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Ask HN: What kind of electronics would you stockpile for doomsday?
We are all dependent on electronics in modern life, from stuff found in our appliances and cars to entertainment. Given the ever increasing potential for disintegration of global supply chain, what would be your choices for hypothetical technological prepping? Microcontroller boards? Power electronics? RF?
- turtlebits 5y agoPower and water are probably the first to go, so.. - Solar panels, batteries, inverters. - Water purification
- Koshkin 5y agoDoomsday maybe too strong a word in this context, but if the situation escalates (which it can) and things do get worse than just the disintegration of the supply chain then you can forget about "modern life." Electronics (and even electric power, at a certain point) will be the last thing on your mind when all you might be thinking about is sheer survival. What will be really important is a piece of land, a closely-knit community, and a lot of ammo to defend those.
- slowhand09 5y agoSomething I can play Solitaire on is a must. Unless I have an actual card deck.
- phendrenad2 5y agoIt's hard to predict what doomsday would really be like, but, excluding the possible doomsdays where you wouldn't want to live (nuclear fallout is nasty!)... There are two types of tech you might want to preserve: Things that will store information (survival guides, plant identification, maps) and things that will help with daily life (GPS watch, electric drill, night vision goggles, etc.) Focusing on storing information in a survival situation is smart. People would likely band together into groups, and if you can call up survival guides at a moment's notice, you'll be valuable. I'd buy 10 each(!) of: 1. The exact same model of cheap laptop on ebay with chargers (you'll need the chargers!) 2. AC inverter that can power an AC device from a 12v source (such as a car battery) You'll also need solar panels and if you can find a battery pack that can be charged by the solar panels, you'll want that too. Storing all of this in a self-storage unit is likely enough to survive an EMP. Don't believe the hype, EMPs will be blocked by a lot of normal buildings.
- robbedpeter 5y agohttps://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/gvcs/ This is a neat concept - bootstrapping civilization is a matter of knowledge. Learning and documenting processes that can achieve food, shelter, clothing, and the like is an exercise that can actually help people in developing parts of the world, and can inform things like Moon or Mars colonies, or provide inspiration for sustainable development. An offline, e-ink Wikipedia could be useful from a shtf perspective, but it'd also be cool to have around, just as a Hitchhikers guide to the galaxy type thing.
- streamofdigits 5y agoAnything you stockpile will break down after a while. So you need to stockpile some electronics repair/manufacturing capability. Its an interesting theoretical question what is the absolutely lowest digital tech level required for one to preserve functional access to e.g. text-only wikipedia and what kind of resources are required to maintain that level indefinetely.
- zoobab 5y agoNone of them.
- mindcrime 5y agoHuh, that's a really interesting question. I've never really considered the idea of "technological prepping" even though I might - to a small degree - self identify as something of a "prepper" in the general sense. Part of it depends on that threat scenario you are prepping for. For example "disintegration of global supply chain" absent some more generalized sort of disaster resulting in the collapse of advanced society (eg, rise of the zombies, meteor strike, etc.) is one thing, where the more generalized disaster "SHTF" scenarios might call for different tactics. For example... if you're worried about a more general "collapse of society" model, then it seems clear that simply having access to electricity at all would be a key thing to consider. So one might want to focus on batteries, solar cells, wire/cable, power electronics, etc., that would be required to get some juice available at all. But something like a further decline of today's (largely pandemic created?) supply chain disruptions, where society is mostly intact, the power grid is up, etc. is a different question. What's the goal, commercial production of products for profit? The ability to repair commonly used household devices if they break? The ability to create innovative new devices from scratch? The "repair parts stash" scenario seems to me as maybe the most likely one to be useful. So it seems like you'd want plenty of commonly used passives in wide range of values, a ton of "jelly bean" IC's, transistors, etc., probably transformers, fuses, etc. Microprocessors get tricky because there are so many out there. One might also want to tailor a stash based on doing tear-downs of the exact devices they own and pre-identify what parts would be needed. Wow... I dunno. The more I think about this, the more it seems like a huge rabbit-hole to go down. In a good way, of course. It's just that there are so many parts that could be useful, it starts to get hard to figure out how to filter the list down.
- fuzzfactor 5y agoAssuming you have an electrical source like chemical batteries, mechanical generators or even solar cells, With copper wire & iron you can have a telegraph. With vacuum tube transceivers you get wireless. You just have to stockpile a lot more tubes than radios. Just in case you want to go big, telegraphs would require a huge pile of copper compared to what you could do with a single truckload of radios & tubes. If it does turn out to take a really long time for certain doom to finally arrive, rest assured it's proven this technology can reliably be built to last a century, and still operate even if it gets hammered by nuclear EMP. From a safe enough distance of course. If nothing else stockpile the tubes, everything else could be much more easily recovered from scratch.
