What are those cases? This is just ensuring that consumers have the option to repair so the manufacturers aren’t mandating waste or planned obsolescence
I make a small specialty electronic device that is optimized for size and weight. Its a side hustle, so I do it just to break even.
It consists of three parts: a 2-piece plastic case, and a single circuit board with around 25 smt components. The user can replace the battery.
I'm not going to publish my schematic or board design because I already open sourced my code, and the device is designed to be stupidly easy to manufacture for my own sake. Basically I don't want people to start making their own. A competent EE could figure it out in a day or two, but a anyone with that ability could design their own in the same amount of time.
If something on the board goes bad, I'm not going to offer guidance to repair it. It isn't worth anyone's time. That said, I do offer a lifetime warranty/buyback option since the unit cost is less than $10.
This is a bit of a contrived example since there is literally only one part that can fail, but the point is that there is a very fuzzy line around how far we can go with repairability. Should I be forced to provide a full schematic/board design (giving away my IP essentially)? Should I be forced to provide 'parts' (there is really only one part, and that is the product itself)?
I'm sympathetic to the 'right to repair' movement, but I'm curious how it would be implemented across such a broad spectrum of products. Perhaps it could just be a transparency rule: planned obsolescence (unrepairable) items should be marked as such and an e-waste tax added. If you want to avoid that marking you have to offer to trade broken parts for new for 5 years after first sale at cost.
