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Recycling Parts From Dead Motherboards
An anonymous reader writes "I had this dead motherboard on my hands and I wanted to see what would happen if I cut out the clock generator and used it stand-alone. So I removed the Winbond chip from the motherboard (I cut out the section of PCB with a hacksaw), powered it up and it was still working. Add a display, a microcontroller and two switches, and I got a cheap frequency generator. Here's my progress so far. Be kind to my Web skills, I'm really just a hardware monkey.
It's not completed yet, but I just wanted to get the idea out there."
can you imagine setting up a cluster of these in a ripple design for an undergrad CS class?
Wh47 d1d j00 541, 31337 15n't t3h r0xor5 ne m0r3???
For a moment there I thought that said "Be kind to my Web server", then I realised no one would be foolish enough to ask such a request in a slashdot article.
Having a brief glance at the site, this looks pretty cool/useful. Being a physics student and having to work with signal generators and oscilloscopes is fine, but when we get kicked out of the lab at the end of the day with half a project left to finish, then one of these things would start looking pretty good.
Anybody have any idea what kind of price for the additional parts would be? Couldn't find any reference on their site. Also, being able to hook the output (from the display/oscilloscope or whatever) to a computer for recording would be a very good thing too.
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
sure, and the circuit-tracing and datasheet-reading skills involved in selecting just which chunk of PC board to hacksaw or dremel out aren't something you can just write up in a short article for a general audience.
Personally, I'd be more interested in the author's pending write-ups on vintage Tek gear...
Just from glancing at it, it's a crappy square wave output anyway. You can get this from a 3 cent clock crystal and a couple of flip flops. I think this is over-engineering the idea.
Dear Michael's a Jerk,
I for one (and i don't think i'm alone) do not think this is "ool, but a Waste of Time".
repurposing parts from old motherboards to make new test equipment IS cool and IS NOT a waste of time. Just because you can't produce a thousand, or even two, doesn't make it not worthwhile; it's silly to think that Tesla or Turing or whoever should never have made anything, because they could only make one.
and just because something *might* be damaged DOES NOT mean it isn't worth a little hacking!
I'm certain that many slashdotters have gotten tons of use out of "broken" and "useless" throwaway parts from old machines. I know I have.
It's tiring to see every cool hack posted on slashdot be berated by people who don't think it's worthwhile. That attitude has nothing to do with the experimental mindset of hacking, and does nothing to construct anything new. This person did something new *and* shared the knowledge with us! Many, many inventions have come from tireless "frustration".
you can also make a pretty cool go-kart out of an old lawnmower and an old washing machine. :)
well, not really. How do you plan to have a variable square wave output just by using flip-flops? You'd need a high speed master clock (TTL can style), flipflops, a divide-by-n chip, etc. You'd end up with a huge chip count. Using an SX style microcontrollers would be much easier.
Making a varible frew sine wave generator, now there's a worthy hack.
I'm not Seth.
...has an 1 Ghz scope. He must be god or something.
You can't build more then one of them easily. Suppose he accisdently blows his prototye up. Where is he going to get another clock chip?
Um... from another dead motherboard?
And as for the parts not working, the first thing he said was after cutting the chip out was powering it up to see if it works. Either it does or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you still haven't lost anything, as the board was dead anyway.
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
What the heck is a troll doing with the highest score on the article.
It was me, I did it, I moved your cheese
Fair enough - I agree that this is an interesting project. But really - what did he do?
He took a chip off a motherboard, added a microcontroller and made a frequency generator. He made the chip do exactly was it was suppsoed to do (EG, be a variable clock chip). He didn't come up with a particulary novel use - the only hard part would be writing the PIC firmware. It's like me building an LCD controller (which I'm doing atm, btw) that connects to USB, and posting it to slashdot ('Look, ma! I can program a microcontroller!')
The 'cool hack value' is in re-using parts. But most EE's do this beofre the age of twelve, anyway (maybe no from motherboards, but from other devices).
I'm not Seth.
Welcome to Slashdot. Where you get modded down for posting a Troll, then get modded up again for posting a karma whore 2 comments below.
Um... from another dead motherboard?
It'd be pretty flukey to have another dead mb with the exact same clock chip. He might - I don't know.
