Right to repair laws are a disability justice issue for those of us who need technological devices for our basic ability to function in the world. All of these things integrate with our bodies and lives in a deeply intimate level.
We may need to fix our wheelchairs, scooters, or powerchairs, things that give us mobility. We may need to understand our hearing aid, cochlear implant, screen reader, brailler, augmentive / assistive communication devices. Or we might need to maintain, troubleshoot, and repair prosthetic devices – a limb, a motorized brace, an exoskeleton, even an eye. They are our essential companions, part of our cyborg selves. Assistive tech shouldn’t be treated as a sort of rental or subscription, a cash cow service needed by the desperate to be exploited, or a throwaway victim of planned obsolescence.
Because of that tension, disabled people are often at the forefront of right to repair advocacy.
This helpful page from repair.org outlines the current legal landscape, state by state, for those of us who are fighting to fix our assistive tech: What are my repair rights?
Currently, there are state right to repair laws in California, Minnesota, Colorado, and New York; another bill is up for review in 2025 in Oregon and in many other states!
While this issue hits especially hard for disabled people, it’s just good common sense in many ways for anyone who buys or uses electronic devices.
It also makes sense for protecting the environment from piles of useless trash that pollutes the land around it with materials extracted from the earth at a great human and ecological price. The less we waste, the better – for everyone.
Last week we held a little powerchair hack night with GOAT, Justin from General Lithium, CriptasticHacker and associates from Spokeland, Morgan from CIL, and more friends, to explore the battery technology of Whill Fi and Ci powerchairs. A Ci battery teardown is in progress along with an investigation into the Fi and its charger.
There was also knitting, and an adorable small support dog on a fluffy cushion. I had a cool moment realizing how many of us knew, or had worked with or learned from, John Benson (aka, “Cripple A”). I was thinking John, a fabulous human being, should get an award, and Morgan said, what he would really like is a parade. My mind took off with this great idea! What if we had a fabulous parade in his honor, with musical instruments and punk marching bands and a zillion wheelchair users zooming around?! We will also hopefully see him and some other repair and DIY wizards at our upcoming events!
We didn’t do any formal talks or introductions, but CriptasticHacker kicked off by talking about one of his finished projects, the WBSW, Wheelchair Battery Spot Welder!
We have learned some things from cracking apart the Ci battery.
It has hidden screws under the bottom corner pieces
You still have to pry it open with a screwdriver and mallet
The battery is encased in several layers of totally sealed plastic for waterproofing
And under that it is podded, 5/6ths encased in rubbery gel stuff so you can’t really take it apart and hack it well.
It has 1/4 kWh
For the Ci, our best option to soup it up (as it has fallen out of warranty and parts don’t seem to be readily available!) may be adding a new battery or batteries, which we could do for about $400 per kWh. We could easily fit 2 of those under my seat in the undercarriage basket. Then those could hook up to a new replacement (V)ESC (Electronic Speed Controller) which we then connect to the motor (managing the voltage etc. so it will be compatible).
For the Fi, we were able to access it a bitbetter and Zach, Henner, mjg, and others had a look with digital microscope, logic analyzer, etc. To figure out what is going on with the power management . Zach will describe all that on his hackaday.io page!
It was interesting to see the different approaches in play at the various workbenches. The laborious and intensive work needed for detailed understanding and reverse engineering is in some ways a philosophical stance, of learning, reuse, and conservation, but in other ways, a factor influenced by resource constraints. In other words, necessity is the mother of the meticulous teardown! The people with capital, on the other hand, had less patience with this approach and were ready to throw resources at a problem, and use new (or repurposed) stuff to do complete workarounds, or simply throw it all out and invent something new that would be more rapid to get working, even if unlikely to be elegant or refined in the first prototype.
There was a long discussion on how to make a kit to convert manual chairs to power with Justin and Morgan. To that I added some wild eyed ideas but also a pointer to these interesting, cheap, DIY open source wheelchair designs and to Whirlwind Wheelchair. We see people every day in the Bay Area who are struggling with clunky or broken chairs. It is a good topic for future exploration – what other conversion kits are out there? What were the problems and pitfalls? How feasible is it to to come up with a maintainable, cheap, design for such a thing?
