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YSK: An out-of-warranty battery almost left this paralyzed man’s exoskeleton useless
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Sep 2024
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Why the fuck are they treating body part replacements like it’s a phone or another device
Because there is little difference when it comes to passively degrading components like batteries. You can't produce a battery and leave it in storage for a decade, the battery will degrade on its own. The only way to keep reserve batteries is to keep producing them, and maintain a production line for all that time. That's prohibitively expensive for small markets like these.
A relatively simple solution is to stick with batteries that have a standard shape and size, but it's not like you can just stuff a button cell in there, you need more power to operate the controller chip.
It's pretty shitty that the company didn't produce a backup controller box that works without having to stick to the wearable watch form factor that just takes a bunch of rechargeable AA batteries, but you can't expect what is essentially a smart watch to still have accessible replacement batteries in twenty years.
This isn't exclusive to medical devices, either. Computers running DOS or Windows 95 are still operating millions of dollars of machinery and are slowly failing and collapsing over time. The amount of affordable replacements (even at an industrial level) is slowly starting to dwindle. Nobody is producing floppy drives anymore, nor new floppies for that matter, so if that industrial controller you bought in the early 2000s dies you have to hire a computer greybeard to fix your hardware or replace the entire system.
In my opinion, it should be put into law that once a company stops supporting their bespoke hardware, the copyright and patents protecting them should expire immediately, so that once a company drops support anyone else can pick up where they left off.
However, anything with a computer in it has a limited lifespan, and that lifespan is significantly shorter than that of a human being. Even with the code and blueprints publicly available, someone still needs to find the compatible hardware, alter the designs to operate on modern commodity hardware, or pay a factory to ramp up a production line if they have the million(s) to do so.
I remember learning about this back when I took a smog certification class back in community College. Learned the only computer approved to run the modern smog diagnostic stuff is from 1986 and it's made by like one company to this day.
Add onto that all the dinosaur lathes and welding machines I've seen over my career and I wouldn't be surprised seeing a commodore running the dmv database for the entire state at this point.
"Ancient" lathes, milling machines work fine. You don't need the newest control software when the old one does the job. And good luck convincing someone to buy a $100k machine just because it is new.
Usually, you're right. But having the actual machine is only half the problem.
Last place I was at we had this big beautiful ride along mill that was just magnificent. Between the attachments and tooling we had, it was capable of producing any part of itself down to the last nuts and bolts. With the right know how and materials, it was capable of self replication.
We torched it for scrap. Not me, as a dumb dumb welder, but the business. There was nobody we could find with any combination of a) space to put it, b) ability to pay for it, and c) know how to run it. Best we ever managed was two of the three, and since there was no money in it for the business, they elected to cut it down for scrap value. Got one of the best t-tables I've ever had to weld on out of the deal, but it was still a travesty.
So yes, while the machines work fine, it's hard to find people with the skills to run them effectively, the space to actually house the machine, and the spare cash required buy and maintain it.
Well, yeah you need people to run em, maintain them and you need the space. Thing is - most people wouldn't be looking for an older machine specifically when needing to buy something. Those machines stay in machine shops and crank out parts since forever.
Like, a neighbor of mine has three older lathes, one cnc, one larger, one smaller. He had to redo the wiring from scratch on one of them because it was so old the isolation from the wires fell off and it was just copper left hanging in the control box. No company would buy that stuff.