[HN Gopher] Circular Microcomputers embedded and powered by repu...
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Circular Microcomputers embedded and powered by repurposed
smartphone components
Author : Bluestein
Score : 75 points
Date : 2025-06-24 10:10 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (citronics.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (citronics.eu)
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| I like the idea.
|
| But I think they have smoked too much dope.
|
| 150EUR 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.
| bArray wrote:
| 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.
| garbthetill wrote:
| 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
| lawik wrote:
| 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.
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| > 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 150EUR.
| 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 150EUR 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-system wrote:
| > 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.
| msgodel wrote:
| 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.
| rjsw wrote:
| 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.
| grues-dinner wrote:
| > 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Disappointed that the microcomputers are not, in fact, circular
| uticus wrote:
| 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?
| rjsw wrote:
| Circular economy [1] is a well understood term.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circular_economy
| mystified5016 wrote:
| 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.
| DrNosferatu wrote:
| 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.
| lproven wrote:
| > Circular
|
| You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think
| it means.
| Bluestein wrote:
| (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 ...)
| neuroelectron wrote:
| 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.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| 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.
| Animats wrote:
| 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.
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(page generated 2025-06-24 23:01 UTC)