And as for the parts not working, the first thing he said was after cutting the chip out was powering it up to see if it works. Either it does or it doesn't. If it doesn't, you still haven't lost anything, as the board was dead anyway.
I just glossed over the article - I stand corrected.
I'm not Seth.
"He took a chip off a motherboard, added a microcontroller and made a frequency generator"
This IS cool! Whether novel or not, there's another point you are missing- this person took the time to make full plans, pictures, and code available for those of use who werent Electrical Engineers when we were twelve.
Use an electric paint stripper gun - you can 'nude' a PC mobo real quick.
Use component tester to test bits/waveforms.
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
OK, OK. I'll let you in on a little secret.
If you want cool plans for how to build electronics stuff, google for 'DIY pic projects' for starters. Or you could just click here
There is a *huge* hobbiest crowd porgramming PICs to do all sorts of cool things. The chip takes maybe a day to learn the basics, and 2 or 3 weeks to master. The chip is around $4, and the programmer under 20. check out the Piclist for free tutorials, projects and code.
If you think it's cool, then go for it.
I'm not Seth.
There's nothing more pathetic than a heckler on a technology board. I hereby crown you king of geeks with self-esteem problems.
"He took a chip off a motherboard, added a microcontroller and made a frequency generator"
again, this IS cool! Whether novel or not, (and not everything can be novel and innovative) and there's another point you are missing- this person took the time to make full plans, pictures, and code available for those of use who werent Electrical Engineers when we were twelve.
Just because it isn't difficult or interesting to you, doesn't mean it can't make me pick up a soldering iron and go to work. Or look for _other_ interesting things to do with old motherboards.
"So, really, what did he do?"
Well, he thought of an interesting way to reuse old motherboard parts to make new equipment; executed those plans and then *made it available to everyone*... this is the nerd community at its best.
As for the old motherboard for a source of parts, I keep a couple of big boxes full of motherboards and adapters for salvaging parts. Even though I'm at a point where I can get free samples of nearly anything I want, there's nothing like having the part you need when you need it.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
moderation is broke tonight.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
OK, I give up! You win!
I'm not Seth.
hey fuck you mister
you're a pathetic loser
i'm in high school and i just talked to a girl for the first time tonight and now i'm cooler than EVERYONE at slashdot
ha ha bow before me
This man never got permission to use the motherboard in this unlicenced fashion.
Just from a quick glance at the site, it appears that he has put a lot of time/effort into this idea of recycling a motherboard.
:P
Yet, how expensive can buying what he is trying to create be, compared to the time put in? If you can put something together from an old motherboard - what are the chances it is going to cost a lot?
Also, considering that the board is dead...
How are you meant to know what parts are working? It would be a bitch to test every single component.
Anyway, I don't really see any good use for it. Just a nice hack and effect factor
Just my cheapo Aussie $0.02
However, I find that it's easier to remove components from circuit boards by taking a heat gun (ie. the kind you use for removing paint) and using it to melt the solder. Yes, on high heat, most heat guns get hot enough to melt solder. Just direct the gun at the back of the circuit board while gently prying or tapping at the component you're trying to remove from the front.
Just be sure to do this in a _very_ well ventilated area (ie. outside) because if you leave the heat gun in one place too long, which you probably will sooner or later, you'll burn the board, which produces some of the most evil smelling smoke you've ever had the misfortune of smelling.
Also, I find that dead motherboards aren't particularly fertile grounds for component salvaging. Once, I got a whole skid full of old scientific instruments at a government surplus auction for $10. The load of components I salvaged from this was quite unreal!
Something tells me that if you open the case of your computer, you will find that you have a Winbond clock chip on your motherboard. They are pretty much the standard clock chip for motherboards these days.
I can't personally recall the last motherboard I touched, living or dead, (or even dead because I have no use for that old of a processor anymroe) that did not have a Winbond clock chip on it.
Then again, I might be wrong. It's happened before, I expect it to happen again, and when it does, I hope to learn from that experience.
-Rusty
You never know...
