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Solar powered micro-controllers might be the way to go that could hook up to crude automated farm machines. Depending on the life span of batteries, solar power

Solar powered micro-controllers might be the way to go that could hook up to crude automated farm machines. Depending on the life span of batteries, solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides, solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software, and solar powered cb ham radios for communications with built in encryption keys.

palmotea 2y ago
In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications." Crude automated [solar powered] farm machines - would probably be useless. Animal power is probably the way to go. Or steam. Go to a threshing bee sometime: I've seen a tractor that runs on wood. Solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides - the life span of batteries would be short, get that shit on paper fast. Solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software - plan in your head or use a paper spreadsheet. Computers might be everywhere today, and you personally might not know how to do anything without a computer, but practically no one had a computer 40-45 years ago, and literally no one had a computer when society was last at a "collapse" level of technology. COMPUTERS ARE NOT NECESSARY.
- vdupras 2y ago
  I 100% agree that computers are not necessary. But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge.
  - palmotea 2y ago
    > But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge. I really disagree with that. It will give practically no edge. It's a specialist skill that's only really useful in the context of an already computerized society for mass production or big one-offs. If you have a collapse, I think the assumption is there would little to no mass production of advanced goods (hence, the scavenging concept). Then you're left with big one-offs, which are things large organizations like governments build and not all the time.
    - hereonout2 2y ago
      I dunno, microcontrollers could help in this zombie apocalypse world we're imagining. I would think even in small scale having things like a 3d printers, CNC machines, networked video surveillance and alarm systems, solar arrays etc would be very beneficial. Absolutely though the top priorities would be much simpler things though like food, clean water and shelter.
      - hakfoo 2y ago
        Process control seems like the big one. Precise tools for precise measurements and monitoring are pretty high up the tech tree, so if you can say "we saved a box of Arduinos and sensors from the Before Times", you can get those capabilities back sooner, and potentially use them as references for tools built with more renewable resources.
- nostrademons 2y ago
  Just because computers weren't around 40-50 years ago doesn't mean that computers won't be very handy to have around in a post-collapse world. Technology is very much path-dependent: the future does not look like the past, and incorporates everything that has happened up to that point. The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire. It continued to use Roman coinage, for example, the Latin language, Roman roads, Roman provincial government, and so on. The point of having computers is simply that they perform certain tasks orders of magnitude faster than humans. They're a tool, no more and no less. Before computers, a "calculator" was a person with paper and a slide rule, and you needed hundreds of them to do something like compute artillery trajectories, army logistics, machine tool curves, explosive lensing, sending rockets into space, etc. Managing to keep just one solar-powered calculator working for 10 years after a collapse frees up all those people to do things like farming. Keeping a solar-powered electric tractor working frees up all those farmers, and frees up the animals for eating. IMHO this project is at least operating under the right principles, i.e. make the software work on scavenged parts, control your dependencies, be efficient with your computations, focus on things you can't do with humans.
  - kibwen 2y ago
    > The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire. Our modern institutions and infrastructure depend on impossibly-complex, precariously-fragile world-spanning supply chains that rely on untold quantities of highly-skilled labor whose own training and employment is dependent upon having enough pre-existing material prosperity that 90% of the population is exempt from needing to grow their own food. Meanwhile, the supply chain for the pre-Roman and post-Roman worlds were not very different. They were producing tin in Britain in 2000 BC, and they were producing tin in Britain in 1000 AD. Crucially, the top of the production pyramid (finished goods) was still close to the bottom of it (raw materials harvestable with minimal material dependencies) without a hundred zillion intervening layers of middlemen.
- kjs3 2y ago
  In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications." Considering how much potentially invaluable info is only/mostly/only easily available as a PDF, I'm thinking a working ereader would be of nontrivial value. Now...if there was only a way to crunch a PDF on an 8-bit processor I recovered from my washing machine...
  - anthk 2y ago
    - pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD - wv/odt2txt and friends - cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot - A Forth with Starting Forth it's hugely valuable, ditto with a Math Book like the Calculus from Spivak. Not a collapse, but a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, they need to be constantly updated. If you can salvage some older machine with DuskOS+networking, simple gopher and IRC clients/servers will work with really low bandwidth (2/3 KBPS and less).
    - kjs3 2y ago
      - pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD Based on xpdf. Probably not 8-bit capable. - pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD From OpenOffice. Probably not 8-bit capable. Point to a PDF to something useful converter that runs in 64K bytes and can handle the 'PDF as a wrapper around some non-text image of the document' and we can talk. Seriously...I'd be fascinated. - cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot Not sure how that helps. And can you port gnuplot to run in 8-bit/64k? * a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, * Ridiculous, unless your definition of 'usable' is 'unless I can get to TwitFaceTubeIn and watch cat videos ima gonna die!'. If civilization collapses and the network goes away tomorrow, my Debian 12, FreeBSD 14 and NetBSD 10 machines will work exactly as well as it does today until I can't power it and/or the hardware dies (sans email and web, of course). Yeah, the windows 10/11 things will bitch and moan constantly, and I assume MacOS too, but even with degraded functionality, it's far from 'unusable'. And I'll be able to load Linux or BSD on them so no worries. they need to be constantly updated No, they don't. Updates come in 2 broad categories: security fixes and feature release. Post-collapse and no network makes security much less urgent, and no new features is the new normal...get used to it. I have gear that runs HP/UX 10 (last support in 2003); still runs fine and delivering significant value. And that ignores DOS, Win3, XP and such, which are still (disturbingly) common. will work with really low bandwidth You mean....with a network?

