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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."
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
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"
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.
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...
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!