Right To Repair? ROTFL

I find news items like This_One funny, because that was specifically what I did.

Back in the 1970s,1980s, & into the 1990s, the majority of Industrial Electronics boards were repairable, with through-hole components. Designs were modular, and a market in Service Exchange Boards was envisaged. Nobody thought that anyone would be successful repairing a board he had hardly seen before. But that was what I did until 2006, aided and abetted by some smart specialised diagnostic hardware, magnification and a highly sensitive 'seat of the pants' approach.

By the 1990s, consumer electronics were un-repairable and have only gotten worse. Some reasons are

• All devices are now Surface mount, and the same device is sold in smaller and smaller packages. So large scale SMT is also obsolete.
• You have to be able to get parts fast in small quantities for a repair to be viable. They are not available.
• The range of available devices has mushroomed, but component suppliers have dwindled due to shrinking demand. They only buy what turns over rapidly.
• Cost has plummeted. If a replacement pcb didn't cost at least 200, any repair was marginal.
• High complexity (e.g.pc motherboards) also make repairs non viable as there's too much to check.
• The software component (firmware, software, VHDL) of any device is understandably never divulged. How to reprogram?
• Usually manufacturers don't even keep spare hardware components for themselves, but use up stock.
• Integration has mushroomed, with devices having their own inbuilt computers running them. So you can check inputs and outputs, but it tells you very little about whether a device works. Previously, it told you everything.
• These large surface mounted chips we see everywhere can only be soldered in wave solder machines, and not desoldered. You have to put 250C on a pin to de-solder it, but the junction it's connected to melts at 150C

So it's funny to see that 15 years too late for me, this right to repair movement has started. Funny because people are finally getting fed up with manufacturers deciding what you can and can't do with their products. But funny also, because if Big Tech actually gave out the parts to repair your circuit boards, you'd need a manufacturing plant and a fresh pcb to fit them. Hand tools (Like I used) are no longer up to the job. And buying parts to order in unit quantities was always very expensive. I presume some compromise will be arrived at anyhow. But the market wants small, and small repairable.