A Very MAD Blog
Month
Last week we wrote the script for our short film. We decided on a device that would monitor technology and send a signal when it needed to be recycled. We also decided on our roles for next week. It looks like I’ll be in charge of Cinematography and Video Editing. The name of the film is not yet decided.
The world in chaos, suburban streets have turned to open landfills. Electronic waste has become so overwhelming that major electronics companies are getting shut down.
It all started around 2020, People refused to recycle E-Waste as it was “too much of a hassle” or in some countries “too expensive”. Toxic waste slowly built up to the point where the ground was so polluted that all groundwater was ‘Hazardous’.
By 2030 most rivers and streams turned to toxic swamps filled with dead fish and mammals melting in the chemical slurry. Anything that came in contact with the water would almost certainly die.
The latest fashion trend of 2040 is a coverall vapor hazmat suit. going outside without it is likely to kill you in minutes.
Almost all species are extinct now in 2050. Humans have been trying to undo the damages but the earth is too far gone. Anyone who had money has already left the planet on the 2045 SpaceX mission to find another habitable planet with their new XHyperDrive space explorer. Any humans unlucky enough to be left behind are left questioning where they went wrong, was it so hard to just drive to the nearest E-Waste Transport Center?
The remaining humans of 2050 have a big problem to solve should they have any chance of survival.
2040 - 2060 Clothing Trend:
In 2055 I design a robot that can perfectly sort Toxic waste into its raw materials. This robot goes around streams and rivers sucking up water and separating it into raw materials like metals, common alloys, chemicals, and water. The filtered water is then pumped back into the river. The result is an autonomous amphibious chemical categorizing thingamabob or The AACCT. an army of these should theoretically make the planet habitable around 2060 to 2070
My E-Waste research artifact is a 2.5″ Laptop HDD. Removing the lid was easy as it was only held in place with a few Torx screws. I thankfully had a Torx bit for my screwdriver that was a perfect fit. One screw was a pain though as it was under the label.
This is what the drive looks like under the hood:
I noticed attached to the lid of the drive was a pouch containing beads of some kind, I found out this is some form of desiccant (most likely Silica Xerogel). This is part of the filter system to keep the internals of the drive clean. The other part is a filter that uses the spinning disk to circulate air through the filter. The filter can be seen in the top right corner of the drive, a white filter paper on a diagonal (United States Patent No. 5307222, 1994).
Neodymium (Rare Earth) magnets are used in many things from electric motors to fridge magnets. Under the read/write arm (Top Left) is two Neodymium Magnets. These magnets are made from rare materials only available from mining, making them very expensive and scarce. However, due to how HDD’s are constructed, recycling the Neodymium magnets is not ideal as the amount of time is greater than the cost of mining more (Sprecher, Kleijn, & Kramer, 2014).
The base material of the Platters is made of aluminum alloy or a mix of glass and ceramic. That is then coated with some sort of magnetic material to store the data on. This was made from a magnetic oxide, however, now it is made from something called a thin-film medium (Hard disk (hard drive) construction, n.d.). Three magnetic mediums are currently in use for HDDs: Oxide, Thin-Film, AFC (antiferromagnetically coupled). AFC is the latest advancement and IBM is coining it ‘Pixie Dust’. AFC allows a much smaller amount of space per GB (Gigabyte), this allows for much larger drives, going beyond the previously thought ‘superparemegnetic limit’. (Hard Drive Films, n.d.)
In conclusion, There are lots of components in HDDs and the most efficient way to recycle them other than to reuse is the ‘WEEE’ method that I explained in my last post; Dismantling and sorting the individual components just takes too long and does not provide much better results.
References:
Dion, F. E. (1994). United States Patent No. 5307222.
Hard disk (hard drive) construction. (n.d.). Retrieved from pctechguide.com: https://www.pctechguide.com/hard-disks/hard-disk-hard-drive-construction
Hard Drive Films. (n.d.). Retrieved from Affordable Computer Security Service, LLC: http://www.clintonpchelp.com/Recording_Media.html
Sprecher, B., Kleijn, R., & Kramer, G. J. (2014). Recycling Potential of Neodymium: The Case of Computer Hard Disk. Environmental Science & Technology, 48, 9506-9513.
After listening and reading our new brief I did some research on some of the hazardous materials found in electronics. I found that the biggest problems were: lead, Cadmium, Mercury, Lithium, Nickel, Polyvinyl chloride (PVC) and Arsenic.
According to ewaste.com
“Most electronic waste goes through a recycling system called a WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment), which not only recycles 95-98%, by weight, of all e-waste passed through it but ensures that any data left on hard drives and memories are thoroughly destroyed too.
