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."

Comments

I could use one of these

[colonelteddy]

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.