# crapify.pl
# fear my mad perl skillz!
# actually, i don't know perl to well...
# what's the best way to do this?
@tag = ('b','strong','tt','i');
srand time;
while (<>)
{
chomp;
foreach(split "")
{
$x = (rand > 0.5) ? lc : uc;
$t = @tag[rand 4];
print "<$t>$x</$t>";
}
print "<br>\n";
}
2) The chip might be damaged. Never, NEVER work with parts that may or not work. It's simply not worth the frustration.
Well damn.. You are right... I am uninstalling windows as we speak...
Of course, hemos has a small cock, so it's hard to tell.
Are you 100% sure?
I just checked - My last motherboard ( an abit) had a RTM520-39 clock chip. My current board (bought 2 months ago) has an RTM-580.
You may be thinking of the Super I/O chip.
I'm not Seth.
the moderators are high on that cheap crack again.
Most accurate Slashdot login name.. ever.
That may be. As I say, I learn by my mistakes and being corrected. I do recall seeing Winbond chips on a lot of boards however. It is probably just my mind catagorizing them as clock chips when I read of someone using one that just happens to be a clock chip.
-Rusty
You never know...
This is my first post even though I have read slashdot for a very long time now. These posts I have been reading in reply are rather disturbing, while I have fun and laugh at many trolls and such around, the excessive offtopic posting is just lame. Please stop, don't ruin slashdot by making every reply offtopic. To the actual issue here, while this news isn't much, I am impressed by the technical ability of this guy. I am trying to learn about some of that stuff myself.
That damn Ruby crap didn't work for me.
Perl all the way
It seems to me that it is a real waste of time to tell someone that what they are doing (or have done) is a waste of time. Why even worry about what he is doing if it isn't affecting your life, liberty or persuit of happyness?
"The man who says it can't be done should not inturupt the man doing it"
Get a 555 oscillator IC. Costs about a buck at Radio shack. Next?
combine the attributes at random for added confusion.
If you just want a square wave oscillator, then I agree with you. I think the point of this story is making an *accurate* oscillator, that's controlalble via USB or serial.
:-)
That's a little tricky with a '555
I'm not Seth.
anybody remember old hack replacing 14.3MHz clock with 16MHz clock?
that's like asking someone not to ruin your festering pile of shit by spitting on it
You generally don't need the latest / greatest / hottest for what you're doing, there's probably vacuum tube gear that is alive, well, and will probably solve some of your problems if you poke around a bit for a lot less money than you'd expect, especially if you value your time.
Most metropolitan areas have at least one or two places for this sort of thing.
Google is your friend. Try searching on:
used electronic test
or on the specific gear you want.
Not to say there's anything wrong with this project, it's a cool hack and anyone who gets into electronic hardware is going to have a growing pile of junk to recycle parts off.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Maybe this guy is on to something. This could be the new modders' realm, the Motherboard Mod. With the current batch of uber-gearheads out there that not only understand WHAT computer parts do but HOW they do it, this could be a new horizon in interoperability. Creative people could not only swap in and out parts from computer to computer, but also between anything that employs some sort of internal computer--which, nowadays, is almost everything electronic.
Oh my, does that mean that companies like Intel could rearrange chip architecture to a generic format to work in many different appliances? Could they gain a strangle hold on world electronic device manufacturing?!? The future is uncertain; however, I would point out that the idea of 'smart appliances' has been tossed around for many years; this guy is a prime example of the next step in electronics evolution.
Then again, maybe I'm full of it and don't know what the heck I'm talking about.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
Wow - I think you really missed the point of his post.
The comment about ordering by the 1000's was about the fact that getting a replacement part would be next to impossible (from the supplier).
The comment about working with possibly broken parts is referring to the difficulty in debugging a system in which you aren't sure if the components work. (Think programming and using a half broken API - you won't know if the problem is in your code or the code you're calling).
Yes this is really neat. It's a great project. You will rarely save money with this approach, but it's no reason not to try it.
The most important reason is that you are learning to use the parts by example which is really cool. You get the benefit of the hard work of the designers and testers. When you start from scratch with a new part, even with all the specs and theory it sometimes takes a few tries to get it right.
I spend as much time as I can building stuff out of junk because it is what I love. Over the years I've figured out that some cool stuff isn't worth the salvage labor. You can get it another way and it will work better, especially when it's a newer surface-mount, multi-layer board. You really have to weigh the alternatives carefully.