- jacquesm 5y agoDiscrete stuff, 74 series, a bunch of 8 bit hole through CPUs, piles of CMOS static ram embedded in foam and alu foil, a bunch of 8 bit eproms, resistors and caps assortments, power transistors (2n3055, BD135), tons of fiberglass hole and strip board. Possibly a bunch of Microchip embedded controllers, And if I were worried about EMPs I'd keep a stack of ECC81s around. You can drive those straight of a bunch of solar panels if you're not too critical about plate voltage, but you'll need a beefy 6.3V supply for the filaments if you plan on building something a bit larger. The rest of the parts you need can likely be salvaged from old junk.
- jareklupinski 5y agoanything electronic would need some way of powering the device personally I would stockpile power electronics / transformers / copper wire and magnets, and be the guy who can generate and then convert power from anything to anything
- temp234 5y agoA high quality, huge storage volume, dedicated music player like the Sony NW-A55 stockpiled with all the music I want to share w my doomsday grandkids. Nice headphones and file backups too. Would hoard beloved media in general.
- ohiovr 5y agoI've been doing this for a while. You should find a cheap whole stack, computer, os, source code, solar cell, battery, and seal them in a galvanized trashcan with metallic HVAC tape around the lid. This will protect it from high frequency EMP bursts in the upper atmosphere from multimegaton infastructure disruption weapons. Other things you may want to add is a soeks dosimeter.. Laptop computers with a core 2 duo are quite cheap and often come with enough memory to be considerble computers. Take all your home movies and run them through ffmpeg to make them run smooth on old hardware. Find a bunch of videos about making food, soap, how to make a gassifier, grain mill.. think creatively. It is almost time. You know it. That is why you are posting this.
- LinuxBender 5y agoAs a backup to the computer one could also print out important documents and photos then vacuum seal them. There are sites that discuss how to preserve documents for a very long time. Data backups with parity data and parity .par volumes can be written to DVD.
- ohiovr 5y agoI just pulled out a pc from a barrel that was non functional because of a dead button cell. Laptops shouldn't have that issue.
- BizarroLand 5y agoIf your laptop battery isn't removable, it may be unable to boot if the battery cell has died, even when connected to AC. Plus, laptops very much do have internal button cells and typically will either throw an error when booting or require a complete reinstall of the OS if something happened to the encryption key system along the way. Might want to have a linux install media (DVD + USB stick) available just in case.
- ohiovr 5y agoOne last thing, radioactivity destroys electronics fast. Radioactivity will destroy all those things anyway if you are near a primary target or downwind from one. I don't recommend burying a trashcan but having it in a basement might help.
- jbjbjbjb 5y agoPerhaps going a couple orders of magnitude up in supply disruption to what we’ve seen in the pandemic would be a realistic worst case. So looking at multi year disruption of key components and hugely inflated prices for new and second hand. To mitigate that I’d have some cheap easy to store replacements at hand as insurance. Things like raspberry pis, spare phone, camping style equipment, bike, car parts etc. We also had a gas price squeeze in Europe that possibly had political motivations, so some renewable fuel source would be useful.
- buraksarica 5y agoBesides other things listed here, One hf, one v/uhf dual band ham radio and lots of cable.
- llamajams 5y ago555s
- JohnFen 5y agoBuckets of transistors.
- Iefthandrule 5y agoDisaster.radio has planned for this [0]. I really like what they do. 0 - https://disaster.radio/ https://disaster.radio/
- nicbou 5y agoWhatever I do, I'd definitely include a device with OsmAnd, and keep the maps updated. I could hardly survive the apocalypse without good maps. A backup of Wikipedia would also be very useful. I'd add a few thousand books since they use little storage space. I'd probably use regular phones like a Pixel 5, a few user-repairable laptops, and lots of USB-C cables and chargers. I'd make sure to have the means to keep them charged off-grid. That ought to be enough. It's barely more than what I pack on long distance motorcycle trips.
- oolonthegreat 5y agothis reminds me of CollapseOS https://collapseos.org/ https://collapseos.org/
- wly_cdgr 5y agoJust a side note that, electronics are good and all, but stockpile printed matter also. You can fit a lot of vital knowledge that you can access without electricity in a very reasonable amount of space with the aid of small print, a simple magnifying glass, and some plastic bags, painted glass jars, and/or lamination for protection from water and light
- bitxbitxbitcoin 5y agoSeconded on some printed matter. I wrote recently, somewhat facetiously, on the topic.[0] Here is one reason: As an absolute last ditch option, printed matter generally works well as a fire starter. Good luck doing that with a tricked out, pelican case enclosed rpi and screen. [0] https://amiprepped.com/prepping/books-i-want-to-have-on-hand-in-case-society-collapses/ https://amiprepped.com/prepping/books-i-want-to-have-on-hand...
