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What happens When You Cook Your Palm Pilot
Hal-kun writes "What happens when you put a Palm Pilot in the oven to dry with the warmth of the pilot light, only to have someone cook a Pizza while you were out? Take a look. Stick a fork in it, I think it's done."
The screen will have been ruined though; liquid crystals are very temperature sensitive.
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Oregon
Using an oven to dry out electronics isn't all that absurd.
When I was working in hardware design, many IC's that were designed to be wave soldered had to be totally free of moisture. They came shipped in air tight containers with humidity cards to tell you if they were exposed to too much moisture.
If they were not dry enough, the procedure was to bake them in an oven at several hundred degrees for a while.
Now, LCD's and plastics and other materials would not be too happy with that treatment. As others noted, a hair dryer will work to get it mostly dry. I'd suggest leaving it in a warm, dry area for at least a day after to make sure.
I once spilled an *entire* glass of water into an old Comodore 1541 disk drive. The scary thing, is they contained their own power supply. And it was on. After a day or so of drying, it worked fine.
Not so for the Commodore 128 that took a glass of grape juice (real, not flavored) into the keyboard. Although it was funny watching the keys sloooowly depress in the order you typed them in...
Dunno about taste of the Palm Pilot, but I'm sure the pizza tasted like hell (from personal experience.) I hope they tossed it, rather than eat it, burnt plastic residue would settle on the pizza and probably make it toxic, besides just tasting that way.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
http://www.tangible-technology.com/tape/baking1.ht ml
When baked, the tape will expand and become loose around the hub. For this reason, use flanges to protect the tape from coming apart. Cooking temperature is between 130F and 140F. Tapes wound on plastic reels with small hubs should be rewound onto large reels with NAB hubs. Be careful to thread the tape around the hub without any "folds." The goal is to minimize "mechanical distortions" that can be impressed upon subsequent layers causing dropouts. The "wind" must be smooth as if played!!!
I have received several e-mails regarding "cooking time" and temperature. Provided the wind is smooth, I am not afraid to bake a quarter inch tape at 135F -- for two hours -- flipping every half-hour. You will find that cooking time varies with tape width, type, brand, condition and the number of reels being baked. Ampex tape from the seventies might require twice as much time as 3M tape from the eighties (as reported by Wendy Carlos when restoring her masters from that time period). Table One below can be used as a guide.
Other links:
http://www.audio-restoration.com/baking.htm
which indicate that this may not be a permanent solution, but is intended for tapes manufactered from the mid 70's forward, which had a tendency to absorb mosture.
http://www.sospubs.co.uk/sos/1996_articles/may96/s alvagearchives.html
is also good, and indicates that home ovens do not go low enough.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The USGS Earth Resource Observation System Data Center has an archive of satellite imagery of the Earth from a large number of sensors. They have a specially build oven to bake older (e.g., Landsat MSS from the 1970's) tapes prior to transfering the data onto newer media. I think the baking helps keep the different surfaces of the tape from sticking to each other when they are not supposed to.
I think the recipe is something like 200 degrees F for 24 hours.
Actually, no they aren't. Proper pizza cooking should be done at about the same temps. Those frozen ready made pizzas all cook at low temps. I grew up cooking pizza in an oven set at 550F. I don't remember the exact temperatures used in reflow, but I had calculated that a convection oven that reaches 500F would do fine. 250C seames to pop up as a likely maximum temperature.
I've used the heat generated from a TV or more recently my monitor. I'm not talking about dripping wet items, that would be stupid, and you would desrve what you get. But if it has moisture on the inside such as in the screen like the face of a watch that fod up inside. Take out the batteries, remove any covers, open all doors and panels, and place it on you tv or monitior. Leave there for a day or two. We used to tell this to people who dropped their digital cameras into water and it's worked dozens of times. Low grade heat and somewhere for the moisture to go. Of course we would suggest that the camera would need to go in for service immediately to protect it from corrosion, etc. most did they were glad we had saved them the cost of a new camera.