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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???
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
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.
elsewhere on his site he talks about the 1s1 sampling plug-in for the Tek 547, a 50 Mhz vacuum tube scope from the fifties (this is one of the Great Scopes of History)... that's how you measured VHF and UHF signals back in the bad old days...
"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.
"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.
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".
If all you want is the clock chip itself, then yes, using a heat gun to remove it would work.
From reading the article, it appears that he wanted to use the clock chip while doing a minimum of circuit design to support the chip itself. To do this, it helps to have the terminating resistors remain attached so you do not have to try to match them back up manually.
From looking at the pictures in the article, it also appeared that the chip was a surface mount package, meaning that he would have had to either come up with a generic surface mount breadboard with the correct pad layout, and solder it down (carefully so he didn't cross any traces), or etch his own breadboard for the project. From what I could read he was probably capable of either, however he (correctly in my opinion, perhaps not yours) chose to make use of the components that were already around the chip he wanted to use.
I find no fault in what he did, or potentially in your case if you just want to harvest the parts, in what you do.
-Rusty
You never know...
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
many here have balked at using parts off of dead motherboards. I personally get my hands on every dead motherboard and every dead sattelite reciever I can get.
Why?
my hobby's costs have went from $30.00 a month for buying surface mount discreet components to ZERO because of this. I have more resistors capicators, inductors, and basic logic chips that I will ever need. (Yes 74lsXX series are still used today! as well as 40XX series)
as soon as you get past the "OH MY GOD!" stage of working with surface mount it 's easier than through the hole. I can etch a board and use it instead of wasting another 10 minutes and probably 3 bits drilling the holes.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Here's the scoop. I don't have a decent camera for taking pictures. It's a black and white security camera on a tripod. The tripod broke, so I had to take those pictures while holding the camera and clicking the mouse. The camera doesn't output straight NTSC video so I can't do full motion capture. I don't have any money anymore to buy a new camera (but I did fix that tripod with a blowtorch and some silver braze.)
That's why the black and white pictures are fuzzy.
The color pictures were taken with a QX-3 USB microscope, much better.
As for the cost, it was pretty low. The only things I bought were the panel mount BNCs for 75cents each and the plain gray Hammond enclosure for 10$. 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!
Back in the early 1980s I used to live near a small plant that made mainboards for electronic stuff. They used to pitch out their quality-failed pieces, til they noticed all the artists scrounging their trash every morning, then they started selling 'em. The boards were cool to look at all by themselves, and made nifty backgrounds for 3-D wall art.
;)
Some motherboards are also asthetically pleasing, and if cleaned of solder and unwanted chips and slots, would likely be just as useful for artwork bases. Of course, unsoldering all the unwanted parts would also produce a big pile of chips and suchnot that you could recompile into 3-D art.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
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