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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."
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'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
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.
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...
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
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.
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"
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!
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.
Be kind to my Web skills, I'm really just a hardware monkey.
I wanted to reply to this as well.
His page is perfectly readable, and isn't bogged down by anything. It's pure content and better than most websites out there. The flow of the page is obvious, and I'm not forced to read mulitiple pages for the same article. The only downfall I can possibly see is the page being too much for an old modem to read quickly.
Following the same logic... ..... you can make a UNIX server out of the secretaries old Pentium 75 Word Processor...
;)
Let's not get silly and ridicule hardware hacking. It's not a lot different from software hacking, except... ummm... it's cooler.
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?
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?