However, you definitely do well when you find boards with parts in sockets and things like that. Old ISA cards and very old motherboards are a great source of unpluggable parts. Most of them have serial eeproms like 9346's, you can get 8051 and 6811 microcontrollers off old modems just by popping them out, UV eproms and eeproms to make your NIC bootable, and if you're lucky you can find an ANCIENT card covered in sockets full of 74xx logic chips of all kinds.
Sadly, the newer things are the less you can do with them. Newer toys, electronics, and computers are becoming so cheap and highly integrated that it's getting really hard to do anything interesting with them. The speak'n'spell was completely hackable. Today's toys just have a transistor and a tiny chip under a drop of epoxy. No label or anything.
It's good to see people are keeping it alive, and not letting the multilayer surface mount stuff slow them down!
I do like the idea of a usb controled and powered frequency source, but I would settle for lower frequencies but greater tunability than just a dozen presets and use the PIC directly. Or better yet, use the PIC and a multiplier circuit if you want the high frequency values the PC clock circuit offers.
Since the clock chip in question uses a 14.318 mhz crystal and PLL frequency multiplication to get the higher frequencies, you might even be able to still use a hacked MB clock circuit, but feed it a clock generated by the PIC rather than from the clock crystal. The top end would still be lower with this approach (better to just use a stand alone PLL and a divider feedback circuit), but it would allow one to get reasonably high frequency by very tunable signals.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Can someone explain to me what he building?
http://saveie6.com/
They said the same thing to car hot rodders (the real kind, not ricers), and then the world was destroyed in an atomic apocalypse, and Mad Max came along, and well, suddenly it was useful to harvest parts from dead equipment and frankenstein it back together again into something that worked.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Even if it is simple, or can be done easier in other ways. It's no different from hacking a nice bit of code you found and decided to see what you could do with it. It's certainly better than spending your life masturbating between trolls on slashdot.
Remember, kiddies:
Those than can, do. Those that can't post on slasdot and berate the idea because they didn't think of it first.
good idea!
But really - what did he do?
:-(
He made a cool hack. Literally. With a hacksaw, yet.
EE's maybe do this stuff in their sleep, but I for one found it interesting and entertaining. (Not that I really understand all that he's talking about
To paraphrase an IBM ad from some time back.
You're both right.
There are large and fundamental differences between:
1) making thousands of them which need to all work reliably without any fuss and feathers, and
2) hacking one out of whatever is lying around which might work and which probably has some ifs, ands and buts.
Progress actually requires both.
Don't be stupid. Picture shows 100 MHz square wave. What do you expect at these frequency ? Imperfections might very well be due to impedance mismatch etc and not by fault of signal generator. All in all, nice hack. I wanted to do it myself, but signal generators on the MB these days are very limited to be of real use for me. They offer a few frequencies and that's it. Some older models were much more versatile, having ability to synthesize any frequency from 0 to over 100 MHz with microHerz resolution...
or, if you are sly, you can get the PIC for free.
just apply for a sample on the website!
just go to http://sample.microchip.com/
hoorah!
1 pic will last for ages if you treat it with care.
-----im billy troll----- im better than you at everything you do.
So, if I understand this right, all i have to do is open the chassis (check,) get out me hacksaw (check,) and star Fè6('NO CARRIER
I had this Dreamcast that stopped working a long time ago. Part of me wanted to salvage, and part of me wanted to punish. This was after weeks of frustration trying to repair it myself. So I went to a friend's house, plugged it in, and popped a music CD into it. Rather than salvaging parts, I tortured it. I shorted out parts and capacitors directly to sensitive chips. I randomly ripped board components out. All the time it kept playing that CD until the motor itself burnt out from 120vAC directly to its windings. My point is, maybe its funner to destroy than it is to try to remove everything with such caution. Or maybe I'm just a sick and twisted man that enjoyed preforming fatal brain surgery upon a faulty Dreamcast
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
*lowers to one knee* and i thought *I* was a geek :)
Did anyone else notice that his webpage has a very nice layout, regardless of how much of a hardware guy he is? I for one am impressed by it. It's not cluttered, it's easy to read, and best of all, it's not slashdotted.