- vorpalhex 5y agoVacuum sealer makes a good laminator in a pinch as well.
- chrisa 5y agoAre you talking like doomsday or zombie apocalypse prepping? Hm... In addition to what others have said: - a few solar powered calculators - several walkie talkies and a way to power them - wind up flashlights - repair equipment (soldering iron, wire cutters, wire, etc) Would a lead box shield those from an EMP? If so, then put those in a lead box in a basement or something
- varjag 5y agoI wasn't really thinking stuff like asteroid impact or nuclear war. More like invasion of Taiwan which at this point is (IMO) 50:50 and ripple effects from that. Fabpocalypse if you will. No products possible to make at post-1970s design levels, even though expertise is still in place.
- fuzzfactor 5y ago>doomsday or zombie apocalypse prepping? >asteroid impact or nuclear war. >invasion of Taiwan >Fabpocalypse Thanks for reminding me. I think with threat levels increasing people are going to have to tailor their prepping according to more than one type of expected apocalypse.
- ohiovr 5y agoI bought a ton of solar calculators for a buck each and stuffed them in my doom barrels.
- paulcole 5y agoNone. Anything approaching a "true" doomsday would be absolute hell on Earth and I'd be ready to die. I live with a chronic illness and honestly doubt my medications would be available. If society did crumble in the way that many fantasize about, I'd be seeing myself out pretty quickly.
- gregjor 5y agoOther than a flashlight and a Casio watch that runs for a decade electronics would be off my list if I were to worry about doomsday scenarios, which I don’t. That’s just another fantasy land to obsess over. I can survive without a computer or cell phone or the internet. I would be much more concerned about water, food, medicine/first aid. We aren’t really dependent on modern technology. I can imagine continuing to live just fine without any of it.
- vorpalhex 5y agoOne of the things I think about is how do you make stuff in the apocalypse? Take soap for instance. People have made soap since the dawn of time - you just need fat and lye. But how do you actually.. do it? For that you need instructions, which means either a library of books vulnerable to all sorts of ills, or a collection of pdfs and movies. If you go the digital route you need some kind of viewer.
- hoseja 5y agoLike 95% of modern industrial processes aren't described in a reproducible manner anywhere in the open, as far as i can tell. I find that a great shame.
- Gustomaximus 5y agoI wonder if Encyclopedia Britannica sets will be getting dug out if information like this is needed in a non-digital way. They are a wealth of information and quite common through to ~20 years ago. I imagine sets of these will remain somewhat common for another 100 years in peoples garages or on display etc.
- giantg2 5y agoIf you do it a couple times the process is easy to remember. A recipe can be written down. If you remember the basics you can make up the recipe as you go and check pH with strips or the zap test (and hope you weren't too heavy on the lye!). Many other basic things are similar. After all, they were inveted/perfected with ancient tech/resources. There are plenty of other things that would be more difficult make, source, or do. How do you preserve food to modern standards if you don't have canning lids and can't make them, refrigerators don't work (some climates might not matter as much), or a local salt/nitrites source? Fermenting is one way, but doesn't work for everything.
- basicplus2 5y agoGermanium diodes
- explaingarlic 5y agoNobody's mentioning what I think should be obvious - a table saw, an impact drill with kilograms of sorted bits, whatever stuff you need for welding. Soldering equipment + as many schematics of the PCB based stuff I own with enough spare parts to drown in. Kilograms of copper wire. If there's no weight and space limit on this question, I'd get a car lift too. I really doubt that anyone would be in dire need of my sick ability to manually inject a DLL into the memory of a process if they were eating each other.
- egberts1 5y agoIf EMP were to hit (by solar flare, nuclear, or weapon) then I would want nothing but Solar panels, LEDs, heating coils, wires, wires, and wires. Can make soldering iron, flashlights, and heater with it. Everything else can fall in place. Might not hurt to have a solar-powered calculator.
- 1R053 5y agoThe PV on the roof probably wont help anymore after am EMP. So you‘d need the whole package incl water purifier also in a shielded box
- egberts1 5y agoyep, and the magic number of separation of condenser plates to a solar water condenser is 5mm. https://news.mit.edu/2020/solar-extracts-drinkable-water-1014 https://news.mit.edu/2020/solar-extracts-drinkable-water-101...
