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The World’s E-Waste Has Reached a Crisis Point (www.wired.com)
submitted 2 years ago by to c/technology@lemmy.ml
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[–] 4 points 2 years ago (8 children)

@ordellrb @eugenia The other place the motherboards of old phones could be repurposed is in embedded processors.

Most home appliances feature embedded processors and motherboards these days. Many commercial and industrial buildings and structures feature a range of embedded sensors.

In many cases, a repurposed three-year-old or even six-year-old iPhone or Samsung Galaxy motherboard is overkill in terms of being capable for these kinds of applications.

Especially if they're reflashed with an embedded device-focussed operating system, such as QNX.

Instead of making new motherboards for embedded devices, why not repurpose old consumer tech instead?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (6 children)

    The issue is the price of new hardware vs the hourly wages of people who are capable of reprogramming old stuff. If you are going to pay $100/h to get old stuff working and buying new stuff costs $20 then it's cheaper to throw it out and buy new stuff.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (4 children)

    @etbe @ajsadauskas so it's on quantity. If you reprogram one device for 500 dollars and then reflash with that firmware other 1000 devices it will be much cheaper than new devices.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    @mcSlibinas @etbe Really good point.

    The development time and cost is an overhead. That's divided between the number of units you produce.

    If the programming costs are $100k and you produce one unit, then that unit costs $100k.

    But if you flash the same software on to 1 million units, then it's just 10 cents per unit.

    Worth remembering that millions of people junking their two-year-old iPhones and Samsung Galaxies at roughly the same time.

    I think the broader underlying issue is that our economy is optimised for labour productivity, rather than making the most out of finite environmental resources.

    It really should be the other way around.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (2 children)

    Reprogramming the 1000 other devices won't be as hard as the first one but it won't be trivial as they may be all on different versions of the software and there may be hardware variations too.

    Just to triage the devices and determine which ones are good enough is going to be non trivial.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago (1 child)

    @etbe definitely. That's why ve have internet - to connect many users of given devices. Like entuziasts of retro gaming consoles: some dudes spend time of reprogramming others help with sharing - fixing - adapting.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 years ago

    @mcSlibinas @etbe Worth noting that in the six months after Apple releases the thinnest, best iPhone ever each year, it would receive several million two-year-old iPhones as trade-ins.

    So you could theoretically reflash several million units of nearly identical hardware with embedded Linux (or QNX), remove the batteries (and screens?).

    You would then have several million near-identical motherboards ready for second life embedded in appliances or sensors.

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