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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...
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.