- BizarroLand 5y agoI think the PV would be fine, but the charge controllers, anything that uses a coil, might be fried. EMP's create huge discharges in coils, that's how they "fry" electronics and cars and motors and the more sensitive chips attached to said coils.
- giantg2 5y agoDepends on the scenario. Probably no point in stockpiling stuff. Stuff you normally use is probably sufficient. My guess is only a few scenarios would ruin non-sheilded tech and leave you alive. Especially if networks/infrastructure are fried, you're probably better off getting low tech alternatives.
- aaron695 5y agoYou'd want a mod chipped gaming console with a pirate game collection. (Don't double this onto a PC) If you are thinking in the years, you need more than food and water. The ability to bunker down in a limited space for long periods matters, and it's good barter. Obviously comms and emergency lights and all the standard stuff comes first, Doomsday probably will last months not years, but not necessarily, for instance looking at something like the war in Tigray it's up to a year now.
- 7952 5y agoIt's interesting how difficult it is to think of anything. Not much of that stuff keeps you warm, or fed, or safe. Maybe some battery Christmas lights to make Christmas a little less depressing.
- adamcrow64 5y agoJust a comment. You have to expect that at some point you may become invalid or disabled to some degree. Although you may not need stuff now, make sure you keep a set of reading glasses or short sight glasses. A walking cane. Look after your teeth! Flossing equipment. Lots of toothbrushes. Tonnes of suncream.
- techsin101 5y agobooks on herbal medicine and herbs classification survival guide and venom antidotes rock classification and identification guides chemistry and physics advanced books civil engineering books seeds metal equipments, knifes, wires, pans, ... rechargable batteries solar panels satellite phone radios receiver and transmitters more wires... dried fruits and cured meat antibiotics and desanitizing chemicals
- techsin101 5y agocompass, map with geological features, gps if that still works, pick up trucks, drill machines, saws, axes, rubber pipes bundles, nails, eye glasses, insulin/thyroid medicines years worth of supply, fertilizer, ....
- fmakunbound 5y agoMaybe a ham transceiver with large antenna. Beyond that, water, food, guns and a stack of porn probably. Oh and my beer brewing gear.
- austinjp 5y agoIf we're talking bare minimum electronics: radio, torch. Powered by solar or dynamo.
- JoshCole 5y agoUnderground cities. Nests of tunnels filled with decentralized infrastructure. I know it is counterintuitive because of costs. However, it is a relatively proven development path. Here are seven reasons I think humanity should invest in this: 1. The dinosaurs were wiped out by an asteroid. The small mammal we evolved from lived beneath the surface and we rose to prominence as mammals in part because of that strategy choice. The species which did not choose to do this didn't do so well. 2. As humanity progresses to become a multi-planet species we will need to live in diverse environments some of which will not have an atmosphere. This technology helps to shield against impacts. It will be useful to get good at this if we don't want holes in our space habitats caused by high speed debris to become a very common way for colonies to die. 3. It's actually better for us in a lot of ways. The ideal temperature in office productivity studies of seventy two degrees happens to be the natural temperature in cave systems. The suns rays cause errors in both our code and also our computers code, but the shielding provided by the earth protects from this. We would be in a healthier environment. 4. It makes better use of our space. We currently underutilize the ground. Density is associated with network effects and healthy cities that are produce well. One of the things that is common in these places is subway systems. It's telling that are most effective places happen to also be the places where we've been starting this expansion into the ground. Another is underground utilities like water and sewage. History is already showing us our cities are better when we move in this direction. 5. This could increase land value for much the same reason that building high rises increases land value. So development of it has some economic incentives which might make it practically possible. This is especially true when Wright's law drops the cost of underground buildings to a currently unfathomably low cost. 6. Where would you rather be if an asteroid large enough to cook the surface of the Earth hit the Earth? Underground insulated from that cooking? Or being cooked? We don't want to be cooked. 7. Evolution has already selected for this strategy at the insect scale in one of the few species which is comparable to us in terms of having civilization: ants. The strategy manages to be successful even in climates wherein rain is exceedingly common and heavy. The largest civilization on Earth which practices agriculture already does it. It's a clever idea. We should copy their good idea and make it our own. Meta: Once you've done this, take the other replies, and put that stuff inside the city.
- grognak420 5y ago
- mikewarot 5y agoLearn to repair stuff, there will be enough stuff laying around that just needs to be fixed, to last for decades, if you have the skills. Stock up on solder, spare tips, electrolytic caps, through hole components, and get yourself a few hundred feet of old 25 pair phone line. There are still a few hamfests happening, buy out everyone who wants to sell off their junkbox of parts.