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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Ceramics are already used a lot in electronics. Ceramic capacitors are the most well known. But you can find it in resistors, inductors and even PCBs. See for example:

https://www.bstceramicpcb.com/ceramic-pcb/thick-film-ceramic...

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The article acknowledges this, and says they chose clay over ceramics for electricity consumption. Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power

>Although I am not sure why they then chose an open wood fire, which is likely far more polluting than even non-renewable grid power

Likely not if you factor in the energy expenditure of gathering some firewood vs. energy expenditure of putting up a power grid.

inb4 "but it's already there" lmao

Well, the atmega fab was already there and that isn’t quite clean either :)

But there are many clean ways to generate electricity and electric kilns are quite efficient compared to heating over an open flame.

I like the artistic element of this exercise, just thought that line of reasoning was a bit off.

The chips were pulled from dead arduinos, not bought fresh off the production line

I know. We live in a society where both the power grid and atmegas already exist, and our individual actions are marginal in impact.

The reason the power grid exists is because enough people want to do enough of this kind of activity that if we were still burning wood to do it there would be no trees left. Scale does matter, and this kind of 'sustainability' can't sustain a fraction of the people on the planet.

You need a grid infrastructure to build and ship the rest of the electronics as well as to use the board.

It's a fun dit/artistic project but the political discourse used to describe it is absurd

Most political discourse you consider normal today (e.g. "fun") was considered absurd some years ago. Fewer than you imagine.

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