I just saw this presentation at the Chaos Computer Club conference, for an “Ethical Hardware Kit with a PCB microcontroller made of wild clay retrieved from the forest in Austria and fired on a bonfire. Our conductive tracks use urban-mined silver and all components are re-used from old electronic devices”. It was part of the feminist hardware strand!
There’s a lot more info on their project page https://feministhackerspaces.cargo.site/Clay-PCB-Tutorial but I think it’s important that I provide context re the PCB being part of their disaster survival backpack! That had lots of other things in it too, tho unfortunately I can’t find the video about it now. But yeah, so the PCB was designed for a kinda worst-case scenario.
As regards the urban mining, yeah it wasn’t quite what I expected: “[we bought] silver paint, commercialised by a German company, that is made with waste silver powder collected by jewellery makers. It’s like an urban mining technique of silver dust.” I was expecting them to find things and extract silver from them!
Thank you for pointing that out! I missed the context of the survival backpack and now it makes more sense. When you view this as more of a ‘what if’ for a somewhat (hopefully) fictional situation this becomes a fun challenge of creating PCBs from limited resources. I’m wondering how I might try to build a PCB under such circumstances now. I’m still not a fan of their ‘urban mining’ though. If anything I believe there would be better sources for silver in a disaster/post-apocalypse.
I imagine a realistic post apocalyptic scenario would involve going back to wire-wrapping, or possibly even point-to-point construction.
AFAIK, urban mining is less about some post apocalyptic contingency, but rather, as the name implies: Sourcing material from any urban environment. This can include recycling, but also stuff like using material of demolished buildings, etc.
For that matter, there is probably better sources of copper in that scenario.