I think we missed an option off the Slashdot poll for this holiday... ;)
Now where's my soldering iron...?
Smokey, this is not 'Nam, this is bowling. There are rules.
Blacken the solder you want to remove with a candle. Wipe the soot from parts you don't want to heat too much. If necessary, cover them with aluminum foil. Place the circuit close to a high powered halogen lamp and - presto. Even PGA parts with high pin count can be pulled out with relative ease (try doing that with a soldering iron and wick!)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
Hobbyist. Hobbyist. Hobbyist.
Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who's the hobbiest of them all?
Where are the cold cathode lights? The faggy case mod?
It wasn't a waste of time. My motherboards usually end up in friends computers but I have a few with those damned capacitors that had the defective electrolyte and have pulled numerous parts from them, mostly regulators and smaller surface mounts.
s ource/feb0 3/ncap.html
Here's why those caps are bulging and spewing.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/re
It wasn't worth the time to replace the capacitors and on some the leakage damaged part of the board.
If the part was damaged, so what, the author really is a hardware hacker and it's destruction would not have meant anything other than more trash to pitch. Wiring up to a board to use a single part is a part of hardware hacking, that's been done, usually by cutting traces, cutting out the whole section is a very good idea, especially on something the size of a motherboard.
This technique increases the usefulness of old, destined for the trash, motherboards as designing and etching a PCB for surface mounted devices is a bit of an investment in time. It also saves the landfill from getting as much toxic waste and garners the salvager a useful return on investment.
I have made custom PCBs or purchased 'generic' ones to mount SMD chips and such. It's slow, any relief is welcome and I do welcome this idea.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
choprboy: Not really... You can pick up a good Tektronix 7104 1GHz scope mainframe for a few hundred bucks.
Anonymous Coward: Working? Honestly, where then?
Only listing at ebay is a used model for $530.00 (Buy it Now for $630).
At that point, I guess you're into a semantic argument over the nature of the phrase "a few."
HAHAHAHAHA!!! Have you LOOKED at the spec sheets for jelly bean logic parts ? I DEFY you to get a 100MHz square wave that looks THAT good. I wager you've NEVER built any hardware in your life. At 100MHz and sub nanosecond risetimes, the layout and lead dress are very important.
So I say: GO FOR IT!!!!
(I also think you've never seen square waves except for 1KHz or in textbooks.... )
Some motherboards had extremly nifty SPMS (switched mode power supply) circuits on board (non-isolated buck style). All of this stuff is expensive and/or difficult to get in small quantities.
An SMPS is an extremely efficient means of regulating a voltage and getting a voltage boost as well. While I think Maixm IC is a nifty parts maker, swiping the parts from a junk board is just easy and cheap and I'll keep doing it. I'd not hacked the board apart but may do so in the future, these parts are not easy to manipulate.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
The chip takes maybe a day to learn the basics, and 2 or 3 weeks to master.
this is horriby misleading. The above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general. There are some C precompilers for Pic's but the good ones are horribly overpriced. and they have one very useful app out there... picbasic. Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.
And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.
PIC's are NOT easy to get started in. there is at least a 1 month gearing up and learning curve. and at least 1-2 years to learn assembly, communications protocols and protocols for every device you want to talk to.. (Want to display on a lcd? you need to know every bit of that LCD's info.)
There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.
but the true power of a pic is in assembly. I have seen a pong game in a pic that directly generated the NTSC video signal out one of it's pins and many other accomplishments that are impossible with any language on the pic other than assembly.
I do think that everyone whould start with messing with a pic. get a basic electronics book if you dont know electronics and start there... buy a 16f84 and build a jdm programmer. and download the microchip dev kit.
Sadly...on a side note, Atmel has a better line of microcontrollers but atmel doesn't give a rats ass about home developers so their dev kit is priced to keep you and I out of them and their Non discloseure attitude keeps them at second banana. I can find 20-30 times more info and support software for microchip products and Atmel has almost ZERO for them.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
"But most EE's do this beofre the age of twelve, anyway (maybe no from motherboards, but from other devices)."
