Treasure Trove for robotics!

CannibalRobotics

Today I got a little frustrated with my project of the moment so I decided to take my #10 Torx driver and attack the HP-InkJet/Scanner I found on the street a couple of days ago. (Our neighborhood has bulk collection days occasionally and it's amazing what people toss!) It cannot be understated how much cool and very usable robotics stuff is inside of one of these things. I know it's not great stuff if your designing a product but for gee-whiz entertainment and one-off pieces, it's a gold-mine.
The highlights are:
2 stepper motors
3 DC motors
about a dozen nylon and plastic gears
~20 springs
2 optical shaft encoders
1 linear optical movement encoder - to track printhead location
1 white 9" CFL tube and power supply
6 stainless steel shafts
wiring harnesses' with connectors for all of the gizmo's above
2 reversing gear assemblies
1 linear optical sensor/line reader with lensing (used for the scanner)
wheels / spacers
2 pre-assembled belt drive systems
a handful of #10 torx screws
several circuit boards containing all sorts of goodies.

Don't ever drive by one of these - in an hour you can have several hundred dollars worth of really fun stuff!
Jim-

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Signature space for rent!
Send $1 to CannibalRobotics.com.

RobotWorkshop

Hello Jim,

Yes, you are absolutely correct about being a great source of parts. I've scavenged parts from many of those printers and scanners. The optical encoders are awesome. I've re-used them in some projects. For one the resolution was a bit too high and I wrote about it and used an SX28 processor to help scale the encoder output without losing any of the counts. It was in SERVO back in 2008.

Robert

CannibalRobotics

I wonder if a contest is in order?

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Signature space for rent!
Send $1 to CannibalRobotics.com.

erco

Great find! It's nice to hear that I'm not the only one who has picked up "trash" from the curb. I rescued a 32" TV from someone's discard pile after Christmas. Works PERFECTLY, amazing picture. Great garage TV set for me with a converter box or DVD player. No doubt someone tossed it after they got their big flat screen. Yes, those are nice; I love the plasma in my living room, but I'll bet none of the new sets will last nearly as long as the good old CRT sets, which did fine even when you left 'em on all the time. Try that with a big LCD or plasma HD set and you'll have expensive problems to deal with before too long.

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
·"If you build it, they will come."

Mikerocontroller

You'll probably never find a Les Paul guitar sitting on the curb but give it a few years and you'll be seeing plasmas, iPods, iPhones, and Yukons parked there. Last month I found a P4 laptop with a missing space bar on TOP of a trashcan.

mikediv

Mikerocontroller true story where I live we do not have garbage collection we have to go to the town dump so if you have anything that's nice or working we have an area where people will put stuff for others who may want it. well I have taken a few things let a few things
I took mostly printers and salvaged steppers DC motors I even scored a treadmill with a 2 HP DC motor ,, Well where this story is going one day I pulled in after dumping my trash and saw a Guitar it was a Strat style well before I got there this resident trash picker guy who is always there grabbing anything that looks like he could sell grabbed it,, Well it turned out to be a REAL FENDER 1962 Strat I wanted to Smile my pants I offered him 500 bucks its all I had and he would not budge was going to put it on ebay He really didn't know its value and I really didn't want to tell him lol anyway while I am changing my pants from crapping them he shows me the amplifier he had just loaded into his van before I got there a Fender Quad reverb some poor old lady or man must have cleaned out here house and had no clue what this stuff was worth ,, since you mentioned the Les Paul I thought you might get a kick out of this .. The first thing I do when I go to the dump before I ever unload my trash is go right to that area but yo know Lightning will never strike twice. I did get one of those very expensive robot dogs and it even worked before I Stripped it for parts but a 62 Strat with a Quad Reverb I can only dream

Mikerocontroller

I would have congratulated him on his find but its seems awful that you just missed out on it yourself. To him it was like finding money. Its like watching an idiot in a nice car who understands its value but has no idea what it IS.

Lab Rat

well you may find a printer to be an ungodly amount of goodies but when you take apart twenty of them it gets kind of boring yes i sed to take out all the parts you listed but i dont anymore i just keep the motores and electronices the motors i keep the rest of the electronics goes to trhe scrap yard. y you might ask. because i have too much stuff i have three o scopes and all three of them are tube jobs they are huge and i have a five gallon bucket of steppers and a five gallon buckt of transformers a five gallon bucket of dc motor and 45 full color leds i only paid 20 dollards for plus oh so much more plus i have a pile of things to rip apart that would make you cry cause there is so much stuff. four monitors a few vcrs about 4 printers a couple cassete decks from the entertainment center a tv or two· and some radios

▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔▔
Parallax posesses power beyond belief.

Believe in it.
Visit me at
http://jrelectromech.services.officelive.com/default.aspx
·

Martin_H

So I filed this post away in my head and recently got an old an Epson 880. The thing was nearly impossible to take apart and I broke the more delicate bits. The power supply caps still had some juice in them and when I shorted one by accident it made quite a spark.

My goal was just to get my hands on a stepper and learn how to use one. I eventually found my quarry, a stepper motor, 2 DC motors, assorted rods and gears, plus a plethora of screws. Now I need to figure out the voltage requirements for the motors and if the stepper is unipolar or bipolar.