[redkoala]

Solar powered micro-controllers might be the way to go that could hook up to crude automated farm machines. Depending on the life span of batteries, solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides, solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software, and solar powered cb ham radios for communications with built in encryption keys.

[palmotea]

In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications."

Crude automated [solar powered] farm machines - would probably be useless. Animal power is probably the way to go. Or steam. Go to a threshing bee sometime: I've seen a tractor that runs on wood.

Solar powered ebook readers to store those farming manuals and other guides - the life span of batteries would be short, get that shit on paper fast.

Solar powered computers for spreadsheets and planning software - plan in your head or use a paper spreadsheet.

Computers might be everywhere today, and you personally might not know how to do anything without a computer, but practically no one had a computer 40-45 years ago, and literally no one had a computer when society was last at a "collapse" level of technology. COMPUTERS ARE NOT NECESSARY.

[nostrademons]

Just because computers weren't around 40-50 years ago doesn't mean that computers won't be very handy to have around in a post-collapse world. Technology is very much path-dependent: the future does not look like the past, and incorporates everything that has happened up to that point. The world after the collapse of the Roman Empire did not look at all like the world before the Roman Republic, and incorporated many of the institutions and infrastructure left behind by the Roman Empire. It continued to use Roman coinage, for example, the Latin language, Roman roads, Roman provincial government, and so on.

The point of having computers is simply that they perform certain tasks orders of magnitude faster than humans. They're a tool, no more and no less. Before computers, a "calculator" was a person with paper and a slide rule, and you needed hundreds of them to do something like compute artillery trajectories, army logistics, machine tool curves, explosive lensing, sending rockets into space, etc. Managing to keep just one solar-powered calculator working for 10 years after a collapse frees up all those people to do things like farming. Keeping a solar-powered electric tractor working frees up all those farmers, and frees up the animals for eating.

IMHO this project is at least operating under the right principles, i.e. make the software work on scavenged parts, control your dependencies, be efficient with your computations, focus on things you can't do with humans.

[vdupras]

I 100% agree that computers are not necessary. But regardless of that, the ability to program microcontrollers is still a superpower and if you can have it, you have a hell of an edge.

[kjs3]

In a societal collapse, the only thing that you list that I think would be worth the effort would be "solar powered cb ham radios for communications."

Considering how much potentially invaluable info is only/mostly/only easily available as a PDF, I'm thinking a working ereader would be of nontrivial value.

Now...if there was only a way to crunch a PDF on an 8-bit processor I recovered from my washing machine...