Sorry, wrong. Most 'EE's flip a coin after high school and sign up for four years of partying with their parent's money because they think 'engineer' sounds cool and might pay a lot.
They are not interested in electronics, they never got their hands dirty in high school, never bought a scope with newspaper run money, etc...
I think this whole discussion is great because it touches the surface of an idea I have been chewing on for a while - Recycling! That is - fixing your motherboard. Of course, it would be easier if more stuff was modular and socketed - I really liked the idea someone posted about using RAM from a VGA board in a disk cache - This is real recycling. Hey - imagine using a motherboard part or parts to upgrade some other appliance.
.....but anyway
By the way, with the advent of micro-atx, and this article, imagine a PDA [ not very small ] from off the shelf parts?
Since:
1- many PC's have more horsepower than most of us use,
2- to toss out a PC with a bad [ insert part here ] is a bad idea if the rest works and very bad for the environment.
3- In the old days gearheads make stuff from kits, and then mods could be shared.
Old PCs can be file servers, or whatever.
Clusters are made from old PCs. Clusters serve games better. Clusters serve lots of stuff better.
Maybe the motherboard makers could be persuaded to make more data available on older designs?
More socketed parts do not really spell loss of sales. Chip advances mean sales, No?
Yeah, let me tell you about hacking the speak-n-spell. This one time, after I lured an alien into my house with Reeses Pieces, he showed me how to turn one of those things into an intergalactic communicator! But not until after we got drunk on a few beers and made out with a Baywatch star.
Here's the scoop. I don't have a decent camera for taking pictures. It's a black and white security camera on a tripod. The tripod broke, so I had to take those pictures while holding the camera and clicking the mouse. The camera doesn't output straight NTSC video so I can't do full motion capture. I don't have any money anymore to buy a new camera (but I did fix that tripod with a blowtorch and some silver braze.)
That's why the black and white pictures are fuzzy.
The color pictures were taken with a QX-3 USB microscope, much better.
As for the cost, it was pretty low. The only things I bought were the panel mount BNCs for 75cents each and the plain gray Hammond enclosure for 10$. Everything else was 'lying around'.
As for the use, it's more of a theoretical thing. Getting fast edges at 100MHz is not that easy (notwithstanding all the people who think they can do better with a flip-flop and a 555, they're welcome to it.)
I can do TDR with the fast edges, which will let me measure trace impedances, and the practice of that circuit will get me going for the 0-800MHz synthesizer I'm planning.
And it was a great excuse for talking about my 1S1 sampler.
I'm also pretty happy that people seem to like the layout of the page.
Thanks everyone!
It's not a waste of time if he has fun doing it.
one day i got this 'crazy' idea, why not try to make a tv from the laptops display? The motherboard is damaged but the display should still be fine. Sure it's a tiny screen , but i would be ideal for my bedroom. Any ideas ? Links ?
Microchip Samples Web Site Requirements
The Microchip SampleMe web site has been optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 4.0 or Netscape Version 4.0 or greater. Please upgrade your browser to the latest version for free by going to either the Microsoft or Netscape web sites. When your upgrade is complete, please come back to our web site again.
Using Opera 6, displaying MSIE 5 user-agent headers, so they're parsing way down to see the word "Opera" in there.
They'll be getting an email shortly stating "when your site is upgraded to actually allow use by people that aren't just follwing the herd, please come back and I might just be a customer".
Stupid fuckwits.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
Yeah, they make ATA chips too. You know, RAID, Serial ATA, the works.
There sure are a lot of them on motherboards, though.
I will now redundantly add my name to the end of my post. You know, in case you forgot me or something.
Yeah, try getting a 555 timer to oscillate at 100 MHz. Next?
That's exactly how I learned to build computers -- assembling XTs and 286s from other people's useless castoff junk. I learned a lot more from having to do kludges and workarounds to get mismatched parts to play nice together than I ever did from books and new components -- and that knowledge carries over to new equipment (in that if something doesn't work right off, I know more about what might fix it). Plus there's a certain satisfaction in the process and the success, even if the end result has zero practical value.
Kids used to do the same with old car and bicycle parts to concoct go-carts. No realworld use, but a good learning experience.
