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Comment by skybrian | Hacker News Reader

Interesting experiment, but on the other hand, maybe 3D printing would have less emissions than an open fire?

I’ve not tried this, but it sounds like a good way to get fast turnaround for very simple circuits:

https://bsky.app/profile/castpixel.bsky.social/post/3mf52azn...

They're not great for anything that might produce heat. Seeing a MOSFET slowly starting to imitate the Tower of Pisa after dissipating a measly 1 W for a few moments was a sight to behold.

For about two seconds before I cut the power.

If heat dissipation matters and we're determined to 3D print at home then extruding a clay is probably the way to go. Laser sintering also seems relevant. For anyone concerned about an open fire a small electric oven isn't particularly expensive.

If you really wanted to go the route of printing plastic I guess you could fix the heat dissipation issue by using the plastic print to do lost PLA casting of an iron die with which you could cut a much thicker sheet of copper. But if you're going to melt iron you might as well give in and fire clay.

I once encountered a very old ceramic board related to telecoms. I'm not sure about the why but it consisted of a ceramic tablet with some sort of conductive resin printed onto it. A crude sort of layering was accomplished by printing a small spot of insulator on top of the junction where two traces crossed one another. I'd guess the board I saw dated to the mid 80s or earlier.

CO2 emissions from burning wood (and charcoal) can considered net-zero by some (I'm not really interested in arguing one way or the other) because all of the CO2 being released was initially trapped out of the air by the plant, not releasing "new" carbon that was initially trapped underground

There’s more to pollution than CO2. You’re polluting the neighborhood with smoke, which is bad for lungs. Maybe okay in a rural area if neighbors are far away.

I guess we can just keep ordering pre-stuffed PCBs from JLCPCB. This way, the pollution involved in the various processes still exists, but it's hidden from view behind a box of minty-new circuit boards delivered to the doorstep.

Or, you know: If the neighbors take up a serious hobby-scale effort of wood-fired pottery project with local clay that they mined themselves, then... Perhaps we could be supportive of their effort, eh? Isn't that part of what being neighborly involves?

People have been standing around fires since the dawn of fire. Live a little.

Does the person who downvoted me think we should ban fire-pits? Or grills? Does anyone seriously think that?

There's nothing environmentally friendly about burning woods good old prehistoric ways. It releases tons of particulates and nitrogen oxides and some other toxic hydrocarbons. That's why it's illegal now in many regions to burn trashes in the backyard.

Wood fired are CO2 neutral (but a problem of pollution with fine particulate at scale in poorly ventilated valleys).

It's an art project

I want so badly for you to expand on this thought. What are you implying about it by describing it as an art project? What does art mean to you? Are you expanding on or disputing whether it is an experiment? Please, go on.

Meant to be a fun thing to do/experience/learn and not produced on an industrial scale. One small fire pit to harden some clay isn't going to make a material impact on total human CO2 emissions.

Do you not think it might be counterproductive considering every new activity in terms of emissions output? We need to reduce emissions, to do this we need systemic change. It seems unfair to place the burdon of reaching efficiency gains that can only come from economoes of scale onto anything that that has not reached scale.

Systemic change cam be seeded from small ideas. Allow the ideas to be inefficient no matter what they are, their sum will still be tiny compared to the mass industry of established ideas. If you want change ideas are a good place to start. If the ideas are good don't reject them because of their resource use in their embryonic stage, once they are established as good ideas we can turn our mind on how to make them efficient good ideas.

I'm sure the clay could be fired in an electric kiln powered by renewable/non-emitting power.

That's a cool project, I've actually considered something somewhere but never put the energy into actually doing the work.

I'm guessing that the issue here might have been that copper as a metal is kind of difficult to trace the source to ethically?

Also, with this method each 3D print is a new instance of using plastic, where with clay you only use plastic once

That link sounds interesting but I can't open it :(

Seems temporary, try again.

Works, thanks.

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