Circular Microcomputers embedded and powered by repurposed smartphone components(citronics.eu)
92 pointsby Bluestein3 days ago11 comments
  • LargoLasskhyfv3 days ago
    I like the idea.

    But I think they have smoked too much dope.

    150€ excl. VAT for the 'dev-kit', which is nothing else than some low to midrange, RPI-like SBC, soldered together from used stuff(no matter how, roboticcally, by hand) is not competitive.

    15 to 50 would be.

    • bArray3 days ago
      It's literally cheaper to build this kind of thing from scratch than to try and re-use existing components like this.

      Maybe there is still a market at this price point, for example if there are tax breaks, or the price of the thing you are selling is so much that the customer just swallows the extra price.

      I still think it would be better if we were to go the way of modular systems. I'm currently building out a controller system that has a modular interface and should be upgradeable as I swap out components and improve it, without adding much to the overall footprint. I think this really is the way forwards with this kind of thing.

      • grues-dinner3 days ago
        > I still think it would be better if we were to go the way of modular systems.

        Modularity can be expensive, though. The unused IO soaks up pins and pushes you to bigger packages and up the SOIC/QFP/QFN/BGA chain. You add multiplexers and transceivers and buffers and so on. The traces take board space and layers and the connectors cost a big chunk of the BOM. Separate modules add SKUs and manufacture, assembly and inventory overhead, and the offboard interfaces take space, power and time.

        Whenever you have any appreciable volume, it's almost always cheaper to integrate and demodularise, even before you consider the physical size and form factor of the device.

        Otherwise all embedded systems would be made of dev boards wearing a hat. Now, yes, there are many systems that use something like a RPi Compute Module or a TI ControlCard, but once you crack a certain volume, it's an easy cost optimisation to "flatten" it into a single PCB.

        And the one thing you do not want from designing around a module is the possibility that the supply of surplus OldPhone X3 mainboards or whatever dries up in two years and it turns out the new generation of modules are just a bit different.

      • garbthetill3 days ago
        yeah the website says a whole bunch of nothing imo & doesnt really define a problem needing to be solved, perhaps they've struck a deal with phone carrier's to get unsold phones that are destined for the landfill as they have a t-mobile logo on their site, thats the only business aspect I can imagine get 10s of million worth of components for like a 1/10 of the price etc

        google is telling me around 400k phone like devices are thrown out into landfills everyday, there might be a market to bring down costs eventually if they get logistics properly moving

        • lawik3 days ago
          I think this proving out the concept. A dev board costing. 150 doesn't matter for professional projects. It latters for tinkerers. What matters is unit price for desired qty.

          And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.

          And in industrial embedded Linux stuff there is essentially no correlation between price and performance. Most don't need performance and they aren't really cost-optimizing this bit of the production line very hard. It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.

          I do hope they come down a lot in price and prove this out over many more phone variants.

          • LargoLasskhyfv3 days ago
            > And this has 4G/LTE (because it is a smartphone) so comparisons to base RPis are largely irrelevant.

            Yes? So have countless new phones at around 150€. Including screen, battery, case, and warranty.

            Edit: Just for fun, a list from a german shopping/comparison site, aptly named 'scrooge', selected for LTE, at least 2GB RAM, Octacore, Android 15 to not get too old stuff, in stock, 4 days delivery max, capped at 150€ incl. delivery. Sorted for lowest price first:

            https://geizhals.de/?cat=umtsover&xf=10063_15.0~2607_2048~26...

            Editoftheedit: To stay with the terminology of the 'largely irrelevant base RPI', they've built (or intend to?) a base board for whatever they are using as CM/Computemodule to plug into. I see some GPIO, some USB, one Ethernet.

            A little bit of board layout, soldering of mostly passive components, and that's it.

            Best of luck. (LOL)

          • kube-system3 days ago
            > It just needs to be certifiable, reliable and replacable.

            I think those are some good unanswered questions here. The supply of used phones is pretty cyclical, and almost all of them are out of production when their supply peaks.

            Also pretty much all smartphones rely heavily on components without data sheets and with proprietary firmware blobs that won't be updated or patched without first-party support, or at all.

      • hinkley17 hours ago
        If you only built it for the most popular models of end of life phones, maybe you could get the price point down enough to sell the. At a profit. But for everything else just forget it. A raspi is cheaper with a better community.
      • rjsw3 days ago
        They seem to be treating the old phone as modular, they mount the old PCB on a carrier board with more I/O, they don't look to be desoldering individual chips.
      • msgodel3 days ago
        You should be able to just reflash the phone and maybe point a small fan at the case. OEMs do everything they can to make that impractical though.
  • mystified50163 days ago
    These are neither circular nor microcomputers.

    Also the entire website reads like an 8th grader trying to pad out an essay to hit the page count requirement. Lots of words just taking up space. Also the same level of language mastery, they really need a proofreader.

    • hinkley17 hours ago
      ESL might have something to do with it. That address is in Belgium.
  • DrNosferatu3 days ago
    Very nice!

    A tax reduction would be fair, in the amount of the effective circularity.

    But the price needs to come down - ideally by one order of magnitude.

  • neuroelectron3 days ago
    Certainly an interesting idea. Hopefully usb-c standardization will make it trivial to repurpose old phones as desktop computers. They should support a hub, usb keyboard/mouse and 4k display output. Powered hub should support a variety of external storage easily as well.
  • Bluestein3 days ago
    (Might someday 'AI robots' be knowledgeable enough to make [whatever] ends meet, and just be thrown bulk e-waste to automatically come up with [whatever useful components] can be salvaged - given a certain stock of parts, incoming?

    That'd be circular for sure ...)

    • GianFabien3 days ago
      It's not the AI that is the challenge. It is the robotics - actuators, vision systems, etc to actually perform the work.
  • 2OEH8eoCRo03 days ago
    I love this and I wonder why it hasn't been done sooner considering the demand for RPIs and that your phone's hardware is more powerful.
    • mrheosuper2 days ago
      Lack of document and source code. It's hard to boot a custom OS if you dont have DeviceTree or even being able to modify the bootchain.
  • mrheosuper2 days ago
    This is exactly what we need. There must be thousands of smartphone being thrown away everyday. Even a cheap android phone has hardware spec than the raspberry pi4. Such a shame that manufactures soft-lock it so that we can not recycle them meaningfully.
  • Animats3 days ago
    That's cute, but you need a huge supply of identical discarded phones to make it go.

    The Raspberry Pi is, after all, a repurposed tablet computer.

  • lproven3 days ago
    > Circular

    You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

  • techlatest_net2 days ago
    [dead]
  • voidUpdate3 days ago
    Disappointed that the microcomputers are not, in fact, circular
    • uticus3 days ago
      Agreed.

      From the About page: "...we demonstrate the technical feasibility and economical viability of circular business models..." I guess that means circular as in "recycled" parts?