Anyone who's never had to create a "make do with what you've got" contraption doesn't know what they're missing. Prefab is convenient, a whole lot easier, and far more likely to work on the first attempt, but even so it's a relatively narrow and limiting world.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I'm sure the accuracy of the frequency at this point is hard to determine but if I were building something like this I'd want a highly accurate frequency generator. That might be a little much to ask but it would be great.
The Winbond chip is pretty specific to its application, that is, making motherboard clocks. There are much better serial programmable devices that can provide a wider range of frequencies. You can get Cypress ones at Digi-Key)
Also for more accuracy, you can stack them and refactor P and Q over multiple dividers. On one project (an MPEG encoder) I did just that to make a low-jitter fully-locked 16.9344 / 12.288 / 18.432 audio reference from 27 MHz video. Each PLL was less than $2, and I used an 8051 to control it.
There are also specialty PLL chips used for cellphones that provide good accuracy using some voodoo in their dividers.
- dvd_tude
...this is not a new idea, in fact it is a very old idea. My old man used to work at IBM and back in the days they used to ship broken equipment like motherboards back to be fixed. Replace a chip here, a capacitator there, a resistor there and good as new. Of course, as things got smaller and cheaper it wasn't cost-efficient anymore.
Sure for a hobby it'll work, if you were going to fumble around with similar parts anyway. I'm sure glad noone tries to figure out the total cost of going out with the boat and throw out a line to catch fish at our vacation resort either. But you think there's a "business model" or anything here, no it isn't. There used to be, though.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
to remove the IC from the mother board (takes about 30s - much less than cutting the board up), then make a new PCB. This guy is using a microcontroller anyway, so a proper PCb would be worth the effort.
Oh well, what the hell...
Yeah, right. I've tried IE6 (it worked), Opera 7 (as IE6 and Moz5), and Moz1.3.1. O7 (the BEST browser, by far) didn't work because these fsckers act like MS.
Note to Opera Software: Bork sample.microchip.com!
IT'S ALIVE!!! IT's ALIVE
OK, where to begin?
above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general
This is slashdot. I bet 90% of people here cana program.
Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.
No. Just like an other language, assebmler had libries/routines that people have given you. Check out The Piclist
And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.
Get a P16PRO40. Or Build Your Own
There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.
The piclist has all of this.
I'm not Seth.
It hurts to see an otherwise-good mobo discarded because the Li clock cell is soldered in, no jumper scheme for a replacement, and the local small shop doesn't have the knowledge to consider replacing it; they probably don't even know how to solder.
Enby in Waltham
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb0 3/ncap.html
Maybe you need to have permission...
Sorry.
Some resources you might not know about:
Astonishingly-good book on electronics -- even has its own Web site! It's The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. Not cheap, but more than worth its price to people who need it. Very practical, yet as deep as it needs to be. Teaches enough electronics for any intelligent person to design and build anything low-powered (including microprocessors) that doesn't involve much RF. For the latter, see radio amateur references.
Monthly magazine, which grew out of a great column in Byte: Circuit Cellar It's for engineers who design embedded micros, but more than that.
Hobbyist magazine -- they suffer from a lack of good material, sometimes: Nuts & Volts. Has lots of good ads!
Don Lancaster's site: <www.tinaja.com> He has written a lot of good stuff in his columns over the years. He's a PostScript language expert.
Tools and supplies for manufacturing -- nice company. fine product line: Contact East
USENET: sci.electronics.*
The Radio Amateur's Handbook, published by the ARRL; back issues are useful, but just be aware of what's no longer the best way/available/etc.
Here's a guy who designed his own instruction set, and built the hardware out of SSI chips to run it. No, it won't play Quake. Doesn't even have an OS. He's one of my very-few heroes!
Enby in Walthamhttp://www.vttoth.com/vicproc.htm
Ouch! I just spent about a half hour keying in a nice article, using this forms window, Googled for another reference without opening a new window, closed the window, and all the text, URLs, etc. was gone. Might still have been in RAM, but no way I know of to search, if it hadn't been already reallocated. :( ARGH!
Sorry, I just don't have the patience/energy to do it all again. As well, Googling to find links might reduce the slashdotting of some of these sites. (No, I'm not really mean, but typing up a decent hyperlink by hand is a mess!)