Alain d'EspaignetWhy do we solder anyway? | |
Devils advocate (you) | Lunatic (me) |
To hold things in place, duh, silly! | We could glue them in place with a light glue that comes off easily. |
To make an electrical connection. | Spring boards bread boards wire wrap all the methods of making an electrical connection rely on contact between metals and they work. Is contact not good enough? Look around you how many things rely purely on contact. Every switch, wall plug, light bulb, relay, contactor… All these make contact and electrons flow, don't they? |
To package things in a box and make it pretty. | What if the box itself helps keep the parts in place? |
To reduce contact resistance. | What's the order of magnitude of contact resistance in low voltage/current circuits anyway? Milliohms, micro ohms? Does it matter a bunch of small resistance in series? Is this not working? |
Because that's the way we've always done it. | Ahh I see. |
Is there anything else YOU want to add to the no can do list? | Go on, do it! |
What if I were to say, the hell with soldering at all. Lets not solder!
Make the product packaging itself responsible for holding the parts in place and making them make contact.
When the product is broken chances are it's just a few parts gone bad.
In that situation just open it up and get to the individual parts easily.
Test them until the faulty ones are found.
Replace them and get the product working again.
If the product has gone obsolete.
Open it up. Shake it and all the parts fall in a tray.
Reuse the parts.
Oh boy now I really opened a can of worms now!
The folks in the EU will like to hear this with their ongoing “planned obsolescence” battles.
The best they managed to do so far is to ask manufacturers to label their products with a repairability rating.
Let the customer decide which to buy.
In my lunatic approach to electronics packaging everything is recoverable and everything can be replaced.
So does that mean it gets a 10/10 rating?
Come on what is your revolutionary idea luni Alain? Spill it out already!
Here it goes in brief:
The key idea
What if electronics could be built in a way where the housing or sub-housings inside holds the components in place forcing their leads to make contact with a traditional printed circuit board. The housing can consist of one or more modular subunits. Open these subunits and loosen the parts for reuse or repair. This opens up new markets for the easier repair and resale of used electronic parts.
We don't want just the metal powder left after the fumes have dispersed.
We want to reuse the bits and pieces! The more the merrier.
From now on I will elaborate on the general idea.
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