5 ms·

You are right on openness. This is key to understand and fix broken machines. Mechanical designs used to be more open too. We bought tractors in the 1980's and

You are right on openness. This is key to understand and fix broken machines. Mechanical designs used to be more open too. We bought tractors in the 1980's and these would come with a workshop manual with parts list and disassembly / assembly instructions, with tools list and torque requirement.

TaylorAlexander 3y ago
You're right. Televisions used to be more repairable too. I found a microfiche reader by a dumpster and for fun ordered a lot of 100+ microfiche cards from an old TV repair shop on ebay. Zenith for example published detailed repair manuals including detailed steps for recalibration, parts lists, schematics, annotated PCB layouts, and more. These were for repair shops not the average person, but modern TV companies don't even produce those materials anymore.
- trilbyglens 3y ago
  Nope they are far cheaper to just throw away and replace. It's a terrible system.
  - TaylorAlexander 3y ago
    Honestly I only think it’s cheaper to replace because we’ve made repair more expensive than it needs to be. I’ve fixed two TVs that stopped working with a few dollars of capacitors and my own time. That’s much cheaper than buying a new TV! But I had to go digging through forums when manufacturers could have provided this information. Instead they refuse ti share info and charge extreme prices for repairs where they will just throw out an entire board with one bad component which would cost 20 cents on its own. I agree it’s a terrible system I just wanted to clarify that the “it costs less to throw it out and replace” narrative is only true so long as we make it true.
  - benj111 3y ago
    Even within a non repairable system, it could be improved so much. Why can't we have dumb screens that I can plug my Amazon stick or whatever into. My girlfriend's TV actually crashes and randomly resets. Presumably because they cram a load of functionality in, and don't test (not so) edge cases. Just give me a dumb screen, if I want $fancy new streaming app I can just buy a single or whatever, if the dongle breaks, I replace just that.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
      Buy a computer monitor. Sadly, that only works up to a certain size, and price will not be your friend. Alternatively, a projector and quality screen.
      - bitwize 3y ago
        Alternatively, order a Sceptre dumb TV from Wal-Mart's web site.
happytiger 3y ago
The key is that mechanical designs cannot be copyright locked and you cannot build a closed ecosystem and demand insane prices for access to that ecosystem. I feel like open source isn’t the point, it’s the solution. The point is that proprietary lock in creates artificial scarcity and allows protectionist rackets, and open source AND all mechanical systems counter this ugly consumer deleterious product choice that is incentivized by the market effects of protectionist proprietary ethos.
- saulrh 3y ago
  Reproducibility of mechanical objects is only the case in the modern day! It used to be that reproducing mechanical parts was difficult enough that a particularly sophisticated part could be just as locked-down as a particularly sophisticated bit of software is today. For an illustrative example, imagine that a part on your tractor suddenly becomes a bit of twisted, wrecked metal. These days? You ask someone else with the same tractor to send you some pictures, pull their part out and measure all the holes and their positions and tell you what the bearing surfaces are made of, you scrape off some slivers of your wreck and assay them to figure out what alloy it's made out of and how it was heat-treated, you go and machine a test piece or two on your mill and try it, you buy a bit of bronze bushing off mcmaster and it works, etc. Maybe someone else has already done this and published a CAD model and instructions! We have solutions for this. Back then? You have no designs. You have no way to communicate with other people who have a complete working part. You might be lucky enough to remember what bits the part connected to if you'd looked at it before. You may have some idea what the intended geometry was, but you're never going to figure out that the geometry is actually just a few degrees off right angles because that keeps you out of a complicated kinematic singularity that blows up the part every time you turn left. You can guess at some of the materials, but systematic classifications of iron-carbon alloys don't exist so all you can say is "it's some kind of steel". Even if you figure a lot of this out, there's no real way to write it down or share it with people because a lot of the terminology for representing this stuff simply doesn't exist. Even if you make a functional part, its expected lifetime is months rather than decades. The original creator, by comparison, can just buy a new block of their supplier's "Alloy Number 5", throw the forging dies back on the presses and stamp out a blank, slap the blank into the jig that presents every hole to the drill press at exactly the right angle, put the part through their proprietary heat-treat process, and then ship you the result. Those dies and jigs and heat-treat protocols are exactly the same kind of proprietary protection that a git repo full of source code is today. If you look at hydraulic and pneumatic fittings, you can see elements of this lock-in still extant in the modern world. Everyone had their own thread sizes and thread geometries for their own tools, getting them to interoperate was impossible unless you had the right adapters, and you could not make the right adapters unless you were a dedicated specialist in hydraulic fittings. You were locked in to your tools provider's pneumatic toolchain in exactly the same way that people are currently locked in to their current power tool brand because they own $50k in tools and battery packs that agree that they're made out of a specific manufacturer's 18650s with specific voltage drop and internal resistance and etc etc etc. (go watch the torque test channel's segment on battery adapters a bit, it's enlightening! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgJI8Ikrd6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgJI8Ikrd6Y). (if you watch enough of Forgotten Weapons, you'll also hear things like "X bought the design for Y gun but it took them 3 years to transfer the tooling and get it up and running" - that's the stamps and jigs and heat-treats and everything that I was talking about earlier, and if those tools were destroyed a gun generally became totally unmanufacturable and had to be redesigned from scratch to continue production, and those redesigns frequently failed to perfectly reproduce the original!)