* Picking Shed – first all the items are sorted by hand and batteries and copper are extracted for quality control.
* Initial Size Reduction Process – items are shredded into pieces as small as 100mm to prepare the e-waste to be thoroughly sorted. This is also where the data destruction takes place.
* Secondary Size Reduction – the small debris is shaken to ensure that it is evenly spread out on the conveyor belt before it gets broken down even more. Any dust extracted is disposed of in an environmentally friendly way.
* Overband Magnet – using magnets, steel and iron are removed from the debris.Metallic & Non-Metallic Content – aluminum, copper, and brass are separated from the non-metallic content. The metallic can then be reused and resold as raw materials.
* Water Separation – water is used to separate plastic from the glass content. Once divided all raw materials can then be resold.”
The article from ewaste.com is reassuring, however, although almost everything can be recycled, I find a bigger problem is people don't bother to recycle old electronics and would rather throw it out instead as it is more convenient.
References:
http://www.greenpeace.org/eastasia/campaigns/toxics/science/chemicals-electronics/
http://ewasteguide.info/hazardous-substances
http://www.ewaste.com.au/ewaste-articles/how-is-electronic-waste-recycled/
The SoundScape
The Instrument
and The Performance
I learned a lot in this project, from recording high-quality audio to putting it together to making it. However, some parts of this project I did struggle with. before this project I did not know what a soundscape was let alone how to make one, I had no idea what it should or should not sound like. I tried to solve this by going and listening to a lot of soundscapes to see what they had in common and thought they are a lot like background music like you would find in a game or movie. I also struggled to find an instrument that hasn’t been built before, it seems experimental music is a lot bigger than I thought. that I solved by just making something completely bizarre and unheard of. the performance also raised its own problems, My Instrument needed quite a bit of work to be performance ready. Both in software and hardware.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with this project and learnt a lot.
Today went a lot better than I expected it to. My instrument, however, did have one minor screw up. What was meant to be a long consistent tone at the end turned into lots of short beeps. I also managed to modify my Instrument to plug into the mixer board before our performance.
Today we finalized the songs and tried all the instruments together and worked out timing. Then we practiced over and over. however, we had one slight delay, the fire alarm went off and our whole building was evacuated. It was a false alarm. Here’s our Score Card:
Today we finished a soundscape to go with our instruments and I programmed my piano to play tunes preprogrammed and assigned to each key.
Today we formed groups of the people we are going to perform with. We did this randomly with a flip of a hand. Immediately we started planning and another group member came up with the idea of following an explorer in a soundscape. It seems like a lot of other groups are making music, however, I feel like a soundscape is more following the trend of this project.
We came up with a timeline of events and then planned out timings and who will play in each event. Here are the original plans:
Because I ran out of alligator clips I wired everything up with wires from an Ethernet cable. The reason I used an Ethernet cable was the cables are single core and therefore, can be inserted into a breadboard. The problems with this, however, was the cable is not very flexible and therefore, pushed the tissue all over the place. To fix this I used tape to fix all the wires in place.
Quickly I realized, how am I going to take this anywhere?… I thought for a while how I could make it portable. My Stepdad suggested a takeaway container and that got me thinking. What do I have that is like a container but large enough for all the keys? Then it came to me, my document case would be perfect. So I moved everything into it and secured it all in place with tape.
In conclusion, I now have a portable capacitance touch keyboard that plays one octave of sounds out of a small speaker. The next feature I would like to add is MIDI output or if that is not possible then normal auxiliary output.
Code:
The main challenges with the programming were:
The hardest and most time-consuming part was getting the notes right. The Picaxe chip outputs sound based on the RTTTL standard. The RTTTL standard was originally developed for Nokia phone ringtones, therefore, the range of notes is limited. Furthermore, there is very little information online showing what programming values go to which notes. Eventually, I found a tool that was made for creating RTTTL tunes and I just exported one note at a time and copy/pasted it into my code.
Finished Prototype:
My prototype uses wet folded tissue paper connected to alligator clips. These clips then connect to my Picaxe circuit. When I touch the tissue the ADC (Analog Digital Converter) that connects to that tissue becomes slightly more positive. Originally I had it reversed, when I touched the paper it became slightly less positive. However, for some reason there was less of a change in values when done this way, therefore, I did it reversed. This works because I have a wrist strap that connects to a positive voltage. This basically uses my hand to complete the circuit.
Overall, The basic concept works and it is fun to play with. However, the gap between each note press could be improved and also only one note can be played at a time.