palmotea 2y ago

In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications." Crude automated [solar powered] farm machines - would probably be useless. Animal power is probably the way to go. Or steam. Go to a threshing bee sometime: I've seen a tractor that runs on wood. Solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides - the life span of batteries would be short, get that shit on paper fast. Solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software - plan in your head or use a paper spreadsheet. Computers might be everywhere today, and you personally might not know how to do anything without a computer, but practically no one had a computer 40-45 years ago, and literally no one had a computer when society was last at a "collapse" level of technology. COMPUTERS ARE NOT NECESSARY.

vdupras 2y ago
I 100% agree that computers are not necessary. But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge.
- palmotea 2y ago
  > But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge. I really disagree with that. It will give practically no edge. It's a specialist skill that's only really useful in the context of an already computerized society for mass production or big one-offs. If you have a collapse, I think the assumption is there would little to no mass production of advanced goods (hence, the scavenging concept). Then you're left with big one-offs, which are things large organizations like governments build and not all the time.
  - hereonout2 2y ago
    I dunno, microcontrollers could help in this zombie apocalypse world we're imagining. I would think even in small scale having things like a 3d printers, CNC machines, networked video surveillance and alarm systems, solar arrays etc would be very beneficial. Absolutely though the top priorities would be much simpler things though like food, clean water and shelter.
    - hakfoo 2y ago
      Process control seems like the big one. Precise tools for precise measurements and monitoring are pretty high up the tech tree, so if you can say "we saved a box of Arduinos and sensors from the Before Times", you can get those capabilities back sooner, and potentially use them as references for tools built with more renewable resources.
nostrademons 2y ago
Just because computers weren't around 40-50 years ago doesn't mean that computers won't be very handy to have around in a post-collapse world. Technology is very much path-dependent: the future does not look like the past, and incorporates everything that has happened up to that point. The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire. It continued to use Roman coinage, for example, the Latin language, Roman roads, Roman provincial government, and so on. The point of having computers is simply that they perform certain tasks orders of magnitude faster than humans. They're a tool, no more and no less. Before computers, a "calculator" was a person with paper and a slide rule, and you needed hundreds of them to do something like compute artillery trajectories, army logistics, machine tool curves, explosive lensing, sending rockets into space, etc. Managing to keep just one solar-powered calculator working for 10 years after a collapse frees up all those people to do things like farming. Keeping a solar-powered electric tractor working frees up all those farmers, and frees up the animals for eating. IMHO this project is at least operating under the right principles, i.e. make the software work on scavenged parts, control your dependencies, be efficient with your computations, focus on things you can't do with humans.
- kibwen 2y ago
  > The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire. Our modern institutions and infrastructure depend on impossibly-complex, precariously-fragile world-spanning supply chains that rely on untold quantities of highly-skilled labor whose own training and employment is dependent upon having enough pre-existing material prosperity that 90% of the population is exempt from needing to grow their own food. Meanwhile, the supply chain for the pre-Roman and post-Roman worlds were not very different. They were producing tin in Britain in 2000 BC, and they were producing tin in Britain in 1000 AD. Crucially, the top of the production pyramid (finished goods) was still close to the bottom of it (raw materials harvestable with minimal material dependencies) without a hundred zillion intervening layers of middlemen.
kjs3 2y ago
In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications." Considering how much potentially invaluable info is only/mostly/only easily available as a PDF, I'm thinking a working ereader would be of nontrivial value. Now...if there was only a way to crunch a PDF on an 8-bit processor I recovered from my washing machine...
- anthk 2y ago
  - pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD - wv/odt2txt and friends - cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot - A Forth with Starting Forth it's hugely valuable, ditto with a Math Book like the Calculus from Spivak. Not a collapse, but a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, they need to be constantly updated. If you can salvage some older machine with DuskOS+networking, simple gopher and IRC clients/servers will work with really low bandwidth (2/3 KBPS and less).
  - kjs3 2y ago
    - pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD Based on xpdf. Probably not 8-bit capable. - pdftotext from poppler-tools under Linux/BSD From OpenOffice. Probably not 8-bit capable. Point to a PDF to something useful converter that runs in 64K bytes and can handle the 'PDF as a wrapper around some non-text image of the document' and we can talk. Seriously...I'd be fascinated. - cp/m can read TXT files generated from gnuplot Not sure how that helps. And can you port gnuplot to run in 8-bit/64k? * a network attach on infra makes most modern OSes unusable, * Ridiculous, unless your definition of 'usable' is 'unless I can get to TwitFaceTubeIn and watch cat videos ima gonna die!'. If civilization collapses and the network goes away tomorrow, my Debian 12, FreeBSD 14 and NetBSD 10 machines will work exactly as well as it does today until I can't power it and/or the hardware dies (sans email and web, of course). Yeah, the windows 10/11 things will bitch and moan constantly, and I assume MacOS too, but even with degraded functionality, it's far from 'unusable'. And I'll be able to load Linux or BSD on them so no worries. they need to be constantly updated No, they don't. Updates come in 2 broad categories: security fixes and feature release. Post-collapse and no network makes security much less urgent, and no new features is the new normal...get used to it. I have gear that runs HP/UX 10 (last support in 2003); still runs fine and delivering significant value. And that ignores DOS, Win3, XP and such, which are still (disturbingly) common. will work with really low bandwidth You mean....with a network?