OH BROTHER 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.