[HN Gopher] Ask HN: What kind of electronics would you stockpile...
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Ask HN: What kind of electronics would you stockpile for doomsday?
We are all dependent on electronics in modern life, from stuff
found in our appliances and cars to entertainment. Given the ever
increasing potential for disintegration of global supply chain,
what would be your choices for hypothetical technological prepping?
Microcontroller boards? Power electronics? RF?
Author : varjag
Score : 20 points
Date : 2021-11-15 20:36 UTC (2 hours ago)
| JohnFen wrote:
| Buckets of transistors.
| chrisa wrote:
| Are you talking like doomsday or zombie apocalypse prepping?
| Hm... In addition to what others have said:
|
| - a few solar powered calculators
|
| - several walkie talkies and a way to power them
|
| - wind up flashlights
|
| - repair equipment (soldering iron, wire cutters, wire, etc)
|
| Would a lead box shield those from an EMP? If so, then put those
| in a lead box in a basement or something
| temp234 wrote:
| A high quality, huge storage volume, dedicated music player like
| the Sony NW-A55 stockpiled with all the music I want to share w
| my doomsday grandkids. Nice headphones and file backups too.
| Would hoard beloved media in general.
| Iefthandrule wrote:
| Disaster.radio has planned for this [0]. I really like what they
| do.
|
| 0 - https://disaster.radio/
| jacquesm wrote:
| Discrete stuff, 74 series, a bunch of 8 bit hole through CPUs,
| piles of CMOS static ram embedded in foam and alu foil, a bunch
| of 8 bit eproms, resistors and caps assortments, power
| transistors (2n3055, BD135), tons of fiberglass hole and strip
| board. Possibly a bunch of Microchip embedded controllers, And if
| I were worried about EMPs I'd keep a stack of ECC81s around. You
| can drive those straight of a bunch of solar panels if you're not
| too critical about plate voltage, but you'll need a beefy 6.3V
| supply for the filaments if you plan on building something a bit
| larger.
|
| The rest of the parts you need can likely be salvaged from old
| junk.
| jbjbjbjb wrote:
| Perhaps going a couple orders of magnitude up in supply
| disruption to what we've seen in the pandemic would be a
| realistic worst case. So looking at multi year disruption of key
| components and hugely inflated prices for new and second hand.
|
| To mitigate that I'd have some cheap easy to store replacements
| at hand as insurance. Things like raspberry pis, spare phone,
| camping style equipment, bike, car parts etc.
|
| We also had a gas price squeeze in Europe that possibly had
| political motivations, so some renewable fuel source would be
| useful.
| llamajams wrote:
| 555s
| paulcole wrote:
| None.
|
| Anything approaching a "true" doomsday would be absolute hell on
| Earth and I'd be ready to die. I live with a chronic illness and
| honestly doubt my medications would be available.
|
| If society did crumble in the way that many fantasize about, I'd
| be seeing myself out pretty quickly.
| gregjor wrote:
| Other than a flashlight and a Casio watch that runs for a decade
| electronics would be off my list if I were to worry about
| doomsday scenarios, which I don't. That's just another fantasy
| land to obsess over. I can survive without a computer or cell
| phone or the internet. I would be much more concerned about
| water, food, medicine/first aid. We aren't really dependent on
| modern technology. I can imagine continuing to live just fine
| without any of it.
| jareklupinski wrote:
| anything electronic would need some way of powering the device
|
| personally I would stockpile power electronics / transformers /
| copper wire and magnets, and be the guy who can generate and then
| convert power from anything to anything
| buraksarica wrote:
| Besides other things listed here, One hf, one v/uhf dual band ham
| radio and lots of cable.
| mindcrime wrote:
| Huh, that's a really interesting question. I've never really
| considered the idea of "technological prepping" even though I
| might - to a small degree - self identify as something of a
| "prepper" in the general sense.
|
| Part of it depends on that threat scenario you are prepping
| _for_. For example "disintegration of global supply chain"
| absent some more generalized sort of disaster resulting in the
| collapse of advanced society (eg, rise of the zombies, meteor
| strike, etc.) is one thing, where the more generalized disaster
| "SHTF" scenarios might call for different tactics.
|
| For example... if you're worried about a more general "collapse
| of society" model, then it seems clear that simply having access
| to electricity at all would be a key thing to consider. So one
| might want to focus on batteries, solar cells, wire/cable, power
| electronics, etc., that would be required to get some juice
| available at all.
|
| But something like a further decline of today's (largely pandemic
| created?) supply chain disruptions, where society is mostly
| intact, the power grid is up, etc. is a different question.
| What's the goal, commercial production of products for profit?
| The ability to repair commonly used household devices if they
| break? The ability to create innovative new devices from scratch?
|
| The "repair parts stash" scenario seems to me as maybe the most
| likely one to be useful. So it seems like you'd want plenty of
| commonly used passives in wide range of values, a ton of "jelly
| bean" IC's, transistors, etc., probably transformers, fuses, etc.
| Microprocessors get tricky because there are so many out there.
| One might also want to tailor a stash based on doing tear-downs
| of the exact devices they own and pre-identify what parts would
| be needed.
|
| Wow... I dunno. The more I think about this, the more it seems
| like a huge rabbit-hole to go down. In a good way, of course.
| It's just that there are so many parts that could be useful, it
| starts to get hard to figure out how to filter the list down.
| nicbou wrote:
| Whatever I do, I'd definitely include a device with OsmAnd, and
| keep the maps updated. I could hardly survive the apocalypse
| without good maps. A backup of Wikipedia would also be very
| useful.
|
| I'd add a few thousand books since they use little storage space.
|
| I'd probably use regular phones like a Pixel 5, a few user-
| repairable laptops, and lots of USB-C cables and chargers. I'd
| make sure to have the means to keep them charged off-grid.
|
| That ought to be enough. It's barely more than what I pack on
| long distance motorcycle trips.
| oolonthegreat wrote:
| this reminds me of CollapseOS https://collapseos.org/
| ohiovr wrote:
| I've been doing this for a while. You should find a cheap whole
| stack, computer, os, source code, solar cell, battery, and seal
| them in a galvanized trashcan with metallic HVAC tape around the
| lid. This will protect it from high frequency EMP bursts in the
| upper atmosphere from multimegaton infastructure disruption
| weapons. Other things you may want to add is a soeks dosimeter..
|
| Laptop computers with a core 2 duo are quite cheap and often come
| with enough memory to be considerble computers. Take all your
| home movies and run them through ffmpeg to make them run smooth
| on old hardware. Find a bunch of videos about making food, soap,
| how to make a gassifier, grain mill.. think creatively. It is
| almost time. You know it. That is why you are posting this.
| ohiovr wrote:
| One last thing, radioactivity destroys electronics fast.
| Radioactivity will destroy all those things anyway if you are
| near a primary target or downwind from one. I don't recommend
| burying a trashcan but having it in a basement might help.
| angrais wrote:
| An curious: _why_ are you doing this?
| wly_cdgr wrote:
| Just a side note that, electronics are good and all, but
| stockpile printed matter also. You can fit a lot of vital
| knowledge that you can access without electricity in a very
| reasonable amount of space with the aid of small print, a simple
| magnifying glass, and some plastic bags, painted glass jars,
| and/or lamination for protection from water and light
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(page generated 2021-11-15 23:02 UTC)