TaylorAlexander 3y ago

You're right. Televisions used to be more repairable too. I found a microfiche reader by a dumpster and for fun ordered a lot of 100+ microfiche cards from an old TV repair shop on ebay. Zenith for example published detailed repair manuals including detailed steps for recalibration, parts lists, schematics, annotated PCB layouts, and more. These were for repair shops not the average person, but modern TV companies don't even produce those materials anymore.

trilbyglens 3y ago
Nope they are far cheaper to just throw away and replace. It's a terrible system.
- TaylorAlexander 3y ago
  Honestly I only think it’s cheaper to replace because we’ve made repair more expensive than it needs to be. I’ve fixed two TVs that stopped working with a few dollars of capacitors and my own time. That’s much cheaper than buying a new TV! But I had to go digging through forums when manufacturers could have provided this information. Instead they refuse ti share info and charge extreme prices for repairs where they will just throw out an entire board with one bad component which would cost 20 cents on its own. I agree it’s a terrible system I just wanted to clarify that the “it costs less to throw it out and replace” narrative is only true so long as we make it true.
- benj111 3y ago
  Even within a non repairable system, it could be improved so much. Why can't we have dumb screens that I can plug my Amazon stick or whatever into. My girlfriend's TV actually crashes and randomly resets. Presumably because they cram a load of functionality in, and don't test (not so) edge cases. Just give me a dumb screen, if I want $fancy new streaming app I can just buy a single or whatever, if the dongle breaks, I replace just that.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3y ago
    Buy a computer monitor. Sadly, that only works up to a certain size, and price will not be your friend. Alternatively, a projector and quality screen.
    - bitwize 3y ago
      Alternatively, order a Sceptre dumb TV from Wal-Mart's web site.

happytiger 3y ago

The key is that mechanical designs cannot be copyright locked and you cannot build a closed ecosystem and demand insane prices for access to that ecosystem. I feel like open source isn’t the point, it’s the solution. The point is that proprietary lock in creates artificial scarcity and allows protectionist rackets, and open source AND all mechanical systems counter this ugly consumer deleterious product choice that is incentivized by the market effects of protectionist proprietary ethos.

saulrh 3y ago
Reproducibility of mechanical objects is only the case in the modern day! It used to be that reproducing mechanical parts was difficult enough that a particularly sophisticated part could be just as locked-down as a particularly sophisticated bit of software is today. For an illustrative example, imagine that a part on your tractor suddenly becomes a bit of twisted, wrecked metal. These days? You ask someone else with the same tractor to send you some pictures, pull their part out and measure all the holes and their positions and tell you what the bearing surfaces are made of, you scrape off some slivers of your wreck and assay them to figure out what alloy it's made out of and how it was heat-treated, you go and machine a test piece or two on your mill and try it, you buy a bit of bronze bushing off mcmaster and it works, etc. Maybe someone else has already done this and published a CAD model and instructions! We have solutions for this. Back then? You have no designs. You have no way to communicate with other people who have a complete working part. You might be lucky enough to remember what bits the part connected to if you'd looked at it before. You may have some idea what the intended geometry was, but you're never going to figure out that the geometry is actually just a few degrees off right angles because that keeps you out of a complicated kinematic singularity that blows up the part every time you turn left. You can guess at some of the materials, but systematic classifications of iron-carbon alloys don't exist so all you can say is "it's some kind of steel". Even if you figure a lot of this out, there's no real way to write it down or share it with people because a lot of the terminology for representing this stuff simply doesn't exist. Even if you make a functional part, its expected lifetime is months rather than decades. The original creator, by comparison, can just buy a new block of their supplier's "Alloy Number 5", throw the forging dies back on the presses and stamp out a blank, slap the blank into the jig that presents every hole to the drill press at exactly the right angle, put the part through their proprietary heat-treat process, and then ship you the result. Those dies and jigs and heat-treat protocols are exactly the same kind of proprietary protection that a git repo full of source code is today. If you look at hydraulic and pneumatic fittings, you can see elements of this lock-in still extant in the modern world. Everyone had their own thread sizes and thread geometries for their own tools, getting them to interoperate was impossible unless you had the right adapters, and you could not make the right adapters unless you were a dedicated specialist in hydraulic fittings. You were locked in to your tools provider's pneumatic toolchain in exactly the same way that people are currently locked in to their current power tool brand because they own $50k in tools and battery packs that agree that they're made out of a specific manufacturer's 18650s with specific voltage drop and internal resistance and etc etc etc. (go watch the torque test channel's segment on battery adapters a bit, it's enlightening! - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgJI8Ikrd6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgJI8Ikrd6Y). (if you watch enough of Forgotten Weapons, you'll also hear things like "X bought the design for Y gun but it took them 3 years to transfer the tooling and get it up and running" - that's the stamps and jigs and heat-treats and everything that I was talking about earlier, and if those tools were destroyed a gun generally became totally unmanufacturable and had to be redesigned from scratch to continue production, and those redesigns frequently failed to perfectly reproduce the original!)