Ask HN: What kind of electronics would you stockpile for doomsday?
We are all dependent on electronics in modern life, from stuff found in our appliances and cars to entertainment. Given the ever increasing potential for disintegration of global supply chain, what would be your choices for hypothetical technological prepping? Microcontroller boards? Power electronics? RF?
75 comments
[ 1.7 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadPart of it depends on that threat scenario you are prepping for. For example "disintegration of global supply chain" absent some more generalized sort of disaster resulting in the collapse of advanced society (eg, rise of the zombies, meteor strike, etc.) is one thing, where the more generalized disaster "SHTF" scenarios might call for different tactics.
For example... if you're worried about a more general "collapse of society" model, then it seems clear that simply having access to electricity at all would be a key thing to consider. So one might want to focus on batteries, solar cells, wire/cable, power electronics, etc., that would be required to get some juice available at all.
But something like a further decline of today's (largely pandemic created?) supply chain disruptions, where society is mostly intact, the power grid is up, etc. is a different question. What's the goal, commercial production of products for profit? The ability to repair commonly used household devices if they break? The ability to create innovative new devices from scratch?
The "repair parts stash" scenario seems to me as maybe the most likely one to be useful. So it seems like you'd want plenty of commonly used passives in wide range of values, a ton of "jelly bean" IC's, transistors, etc., probably transformers, fuses, etc. Microprocessors get tricky because there are so many out there. One might also want to tailor a stash based on doing tear-downs of the exact devices they own and pre-identify what parts would be needed.
Wow... I dunno. The more I think about this, the more it seems like a huge rabbit-hole to go down. In a good way, of course. It's just that there are so many parts that could be useful, it starts to get hard to figure out how to filter the list down.
With copper wire & iron you can have a telegraph.
With vacuum tube transceivers you get wireless.
You just have to stockpile a lot more tubes than radios.
Just in case you want to go big, telegraphs would require a huge pile of copper compared to what you could do with a single truckload of radios & tubes.
If it does turn out to take a really long time for certain doom to finally arrive, rest assured it's proven this technology can reliably be built to last a century, and still operate even if it gets hammered by nuclear EMP. From a safe enough distance of course.
If nothing else stockpile the tubes, everything else could be much more easily recovered from scratch.
The rest of the parts you need can likely be salvaged from old junk.
personally I would stockpile power electronics / transformers / copper wire and magnets, and be the guy who can generate and then convert power from anything to anything
Laptop computers with a core 2 duo are quite cheap and often come with enough memory to be considerble computers. Take all your home movies and run them through ffmpeg to make them run smooth on old hardware. Find a bunch of videos about making food, soap, how to make a gassifier, grain mill.. think creatively. It is almost time. You know it. That is why you are posting this.
Google "prepper". There's a whole community out there of people who prepared for the absolute worst.
I witness a funny side effect of focusing on the body almost daily. I live in snow country. The locals here are bundled up in layers of sweaters, jackets, scarfs, hats. I am just wearing a t-shirt and they look at me like I'm an alien.
Plus, laptops very much do have internal button cells and typically will either throw an error when booting or require a complete reinstall of the OS if something happened to the encryption key system along the way.
Might want to have a linux install media (DVD + USB stick) available just in case.
To mitigate that I’d have some cheap easy to store replacements at hand as insurance. Things like raspberry pis, spare phone, camping style equipment, bike, car parts etc.
We also had a gas price squeeze in Europe that possibly had political motivations, so some renewable fuel source would be useful.
0 - https://disaster.radio/
I'd add a few thousand books since they use little storage space.
I'd probably use regular phones like a Pixel 5, a few user-repairable laptops, and lots of USB-C cables and chargers. I'd make sure to have the means to keep them charged off-grid.
That ought to be enough. It's barely more than what I pack on long distance motorcycle trips.
Here is one reason: As an absolute last ditch option, printed matter generally works well as a fire starter. Good luck doing that with a tricked out, pelican case enclosed rpi and screen.
[0] https://amiprepped.com/prepping/books-i-want-to-have-on-hand...
- a few solar powered calculators
- several walkie talkies and a way to power them
- wind up flashlights
- repair equipment (soldering iron, wire cutters, wire, etc)
Would a lead box shield those from an EMP? If so, then put those in a lead box in a basement or something
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=uLTDuGhqE2w
>asteroid impact or nuclear war. >invasion of Taiwan >Fabpocalypse
Thanks for reminding me.
I think with threat levels increasing people are going to have to tailor their prepping according to more than one type of expected apocalypse.
Anything approaching a "true" doomsday would be absolute hell on Earth and I'd be ready to die. I live with a chronic illness and honestly doubt my medications would be available.
If society did crumble in the way that many fantasize about, I'd be seeing myself out pretty quickly.
Take soap for instance. People have made soap since the dawn of time - you just need fat and lye. But how do you actually.. do it?
For that you need instructions, which means either a library of books vulnerable to all sorts of ills, or a collection of pdfs and movies. If you go the digital route you need some kind of viewer.
There are plenty of other things that would be more difficult make, source, or do. How do you preserve food to modern standards if you don't have canning lids and can't make them, refrigerators don't work (some climates might not matter as much), or a local salt/nitrites source? Fermenting is one way, but doesn't work for everything.
In a society with soap-making potential (this is a fun categorisation) you'll need materials and capability. If you're in that situation, I sincerely doubt PDFs are going to be useful unless they've already been printed and/or frequently discussed, i.e. books and stories.
Maslow's hierarchy of needs may have issues, but it's surely a useful heuristic.
Pretty much everything you need to get by in the imaginary post-apocalypse world (which will be littered with consumer goods for a long time) you can find the Boy Scouts Handbook. The normal human solution to not knowing how to do or make something (historically) is to find someone who does and partner or barter with them. Trying to collect and carry around all of the world’s knowledge seems the least plausible way to go.
They are a wealth of information and quite common through to ~20 years ago. I imagine sets of these will remain somewhat common for another 100 years in peoples garages or on display etc.
Whoever thinks of Anything else, has never lived in the wild and will definitely be the first ones to die.
- Solar panels, batteries, inverters. - Water purification
Soldering equipment + as many schematics of the PCB based stuff I own with enough spare parts to drown in. Kilograms of copper wire.
If there's no weight and space limit on this question, I'd get a car lift too. I really doubt that anyone would be in dire need of my sick ability to manually inject a DLL into the memory of a process if they were eating each other.
Can make soldering iron, flashlights, and heater with it. Everything else can fall in place.
Might not hurt to have a solar-powered calculator.
https://news.mit.edu/2020/solar-extracts-drinkable-water-101...
EMP's create huge discharges in coils, that's how they "fry" electronics and cars and motors and the more sensitive chips attached to said coils.
If you are thinking in the years, you need more than food and water. The ability to bunker down in a limited space for long periods matters, and it's good barter.
Obviously comms and emergency lights and all the standard stuff comes first, Doomsday probably will last months not years, but not necessarily, for instance looking at something like the war in Tigray it's up to a year now.
survival guide and venom antidotes
rock classification and identification guides
chemistry and physics advanced books
civil engineering books
seeds
metal equipments, knifes, wires, pans, ...
rechargable batteries
solar panels
satellite phone
radios receiver and transmitters
more wires...
dried fruits and cured meat
antibiotics and desanitizing chemicals