I learned during the event that ESC (pronounce the letters in it) is an electronic speed controller (the thing I normally just call “motor controller” with a vague handwave.) VESC, frequently mentioned by our hardware hackers, is a particular technology – or we could call it a movement – that I think looks amazing – for “flexible, efficient, and reliable power systems for your platform”.
Another cool nexus of ideas that came up: Whill chairs come with Bluetooth and a phone app. You can control the chair from the app, configuring it with one of three pre-set acceleration curves. Could we write a new app to communicate with the chair and program it in different ways?
You can also steer the chair from a phone or tablet screen via Bluetooth. I have never actually used this feature. But we can see that airports are starting to explore using Whill chairs on auto-pilot, to take passengers to their gates. Using programmed routes but also LIDAR, like robot cars! That put a gleam in several people’s eyes. Actually, it put a whole range of different and hilarious facial expressions on everyone’s faces!
And as one more note for future investigation: The chairs also appear to log and send diagnostic information to the manufacturer. I’d certainly like to see that traffic! I wonder if it is encrypted and what the heck it is sending!
I’m really looking forward to Grassroots Open Assistive Tech hosting more electronics and hardware tinkering nights, as well as other DIY gatherings!
Overheard: (just for fun – it was a lively event!)
“I’m so impressed with the fact that you bypassed the VMS…. Expert move”
“….. and then it would explode!”
“That motorcycle [points to motorcycle in a giant pile of e-bikes] has a battery bigger and more powerful than a tesla powerwall. and it goes 160 miles an hour! [gleeful laughter]”
“You can control it via bluetooth? Woah!! That’s my kink!”
“There are no standards for bike wheels, so there are 4 different kinds of 26 3/4 wheels and none of them work with the others!”
(Justin): “I’m gonna take your 1/4 kWh battery and give you THREE kWh. We can just strap the batteries under your seat.” (me:) “Oh, great! I’ve always wanted to be launched into fucking SPACE with my ass on fire!”
“Is this illegal?” “No surely not!” “Well, maybe? But we’re just taking things apart, and looking at how it works! How can that be illegal?”
(FYI: This can be a complex question! You may want to read this Coder’s Rights Guide from EFF as a starting point. )
Thanks to everyone who showed up, chatted, tinkered, and especially thanks to our congenial hosts, General Lithium – they are a battery tech company, but they also have a nonprofit wing that runs this maker/coworking space in the heart of San Francisco. Have a look at their events page and membership information!
In the summer, GOAT started cataloguing and scanning a box from the archives of assistive tech DIY booklets, papers, and books donated to the organization. We have an initial “pilot” box of materials to work with, going through each item and filling out a short printed worksheet by hand to describe some of its meta information, including:
author(s) if they are not clear
general subject
a selection of tags, with free tagging if needed
uniqueness, via WorldCat, Internet Archive, and other searches
Our first intern, Jack Kulkulski, got a crash course in disability justice, assistive tech, intellectual property, open software licensing and hardware licensing, copyleft, and more. For now, items are catalogued on LibraryThing, as it is affordable, has a flexible interface, and an API so we can later query it for searches and display items from it on the GOAT website.
We have made some preliminary scans of stapled or unbound material that could be easily disassembled and then put together again. Documents are scanned to PDF, OCR-ed, and converted to other file formats. We will likely be uploading much of the older, unique material to the Internet Archive.
For example, this short booklet, “Application and Construction Notes for Laptrays and Adaptive Pointers [microform] : Wobble Stick Toy Control, Adaptive Pointers, Slide-Away Laptray, Swing-Away Lapboard and Folding Communication Board”. It’s packed with useful looking diagrams and instructions to make trays, communication boards, and adaptive pointers that attach to wheelchairs or elsewhere. It is difficult to find, though you can view it on microfiche at the University of Colorado and maybe could order it from ERIC. We have catalogued it (very amateurly; not as real library cataloguers would do) at LibraryThing in the openassistivetech.org collection. The full text of the scan will be uploaded soon.
Here’s our intern hard at work assessing materials from Box A of the archives:
These boxes of materials for cataloguing and scanning were generously donated by DIY assistive tech expert Alexandra Enders. I’ll write more about Alexandra in a future post!
The eventual home will be at a very interesting, privately owned public institution: the Prelinger Library in San Francisco, so that anyone who wants to look at the physical papers and books will be able to use them.
