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Is there anything you're into that no one or basically nobody is into? (lemmy.world)
submitted 11 months ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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There's an Aztec city building game called Tlatoani. It's in early access, but has enough meat on the bone that it's one of my goto games.

Out of curiosity I checked Steam DB for active player numbers. I have discovered at any given point I am 10% to 25% of the given player base BY MYSELF. I am 1 of 4 people playing this game right now in the world. With the prevalence of the internet I always assume whatever weird bullshit you're into there's at least a thousand people talking about it; making memes outsiders could never comprehend. It's actually novel to fly under the radar for once.

What do you do that doesn't have a community associated with it?

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[–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (3 children)

Have you seen the Sam Zeloof videos? He's the main person I've seen actually build a chip in a garage.

He buys his wafers, which is critical. Given a hot furnace you could refine your own metallurgical silicon in a crucible, but cleaning it will be a whole thing. The machine needed would probably be based on spinning band distillation, which you could make in a pre-existing machine shop. To avoid toxic gases and explosion hazards - which are the two things chemists have told me not to mess with - you'd want to use SiCl4, which is a bit different from the standard approach which uses hydrogenated species. The Siemens process back to silicon and monocrystalline casting is all that's left, and I wonder if they could be combined in a step if scalability isn't a concern.

What type of projects do you do?

If only I had space for a workshop, so it's all theoretical ATM.

Which machines are noisy? Polishers?

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago (2 children)

    Ah, not to worry, even professionally it's very common to buy your wafers. I am on mobile data right now so I'll check out those videos later!

    Basically, every single machine that needs a vacuum chamber - so almost all non-wet processes, like physical/chemical vapor deposition, reactive ion etching, scanning electron microscopy (although a good optical microscope will do if you're not at the nano scale... Which is almost certainly the case if you're doing things at home).

    Honestly maybe I'm just too used to the lab setting and am underestimating how much you can actually do without vacuum processing. I'll take a look later: this all looked so out of the reach of an ordinary person that I never even considered following content creators who do this. Thank you!

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  • [–] 4 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

    High vacuums are tricky. The first high vacuums were achieved with mercury-based Sprengel pumps, but mercury isn't available everywhere. Maybe you could make a small, slow turbomolecular pump work if it was mandatory (it's all about the bearing) but it seems anything that needs sealing is going to struggle without either that or a massive petrochemical industry to supply the needed high-quality synthetic oils. If you're doing technology all over again, I'd skip the vacuum tubes stage because of this.

    If you can get away with a low vacuum, a piston-type pump with castor oil as the sealant will do. It seems like a low vacuum would work for at least some kinds of VD. Maybe you can help clear it up a bit.

    (although a good optical microscope will do if you’re not at the nano scale… Which is almost certainly the case if you’re doing things at home).

    1 micron features is as ambitious as I've bothered to think about. For basic computing, like to run a CNC machine, that should do.

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