Salvage

Electronegativity

I am cleaning out my basement today, and suddenly I see the old junky computer boards in a new way.

"Hey, that's a 26 pin header!"
"This one has half a dozen good surface-mount capacitors."
"I wonder if I can re-use that serial port connection somehow?"

One man's garbage is another man's gold.


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I wonder if this wire is hot...

doggiedoc

Funny! I do the same thing. I acutally have several boxes full of old boards and such. Last fall when I first found a fondness for electronics, I would go to flea markets and garage sales looking for cheap old "stuff" that I could take apart. I watch out for anything that has a circuit board in it!

The pleasure I derive from taking things apart is probably not normal

JLBShecky

I have also been taking apart some of the old mother boards laying arround my house, I just love reusing those headers. One of my favorite things about the old AT mother boards is that the serial ports were connected using ribbon cables, now I have quite a few 9 wire ribion cables that are ready for use. (if I ever find something to connect them to)http://forums.parallax.com/forums/emoticons/smile.gif

um..., Hi

hey,

i also do the same thing, once when was in 3rd grade we had to teach the class something and i taught the class how to "properly" take apart a walkman, but that was back in the "whats a screw?" era where my tool box consisted of various standard screw drivers and a hammer (and of course band-aids for when the screwdriver slips when you hit it with the hammer)

Dave Lewis

dont forget things like the CMOS battery holder, leds a' plenty, and lots of miscellaneous connectors and ideas that can be borrowed and copied.........remember these guys are big time time production and these products are/ were very profitable...this means these designs are GOOD !

also you can steal the BNC connector off of an old NIC card and still use the NIC with no bad effects I have learned


just my 2 cents


Dave

Post Edited (Dave Lewis) : 8/26/2005 8:27:22 PM GMT

John Bond

I have a passion for stripping old printers; They have all those stepper motors plastic gears, drive belts and things. They often also have a couple of relays, a decent power supply and an assortment of connectors.

I recently did a demo on a system that will switch some motors, a large fan and some heaters. The demo used small motors that were off an HP printer, the fan was off a Pentium 3 chip and the heaters were yellow and red LEDs salvaged from an OKI printer.

I recon the demo was better than the real thing is going to be.


Kind regards from Kwa Dukuza

John Bond

Paul Baker

I had an old dye sublimation printer sitting in the back of my closet that went unused for a few years (replaced by a photographic inkjet). I am going through a spring cleaning bug and decided to discard the printer, when I thought "wait there may be salvageable parts" after some frustration of figuring out how to simultaneously undo many many locking tabs and doing reverse engineering of how the thing should be disassembled, I now have 5 bipolar stepper motors (1 large, 3 small and 1 tiny), 6 micro-switches, 3 micro ir led/photo transistors (1x2mm, with 2 pin-point elements), and 4 unknown micro devices (perhaps some more led/phototransistors, they have rectangular elements instead of of the pin point or they may be electromagnet/hall effect pairs), switching power supply (plan on investigating what its voltage/current capabilities are), a thermistor, heater array, brushless DC fan, and the controller board with mainly ALPS semiconductor chips, but it has a static RAM, many surface mount 74 series chips, Toshiba microcontroller and a whole sluth of surface mount resistor arrays and capacitors (tantalum, ceramic, electrolytic). Not to mention belts, pulleys, gears, guide bars, etc. Not a bad haul for a few hours of work.

Ill post a picture of the mystery sensors sometime to see if anyone has seen anything like it.

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·1+1=10

Basic Jim

On those old motherboards don't forget to take the eprom that contains the BIOS. They can be erased and reprogramed for your bs2 projects. Espesialy, most pentium class boards will have·flash memory chips for a bios. These could be very handy·for projects.