Tony L
Administrator
The point I’m trying to make (as someone with old-school IT experience) is that the ICs are not inherently unreliable. You can find countless Apollo space program era ICs that still work, though other aspects of the circuit will have dried up and failed.
There is not a hope in hell of fighting progress, no one in human history has ever achieved that goal. The simple fact is LSI and SMD is where we are and no one will be going back.
Sure, there will always be traditional niche markets like bespoke hi-fi, guitar amps and FX pedals etc that are even proper old-school hand-wired, let alone through-hole, but in most cases most things have already moved to SMD technology, even in the audio industry. I am simply arguing that with the correct access to parts and documentation these can be kept alive for decades as the same kind of thing fails on these boards as fails on all electronic kit (caps, batteries etc).
There will be cases where there is no economic fix, but there is on a lot of traditional vintage stuff too, e.g. say an old Pioneer receiver where the mains transformer and output stage has failed. At that point it becomes a valuable donor unit and good parts can be harvested to keep others alive. Again, documentation and service procedure being available in the public domain is the key here. This is an access to information about the things you own thing.
If people start thinking and arguing logically maybe we can get to the point we aren’t sticking 50” flat screen TVs etc into landfill every few years because they are undocumented and maybe even un-openable. Consumer pressure will eventually win out, but no one is going to make a smart TV or tablet using through-hole technology. It just isn’t possible. We just need the right of access to service 2020 technology. Throwing something away because some crappy low-cost Chinese surface mount capacitor has crapped itself is not acceptable, and in many cases that is actually the issue.
There is not a hope in hell of fighting progress, no one in human history has ever achieved that goal. The simple fact is LSI and SMD is where we are and no one will be going back.
Sure, there will always be traditional niche markets like bespoke hi-fi, guitar amps and FX pedals etc that are even proper old-school hand-wired, let alone through-hole, but in most cases most things have already moved to SMD technology, even in the audio industry. I am simply arguing that with the correct access to parts and documentation these can be kept alive for decades as the same kind of thing fails on these boards as fails on all electronic kit (caps, batteries etc).
There will be cases where there is no economic fix, but there is on a lot of traditional vintage stuff too, e.g. say an old Pioneer receiver where the mains transformer and output stage has failed. At that point it becomes a valuable donor unit and good parts can be harvested to keep others alive. Again, documentation and service procedure being available in the public domain is the key here. This is an access to information about the things you own thing.
If people start thinking and arguing logically maybe we can get to the point we aren’t sticking 50” flat screen TVs etc into landfill every few years because they are undocumented and maybe even un-openable. Consumer pressure will eventually win out, but no one is going to make a smart TV or tablet using through-hole technology. It just isn’t possible. We just need the right of access to service 2020 technology. Throwing something away because some crappy low-cost Chinese surface mount capacitor has crapped itself is not acceptable, and in many cases that is actually the issue.