#open hardware

“A refugee camp in the northern Sahara that relies on international aid for everything has gotten their hands on small, relatively-portable plastic recycling machines to turn the camp’s waste plastic into furniture, bricks, and other useful objects.

For years, pallets of supplies containing food, water, and medicine would arrive—then they went into a sandy, makeshift landfill. Now that waste is being placed in two machines, which either presses plastic waste into sheets, or melts it into blocks.

Far from being just another line of government aid, Precious Plastic—which was started by Dave Hakkens as part of his studies at the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2012—is fully-intending to train a workforce at the camp. It will donate the machines, and let the people build their own business there...

At the camp there is a “large refugee population there with a high unemployment rate,” Joseph Klatt, managing director at Precious Plastic, told Adele Peters at Fast Company.

“Everything is brought into the camps, so there’s not a lot of economic activity going on. And secondarily, there’s a lot of waste in the camp. [This solution helps in the creation of] a new business from processing the plastic waste and providing some economic activity for the refugees...”

After some introductory instruction, refugees at the camp got on with making benches, chairs, and desks for the school, and tea sets to support the Sahara’s most widespread drinking habit...

Precious Plastic isn’t a humanitarian aid group though; they call themselves an open hardware plastic recycling project, and they want anyone around the world who cares about the plastic pollution problem to start their own recycling business using their machines.

Most quad-GPU workstations on the market right now use a generic chassis. It works if you want something just for storing components, but what you get is a machine that runs hot and slows down your system. That’s where Thelio Mega comes in.

All About Thermals We’ve engineered Thelio Mega to ensure your top-line components perform to their fullest potential. Its thermals are actually two separate systems, as we found it more effective to divide and conquer. Unique airflows keep heat generated by the CPU and GPU from mixing, exhaust air effectively, and prevent throttling.

Heat builds up quickly when you have up to 4 NVIDIA Quadro RTX GPUs stacked atop one another. Rather than use a single vent to cool the entire system, Thelio Mega uses intake fans on the bottom and side panels to blow cool air directly onto your GPUs. Everything down to the GPU brace has been tested for maximum thermal efficiency. The result is consistent access to every last core of performance in your system.

Meanwhile, a separate duct isolates the airflow to your CPU. A dedicated intake vent on the side panel directs cool air towards the heat sink. In what’s called a closed-loop phase change, actuating fluid evaporates into a gas, drawing thermal energy away from the CPU and towards the heat sink. The hot air then exits via the exhaust port. The process yields performance similar to if your components were sitting on a test bench.

We tested a wide variety of fan sizes and alignments, sometimes adjusting position by only a couple millimeters, until we arrived at the most effective solution. Large 140mm fans move air more effectively at a lower RPM, producing quieter acoustics. The Thelio IO board allows your operating system to monitor the temperature of your GPUs and adjust fan speeds for intensive computing.

The Components

Send this shopping list straight to your purchasing manager: Thelio Mega maxes out at 4 NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, 128 threads on an AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPU, 256GB of memory (including 128GB ECC memory), 96TB of storage (including 32TB NVMe storage), and Dual 10GB Ethernet ports, which operate at speeds 10 times faster than the speed of a standard Ethernet port.

Serviceability

Like all Thelio desktops, Thelio Mega is built to be expandable, repairable, and convenient. The system is pre-wired for upgrades. Screws for 2.5” storage drives are neatly tucked away in the GPU duct panel. When you’re in need of additional compute firepower, there’s room to spare.

Open Hardware

Celebrate Open Hardware Month! Thelio Mega is OSHWA-certified open source hardware. Anyone can download the schematics, learn from them, or adapt them into something new. System76 is a pro-Right to Repair company with lifetime support and readily available documentation.

Tech devices are less and less of a niche. Back in the early 2000s people had barely adopted the home computer, but now many people and even kids are exposed to tech. Sadly modern technology is less and less repairable. You may say "ok, but why should I care?". You should care because the monopolization of repair eliminates jobs, increases e-waste and is an attack on curiosity.

Open platforms on the other hand foster a desire to learn and tinker with devices. Where would Apple be if Steve Wozniak had not been tinkering with his own boards? They definitely would not be the success they are if it weren't for Woz and his hacking skills.

(Klosowski T. 2021, July 21) "Intentionally or not, manufacturers employ all sorts of tricks that make repair difficult, such as using proprietary screws, declining to publish repair documentation, or gluing parts together. Sites like iFixit (which also sells some of our favorite repair tools) have sprung up over the years to offer product “teardowns” and documentation for user repair."

Having access to schematics, and specials tools will lead to better device repairs, and will encourage others to not be so scared about opening their device.

Yet, you may say "But I have never wanted to open my device, I'll just buy a new one". That's fine, but its about having the choice to do so. At the moment what I have mentioned applies to mainly electronic devices, but I'm not the only one directly affected.

(Gray A. 2022, March 9) Farmers for example are not allowed to fix their own tractors. This means that they have to hand over a ton of money to fix any mechanical issue on their equipment. Clearly we need a solution.

We need to have devices that are repairable and are open to modification. One device that is the epitome of this is a device I am looking into buying, and stands with the idea of right to repair. The Framework Laptop (https://frame.work/) is a device that is fully open, even including schematics. This device is an essential step in the right direction.

References

Klosowski T. (2021, July 21) What You Should Know About Right to Repair. NY Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/blog/what-is-right-to-repair/