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Re: [ox-en] Peer Economy. A Transition Concept.



Smári McCarthy wrote:

As for inkjet-style polymer based electronics.. phew. I wish. There have been a number of attempts done at this. I refer to the following for more information: * S.B. Fuller, E.J. Wilhelm and J.M. Jacobson, Ink-jet printed nanoparticle microelectromechanical systems, IEEE Journal of Microelectromechanical Systems, Volume 11, Issue 1, p. 54-60 * B. A. Ridley, B. Nivi, and J. M. Jacobson, “All-inorganic field effect transistors fabricated by printing,” Science, vol. 286, pp. 746-749, 1999.
*    Saul Griffith, Growing Machines, MIT PhD Thesis, 2004
* R.A. Lee and D.R. Whittaker, Laser created silicon vias for stacking dies in MCMs, Electronics Manufacturing Technology Symposium, 1991., Eleventh IEEE/CHMT International

I can cite numerous other references about this subject. Suffice to say, it's still a heavy research issue, mostly because, in my view:

Yes, that's exactly the point. It's at a research stage where people are busy covering the whole area with as many patents as they can now. It's also a kind of research which doesn't need heavy expensive equipment (on the whole). In a similar situation some biochemists have worked hard on keeping the field open by publishing under free licenses (eg some of the designs for DNA processing equipment, as well as data on genomes themselves). I was curious as to why there weren't polymer scientists doing the same thing - or if there are, where they are.

* The people trying to do this stuff are still thinking of routing as a preprocessing issue rather than just another plotting point * People still think of transistors, etc, as bulky discrete elements rather than little droplets of liquid 3 atoms across (as can be done, see numerous articles online) * People are not willing to accept a 30% failure rate on "inkjet" printed surfaces, which is about what you can expect to get in terms of incorrectly placed pixels, offsets and bad ink etc in tabletop inkjets. * Redundancy in electronics is still considered expensive, despite evidence to the contrary.

* Even if everybody had access to an "inkjet" that could print arbitrary circuit boards, say with 26µm voxel/pixel granularity, most people wouldn't have the foggiest idea what to do with it.

True, but there is a lot of room for imaginative designs that would be physically possible to manufacture in a way that free IC designs aren't, unless you have an IC factory. No-one can make a Sparc at home (although there are several spin-offs of the gpl-ed Sparc designs which have been manufactured for specialised purposes). But if you were incredibly ambitious you might well be able to come up with a SIMD design which could handle redundant cells and trade the slowness of polymers against the scale inkjets make possible - and make it at home. More likely though would be much smaller and simpler electronics (switches of various kinds, mainly) printed on everyday plastic devices.

The industrial revolution was purposefully kept out of the homes by the owners of the methods and processes. If you don't believe me, look at the history of knitting (an excellent talk on the subject was done by Rose White at some conference, I forget which.) This has slowed down the adoption of home electronics, and it's frankly a wonder that the original Apple computer ever got built - true piracy.

I recommend looking at the OpenSPARC II CPU if you're interested in this kind of thing, and ask yourself "if I could make one of these in my kitchen at zero marginal cost, how would it change the way I live my life?" I'd love to hear your answer.

If you could make them in your kitchen, then the whole basis for the semiconductor oligopolies and their vast polluting factories would vanish. Which might change many people's lives, even if they didn't use the Sparc itself at all. Bringing technology back to a small scale isn't only about individuals being able to do things at home - it's also about small, human scale companies being possible, as opposed to the commercial giants which rule now.

Cheers
Graham



 - Smári





Michel Bauwens wrote:
Graham,

if the content about us policy is true, thanks for letting us know any
details for publication, as this would be a bombshell ...

I don't know about polymer activities, so I'm copying a few people who
might be aware of it,

Michel

On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 3:49 PM, graham <graham theseamans.net> wrote:
Michel Bauwens wrote:


I think there is actually quite a bit of activity around open
hardware/physical production through open design communities

only 2-3 years ago, the field was in the doldrums, with negative
assessments of the previous wave of experiments (expressed by graham
seaman if I'm not mistaken); but as I discovered about 6 months ago,
and which prompted me to create the design pages, see
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design, the field is again in a
strong moment of re-emergence, with tons of practical projects
emerging in all kinds of fields:

http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking


Yes, that was me, though the assessment was only negative in the sense that the kind of cumulative process seen in the creation of Linux, which I had expected to see repeated in chip design, had not yet happened. I still think that what is happening now (in electronics, I don't know about other areas) shows that the underlying pressures towards peer production are still there - and even increasing - but that the breakthrough has not yet materialized
(maybe a bad choice of word ;-).

Until recently I thought the sense of disappointment I felt was due to my
having misunderstood the processes going on at a logical level; in
particular the relation between commercial and 'hobbyist' designers, which
is clearly even more important here than it is for free software.

However, someone just sent me a huge pile of documents he says show that the US government has been systematically working to isolate any medium to large scale companies working with free designs. I'm not sure how real this
is till I get a chance to read it (though the guy knows far more than me
about both the technical and the commercial sides of electronics), or what I should do with it if it does look real, but it is certainly a possibility. In which case the reasons are political, and once again show the tendency of
oekonux-like thinking to underestimate the political...

Aside from conventional chip design - do you know of anyone working on free development of polymer-based electronics using ink-jet printers? If not, why
do you think there isn't? It seems such a logical area to extend to, and
surely there must be people with both knowledge of polymers and links to
peer production?

 Graham


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 Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
 Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
 Contact: projekt oekonux.de







_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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