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Comment by isawczuk | Hacker News Reader

Low cost home IC development is something very needed for agriculture. If we think about current and future farming equipment, it's digital. We need to provide them the ability to repair themselves and mod.

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You can just get finished Microcontrollers that you can program yourself for a fraction of a fraction of the price to make them yourself, and orders of magnitude more capable. You will not be able to make a chip more capable than an ESP32 for less than $2, so how would making an IC yourself help you?

I imagine it would be in preparedness for a time when you could no longer get such powerful chips so cheaply and quickly, or for one where you no longer trusted the chips you could get for some reason.

How about we let them flash the ICs that they have first? Or allow them to change the maximum speed on the vehicle without having to go to the service center and paying 300 to 500$.

Why are we talking about low cost at home IC development for farmers while we don't let them do even that.

Forcing companies to open source their software is not possible, but making sure we can replace each component after warranty? There are strong right to repair movements, it's just matter of time.

But you still have to reverse engineer the IC before you can replace it - and once you have that it's still cheaper to have it manufactured in an existing Fab than to build your own.

In that future you can make yourself a replacement 555 IC at home but keep in mind many components have an SIP core.

Forcing companies to open source their software is certainly possible for some senses of the word "possible". You could go a long way in that direction just by changing the copyright law to not cover software, or to only cover software if the source code is deposited with the Library of Congress. Or you could change product liability law to declare products shipped without complete, compilable source code for their firmware to be "defective". Right now the political support for such changes isn't there, but that can change over time.

More likely we're going to go in the opposite direction, though.

My father grew up on a farm and I wholeheartedly agree. Unfortunately, this is a step in the right direction but the goal is still a long ways off. Farmers don't have a spare $50k sitting around to build hobbyist IC fabs in the barn.

Any IC that would be practical to DIY is available for <$1 and you could probably get something 1000x more powerful for nearly the same price. Making chips isn't the issue here.

Unfortunately I don’t think this has any relevance to that at all.

Heh, now they have two yields to worry about. What's stopping them from doing this with the various commercial-off-the-shelf system-on-a-chips?

Does John Deere use ICs of its own manufacture?

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