Even with just full documentation available, people (hobbyists, repair shops) could replace original parts with generic alternatives that match the spec electrically. The result wouldn't be as pretty as the original, but it would work (and gave some street cred valued by people who prefer reuse and repair to generating waste).
Seems like a useful trick for any existing manufacturer: Any defects that still mostly function could be sold to South Africa instead of being broken back down for parts.
If enough of these are sold, it doesn't matter if they're reliable, since repairing any issues will become cheap.
Garages all round the country will be able to disassemble and reassemble to swap any part in minutes, and there will be a super cheap non-oem clone of every part that fails.
I think the interesting thing is that for small communities (Game Boy revitalisations?), there is a semi-cheap way to build certain plastic replacement parts/mod parts. Sure, the person who made the piece needs to be good, but everyone can profit.
Yeah, they are easy to repair, but I think the main point is that they are plentiful. I don't think a few little projects like this are going to put a dent in the overall market supply.
This is beginning in the wrong end IMHO. One of the big problems today is that products are:
1) Not made to be repaired.
2) Not made to last
3) Repair manuals are not easily and widely available
4) Manufacturer have monopoly on replacement parts making them extremely expensive.
I would instead create tax incentives which encourage manufacturers to make repairable and durable items, and pass laws which makes it easier for the competition to make compatible replacement parts so they are cheaper.
How many products don't we have where one stupid little plastic thing breaks and it becomes useless. Getting the part is difficult, expensive or hard to install.
I won't hold my breath when it comes to proper component-level repair, but I'd also argue that component-level repair is already possible (with manuals from grey-area sources).
This is good news for at least being able to order legitimate "consumable" parts such as batteries which are difficult (or dangerous) to obtain unofficially, or easily-broken parts such as screens.
Sure, I understand and appreciate the resourcefulness of the repair as much as anyone.
I just wanted to let people know that making a new one is a viable option both in repair and new hobby designs. It hasn't been that long that it's been fairly easy to do.
Hopefully such things bring forced availability of rare spare parts. If cookie cutter capacitors break, that's nothing really since you can just order them on Mouser et al.
But if a more special part breaks, say a custom voltage regulator to a game console (just since I saw a video on that fail yesterday), I would like for a repair center to be able to buy one such for a reasonable price and have the 500$ console repaired for perhaps 100$ - not scrap it.
This is clearly a professional repair kit, to be used at a local shop or maker space.
And now that the devices are available to the public, anyone can use the ideas in them to develop less fancy alternatives.
Maybe it's time to accept that a tiny powerful computer, radio, camera, and display is worth the base price plus $50 for and extended 3 more years of use?
Making replacement parts and repair manuals available wouldn't meaningfully hurt device activation schemes. Sure, somebody could buy and replace the logic board in a stolen phone, but criminals are already able to do that with used or stolen parts.
I'm not necessarily a fan of the complicated design but I accept that it might've been necessary for miniaturisation.
Other than that, to me the message of this video is that if anything goes people will have replacement parts available and a repair shop can take care of it. Assuming that's the intention it's still pretty good.
Would be great if they defined what is a spare part. Somehow I have a feeling that this is just a PR to shut right to repair campaigns down by saying "look we have implemented this, what else do you want?" Reality will be you still won't be able to buy individual custom ICs with their datasheets but whole PCBs at a prices only slightly cheaper than a new product.
> Do that ten times in a single design, and the resulting device is significantly better.
Honestly, I would be very tempted by appliances/cars that said "we've been using these parts for 20 years, and expect to do so forever so replacement parts won't be an issue". I believe some European car makers did that very thing.
Yes, it won't have certain definitions of "better", but repairability is a feature.
This is an important point. We're so accustomed to the low-margin consumer world sometimes that we forget that equipment can be repaired. Broken physical enclosures can be replaced, dead motors can be replaced, PCBs can be replaced and in extreme cases even the SMT components on them can be reworked for much less than the total cost of production (which likely included things like service agreements already).
I think when we generally talk about whether something is "repairable" we're referring to the ease of repair, which translate to the repair being affordable and makes economical sense so people actually do it vs buying a replacement.
This is a good point, and might actually be viable in some cases. Though I think most of those end up looking less like what we'd think of as repair and more like, I dunno, replacing the batteries in a remote control, or lightbulbs in a lamp. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing, but it's also probably not easy to engineer into a lot of products, especially without driving up the price significantly.
reply