involves?
Wood fired are CO2 neutral (but a problem of pollution with fine particulate at scale in poorly ventilated valleys).
It's an art project
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.
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
That link sounds interesting but I can't open it :(
Seems temporary, try again.
Works, thanks.
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.
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.
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.
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.
For what it’s worth, these can be fired in a campfire! No kiln or anything necessary.
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...
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
>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
The reason the power grid exists is because enough people want to do enough of this kind of activity that if we were still burning wood to do it there would be no trees left. Scale does matter, and this kind of 'sustainability' can't sustain a fraction of the people on the planet.
Well, the atmega fab was already there and that isn’t quite clean either :)
But there are many clean ways to generate electricity and electric kilns are quite efficient compared to heating over an open flame.
I like the artistic element of this exercise, just thought that line of reasoning was a bit off.
I know. We live in a society where both the power grid and atmegas already exist, and our individual actions are marginal in impact.
You need a grid infrastructure to build and ship the rest of the electronics as well as to use the board.
It's a fun dit/artistic project but the political discourse used to describe it is absurd
Most political discourse you consider normal today (e.g. "fun") was considered absurd some years ago. Fewer than you imagine.
I feel like foregoing the whole PCB would be better, and just wirewrap, or "free-air" solder.
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.)
How would you handle LQFP or BGA packages?
What do you think the minimum pad clearance is for the clay?
You can dead bug an LQFP if you absolutely have to…
[flagged]
How well did Albert Hanson’s flat foil board handle BGAs?
Instead of looking for flaws, try looking for the insight. I’m reminded of this blog post that was on hn recently https://scottlawsonbc.com/post/shooting-down-ideas
Not looking for flaws. Looking for solutions!
Can you please stop posting so aggressively and breaking the site guidelines? You've done it repeatedly in this thread and we're trying for something else here.
If you don't find the current post/comments gratifying of your intellectual curiosity, there are 29 other threads on the frontpage, and if none of those are of interest, you're certain to find something interesting at https://news.ycombinator.com/front and the links back from there.
In the meantime, if you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
I didn't invoke bgas, that was someone else.
I can easily explain how this art process could handle BGAs. As mentioned in the article, you could swap the indentation+hand-painted circuit traces with screen-printed traces on a flat surface.
Defending one idea isn’t shooting down another. Point to point wiring has its uses, for sure. But calling it an “idiotic ash tray of clay and paint” is shooting something down. But again, i think you’re conflating me with an earlier commenter.
What a rude and shallow thing to say about a creative project.
It’s interesting how angry this makes some people.
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
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?
They talk about conflict materials but this is replacing FR4, which is pretty cheap. It's basically glass and glue.
I'm thinking of finer grained applications. Would CNC before firing work? Perhaps finer grained printed stamp plus air-drying clay?
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?
And we've back to clay tablets! Cuneiform would be fitting.
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."
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.
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
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.
Truly stonepunk
Stoned punks for sure.
Quintessentially nu-germanic site.
Interesting project but I can't tell, is the language used supposed to be satire?
The "Arduina" comment definitely made me think it might be at least a little satirical in nature
It's not, the entire site appears to be a serious examination of technology and hacking ethics through a feminist lens
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>assuming 1% annual growth and utilization of PtL / Fischer–Tropsch
Is that assuming a large fraction of the supply will be synthetic fuels created by electrolysis?
I would like to see the napkin. I wasn't aware synthetic fuels were on that kind of a trajectory.
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 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
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.
It depends which language you're talking about I guess. The "Arduina" bit is clearly a joke
Yes I would say I am quite familiar with such spaces and have even read relevant theory.
The subversion of language is sometimes poetic, sometimes just "play".
Regardless, the fact that so much of this masc-biased website's energy is being sucked in on this little prickle is evidence that the strategy is quite effective
> - 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.
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?
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.
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.
If the goal is to decouple feminism from feminine identities, which by definition means it then also needs to apply to masculine identities, then I think they need a new name.
Also, it appears that >99% of feminism researchers are publishing their scientific papers with a feminine name. I can easily understand why the general public might confuse the 2 groups with each other.
Which brings me back to the question: what do you think the authors hope to gain by invoking this association? Especially now that we have established that their word choice is highly likely to be misunderstood?
First, confusing feminism with femininity or, conversely, patriarchy with masculinity is such a basic error - and not one of nuance - that shows at least an intentional disinterest. There is no "goal to decouple", because if an ideology believes a certain group is disempowered then it strives to empower it and there is no "decoupling". But if you can't tell the difference between, say, being white and being a white supremacist, then you should probably find out what it is.
Second, every academic discipline, from history to physics, suffers from misinterpretation by "the general public", and the disciplines don't generally let this problem shape their work. Non-introductory writing doesn't cover the basics. That's what Wikipedia is for.
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.
This is going to really confuse future archaeologists.
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.
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
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.
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?
> 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?
The article doesn’t say or imply that whatsoever.
That a feminist art project or collective has to be defined in opposition to something else is entirely your own framing.
This is where your mind goes when you read “feminist,” which reveals your priors.
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).
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.
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.
Euros generally understand that taxes aren't purely for what they themselves want to be done.
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.
Probably not, generally Western Europe has a very different opinion compared to the US when it comes to funding the arts.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack and please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
[flagged]
Please don't cross into personal attack and please avoid tit-for-tat spats on HN. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
[flagged]
The intent is to gently exclude the kinds of people who would be hung up on this question.
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?
I think "feminist" here means "socially conscious," not "small-batch/artistic."
Except "free-range feminist eggs" is sort of a weird sentence.
The group clearly has a strong sense of humor that the typical HN crowd is struggling to pick up on
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
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!
>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).
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
I think parent comment is probably aware of gender inequalities in tech.
I don't think so, since he's making it clear that he, in fact, doesn't: "I truly don’t understand what the hope to gain from self-classifying this is “feminist”."
[dead]
[dead]
"We are investigating alternative hardware..."
The way she writes like this is serious research is throwing me.
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.
Serious research always start by looking like play. Read Feynmann if you want to know more
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.
[flagged]
[flagged]
If you’re the kind of person who can’t get past “arduina”, then i don’t think you’re going to be interested in any of the other ideas in the tutorial.
Gonna +1 what the other person said, but also this research group appears to be like intentionally focused on hacking and technology ethics from a feminist perspective sooooo like maybe it's just not your cup of tea to begin with?
Either way, it's probably that no one cares about your opinions on credibility
[flagged]
To clarify, I really do enjoy the premise of the article. I’m a big fan of circuitry-as-art so I was excited to see what new ideas this brought to the table. It’s clear my tone in my original comment made it seem like I was fully disregarding the article and I’m sorry for coming across that way. In retrospect it was very snippy and it shouldn’t have been. I was just very thrown off by the comment in an article that is otherwise taking itself very seriously.
Fair enough, thanks for clarifying. Feminist spaces love to play with language. Many people just aren't accustomed to it