Now I'm curious what other parts of this device could last 'over 200 years.' Whats the next weak link on the chain? Is contact corrosion the ultimate limiting factor?
- ESD / supply voltage spikes. This device has basically zero protection against them. The RP2040 is well-known to be quite sensitive to them, so I'd expect it to kill the controller relatively quickly. The FRAM chip itself isn't as exposed, but could still be damaged.
- USB-A becoming obsolete. I fully expect USB-C to replace it on new machines within a decade - and we'll probably switch to something completely novel within the next 50 years or so. You'd have to get a PC out of a museum to access it.
- Flash failure. The data is stored on an FRAM chip, but the controller's firmware isn't. That chip is rated for 20 years (but I do expect it to last quite a bit longer).
- Crystal oscillator failure. It's literally a crystal, which is vibrating. They can fail.
- LDO fail-closed, exposing the MCU, flash, and FRAM chips to an overvoltage.
- Tin whiskers. The device is almost certainly using lead-free solder, which means it is susceptible to the solder growing tiny "spikes", which can lead to shorts. We've gotten quite good at managing these over the years, but all bets are off when it comes to a 200-year scale.
Most of those can probably be recovered from, as you'd still be able to attach debugging tools directly to the chip and bypass the controller. The biggest risk is probably losing the documentation, which makes accessing it an awful lot harder.
I'm going to make a safe bet that there's no way any of the capacitors involved survive anywhere near that long. Now of course, technically the data is still there, but I doubt it in 200 years it's going to be all that easy to replace the microcontroller while retaining that data. A competitor in this race would be the connector:
> The Blaustahl includes 4MB of NOR flash for firmware and a USB Type-A male port that requires no additional drivers on most operating systems.
Something tells me that USB type-A is unlikely to survive the next 200 years.
The pico microcontroller, on the other hand, has normal flash and won't last very long. Here's an interesting article:
https://www.ni.com/en/support/documentation/supplemental/12/...
Maybe keep it in the freezer?
Otherwise I would expect tin whiskers or some other process to dominate reliability at long periods.
More generally, all electronic components can fail [2] and there's a lot of such components in this device. This is applying component-level thinking to a systems level problem with no real way to verify their claim (they don't even claim to have done any aging test to try to simulate how long the device could last) and why this should be called out as nothing more than a marketing gimmick.
[1] https://www.edn.com/class-2-ceramic-capacitors-can-you-trust...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Failure_of_electronic_componen...
Hey, what happened to usb-b?
You can find USB-B ports on e.g. laser printers (where size doesn't matter) or on some older USB drives (where you'd want USB 3 speeds).
I think i even had a sata to usb box using the huge usb 3 version.
Those were fine-ish, but their micro versions can't die in a nuclear explosion fast enough...
Why? All capacitors on the flash drive are MLCCs, which unlike their electrolytic counterparts aren't exactly known for failing - let alone simply due to age. When push comes to shove you can just remove them without meaningfully impacting functionality anyways.
[1] https://page.venkel.com/hubfs/1_Images/Resource%20Center/Cro...
[2] https://www.edn.com/class-2-ceramic-capacitors-can-you-trust...