It's been a while since I posted, by my usual standards. The
frustrations of my usual business failings have been getting me
pretty depressed lately, and not conducive to producing text that's
worth uploading. But at the same time I did finish that little
website project (its usefulness apparantly appreciated mainly by
myself) and obtained a good few new toys for free.
One less interesting toy, only in my custody for the sake of its
repair, is the ~10 year old Brother A3 ink-jet printer/scanner from
the fire station. I don't think anyone else actually cares much if
it's fixed. The fire brigade just spent over $100 on new ink for
it, but that only reinforces their opinion that the vaguely similar
cost of buying a whole new printer is easily justified, and even if
I fix it some gung ho type might still do that anyway. Of course
since it hardly gets used, 90% of that $100 ink gets squirted into
the sponge inside when it does head cleaning whever someone does
actually print with it. A laser printer would be a vastly saner
option, but that costs more to begin with so per the half-second of
thought the average consumer puts towards purchasing decisions it's
not an option.
It's all playing the printer manufacturer's game to a T, and that
really annoys me since it's charity funds being wasted. In fact
this is the sort of thing that puts me off funding or getting
involved with charities in the first place. Or really, puts me off
dealing with other people entirely. They're all in their own
separate world, and it's no place I want to be.
Looking into the actual problem with the printer has proven even
more frustrating. The issue was that it wouldn't turn on when the
power button is pressed. It would power up when turned on at the
mains, but automatically go into sleep mode and again not respond
to the power button. The obvious cause is a faulty power button,
especially given it lives on a dusty table squeezed in next to the
fire trucks (making it near inaccessible half the time anyway). But
after digging out enough plastic fittings (with a few snap-in clip
casualities) to find the power button tactile switch, both poles of
its operation proved perfectly fine when checked with a multimeter.
Moreover at this point I discovered that if the printer is powered
on at the mains while the lid is lifted, it doesn't go to sleep, so
it can complain about the lid being up, and then remains on when
you put the lid down. After that, the power button _does_ work to
turn it off, even playing a noise each time it's pressed
repeatedly, so evidently it is reading that OK after all.
Possibly the standby power supply is failing (hard to tell where I
should probe for that on the limited areas of circuit board easily
reached), but I have to wonder with a fault like this whether this
is a sneekier attempt at planned obsolescence than the old error
messages claiming the printer is useless because that sponge that
it dumps all your ink into is full.
Anyway, I sketched out a little transistor circuit to fake the lid
sensor being up for a few seconds after power-on, so I'll build
that in and hopefully make the printer usable again so long as it's
turned on/off at the power point. But last weekend I instead ended
up playing around naked on the beach or roaming the surrounding
paddocks in the unseasonably-warm moonlit night, which I'm tending
to prefer in place of many theoretically-productive tasks these
days.
While walking through paddocks and the long trail to the nudist
beach, my cludge of a solution got me thinking again about the
diverging paths of computer software and computer hardware. Were
printer designs documented publicly, I could likely have pinned
down a way to fix the real issue. If not, then probably because
it's a fault (or user-hostile feature) inside a proprietary chip,
or microcontroller with read access to its firmware disabled.
In the software world this sort of roadblock to fixing small but
deeply obstructive problems exists with closed-source software.
But, slowly but surely, open-source development seems to be
swallowing that up, with even Microsoft becoming active with Linux
use and development now. Its rise has been slower than many people
hoped, but it looks like open-source is the direction of
mass-market software in the future, and of course already here for
Linux and BSD users.
Hardware though, one space where even open-source evangelists are
forced to make hypocritical usage decisions, seems to be
impenetrable to wide adoption of open-source models. The home 3D
printer industry is a particularly frustrating example. The first
companies started making designs from open-source RepRap 3D printer
models, including the successful Makerbot company who open-sourced
all their custom hardware design info while using electronics and
software from the RepRap project. People did come up with mods to
Makerbot's first 3D printer designs, as they grew to be a major 3D
printer kit manufacturer. However when competition increased, and
they started selling pre-built printers in a more consumer-friendly
package direct from store shelves, they ceased releasing their
designs as open-source. At the same time their other mass-market 3D
printer competitors who had grown up showed no regard to
open-source, and one called Da Vinci even tried to emulate the evil
of ink-jet printer makers with expensive proprietary plastic
filament cartridges designed not to be refilled. Now Makerbot has
gone entirely, except as a brand name, after sale and merger with
always-closed-source 3D printer companies.
People still go on about open-source hardware in niche products.
But if an industry born from an open-source project ends up going
almost universally closed-source by the time it reaches the mass
market, what hope can one have with the pre-existing hardware
industries?
There one new angle: the Right to Repair movement. But its approach
is always going to be at war with closed-source designs because
their owners will try to withhold whatever they can. They might
release info on disassembling things to replace circuit boards, but
for the sake of people like me who know what to do with the info,
will they be persuaded to release schematics in order that the
circuit boards themselves can be repaired? Will they release the
microcontroller firmware so the boards can be remanufactured once
they stop supplying replacement boards themselves (if they're
forced to supply those at all)? Of course not. But then they
wouldn't be getting the benefits back from those sort of releases
like they would with open-source. People couldn't contribute back,
companies couldn't pool resource around common designs to improve
them collaboratively and present a more stable platform for
improvement without accidental regressions. It seems to have worked
for software, but then companies like Intel and AMD who employ many
Linux developers are selling processor chips which are themselves
closed-source in every respect. IBM does have their OpenPOWER
architectures, but who thinks that will become the basis for future
mass-market applications? Some say RISCV is the future, but will it
just be left behind like the RepRap designs for home 3D printers?
And beyond processor cores, they need to be inside an otherwise
open-source chip so people can make hardware-compatibile
replications of it, then used in open-source circuits, running
open-source firmware. These later steps still aren't coming
together, but for half-hearted efforts like the partial schematics
released for the Raspberry Pi boards, which with luck might be of
some use for repair, but aren't enough for real hardware
development collaboration.
Consumer electronics strike me as enormous demonstration of waste -
so many designs for the same things, all getting their own things
right and their own things wrong. Cloned anyway by the Chinese,
their successes defeated by failures in later revisions, their
half-hidden design trail far to complicated for a consumer to
follow. Nothing considered repairable. But the economics evidently
don't support anything else, and I have to wonder whether Right to
Repair laws can ever really fight that economic obstacle.
- The Free Thinker
PS. I will just add that Brother do seem make fairly good printers
compared to other brands. But any company in the ink-jet
printer industry is morally corrupt by default in my opinion.
