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

EFF-PEE

[H.G. Pennypacker]

Re:EFF-PEE

[Anonymous Coward]

A n A n o n ym O U s R E A d e R w R I T e s " i H A d t hi s d E A d m o t h eR B o A R D o n m Y H a N d s a N d I W a n t E D T o s e e w h a t W O u l D H A p P e N i F i c u T O U t t he C L o c kg e N e r a t o r A n D U s e D I t S t A n D - aL o n e . S O i r e M O v E D t h E w I N b O n dC h I p f r o m T h e M O Th e r B o a r D ( i C Ut o U t T h E s E c T I O n o f p C b W I T H A H a C k s a w ) , P O W E r E d I T u P A n D I t w A s St I l l W oR K i N g . a d d a d I S P L A y , a M Ic R o C O N t R o L l E r A N d T w O s w i t C H e s , a N D I GO t a c h ea p F R E Q u e N c Y G e N E r A T O R . H E R e' s M Y p R o g R e S S s O f A r . B E k I

How RedHat's Linux Can Defeat Micr$oft's Windoze

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Hi,

I've always used Windowz and I consider myself an exceptional Visual
Basic programmer, so I know computers pretty good. In fact I got an A-
in my programming class last term. But I'm a little wary of how much
power Microsoft has in the computer field. Many of my friends use
RedHat and I've recently installed it on my machine at home. Although
I haven't had as much chance to play with it as I'd like, I've been
greatly impressed.

This weekend I gave some thoughts to the things that are wrong with
Linux. I hope no one minds having some flaws pointed out. I'd like to
help make RedHat stronger so it can conquer MS. Hopefully RedHat will
hear this (crossing fingers) and address these. I think with a little
effort, RedHat's Linux can defeat Microsoft's Windows! :)

To begin with, there are too many different flavors of RedHat.
Browsing a list on Amazon, I saw they made varients under the
codenames of Mandrake, Debian and Slackware, just to name a few. I
know that I'm very new to RedHat so maybe this is obvious but it seems
like RedHat should just sell a few different flavors of its operating
system. Perhaps one for the desktop and one for a server? Could
someone explain why RedHat produces dozens of different versions of
Linux?

Secondly did you know that anyone can view the source code to Linux! I
think that RedHat shouldn't make its code available. After all, what
keeps Microsoft from stealing RedHat's ideas and putting it into
Windows? My friend says that FreeBSD stole the TCP/IP stack from DOS a
long time ago and Microsoft is always looking for revenge for that.
Plus it seems to me like RedHat is just giving away its ideas for
free. And what keeps hackers or terrorists from tampering with the
code and putting a virus in every computer?

On a related note, why doesn't RedHat write Linux in assembly? My
friend says that's what Microsoft does for Windows, and that's why
Windows is faster and more stable than Linux.

Next RedHat definitely should kill -9 (ha, ha!) the command line.
Microsoft finally gave up DOS when Windows 2000 came out. I'm suprised
that RedHat hasn't migrated away from...whatever its version of DOS is
called (Bash, I think?) But maybe this is planned for a future
release?

Finally Linux needs games! RedHat will never be successful in the home
without games. They should also tell M$ to release a version of Office
for Linux too. And Internet Explorer!

Have a nice day! Go Linux!!

just imagine...

[rock_climbing_guy]

can you imagine setting up a cluster of these in a ripple design for an undergrad CS class?

Re:just imagine...

[Anonymous Coward]

can you imagine setting up a cluster

A beowu-?

ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Besides the 'cheap hack' value, this is a total waste of time. Why?

1) 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? Companies like realtek etc don't even want to know you, unless you which to order @ least a thousand parts.

2) The chip might be damaged. Never, NEVER work with parts that may or not work. It's simply not worth the frustration.

That aside, it's a pretty cool hack.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[foog]

sure, and the circuit-tracing and datasheet-reading skills involved in selecting just which chunk of PC board to hacksaw or dremel out aren't something you can just write up in a short article for a general audience.

Personally, I'd be more interested in the author's pending write-ups on vintage Tek gear...

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[cscx]

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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[danitor]

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".

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[colonelteddy]

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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

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).

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Welcome to Slashdot. Where you get modded down for posting a Troll, then get modded up again for posting a karma whore 2 comments below.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Um... from another dead motherboard?

It'd be pretty flukey to have another dead mb with the exact same clock chip. He might - I don't know.


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.

I just glossed over the article - I stand corrected.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[danitor]

"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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

OK, OK. I'll let you in on a little secret.

If you want cool plans for how to build electronics stuff, google for 'DIY pic projects' for starters. Or you could just click here

There is a *huge* hobbiest crowd porgramming PICs to do all sorts of cool things. The chip takes maybe a day to learn the basics, and 2 or 3 weeks to master. The chip is around $4, and the programmer under 20. check out the Piclist for free tutorials, projects and code.

If you think it's cool, then go for it.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[danitor]

ok, sorry, I hit post accidentally. here's the full argument. I am aware of google, DIY projects, and epanorama.net. Elitism helps noone.

"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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

OK, I give up! You win!

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[rusty0101]

Something tells me that if you open the case of your computer, you will find that you have a Winbond clock chip on your motherboard. They are pretty much the standard clock chip for motherboards these days.

I can't personally recall the last motherboard I touched, living or dead, (or even dead because I have no use for that old of a processor anymroe) that did not have a Winbond clock chip on it.

Then again, I might be wrong. It's happened before, I expect it to happen again, and when it does, I hope to learn from that experience.

-Rusty

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

2) The chip might be damaged. Never, NEVER work with parts that may or not work. It's simply not worth the frustration.

Well damn.. You are right... I am uninstalling windows as we speak...

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Are you 100% sure?

I just checked - My last motherboard ( an abit) had a RTM520-39 clock chip. My current board (bought 2 months ago) has an RTM-580.

You may be thinking of the Super I/O chip.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Most accurate Slashdot login name.. ever.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[rusty0101]

That may be. As I say, I learn by my mistakes and being corrected. I do recall seeing Winbond chips on a lot of boards however. It is probably just my mind catagorizing them as clock chips when I read of someone using one that just happens to be a clock chip.

-Rusty

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a 555 oscillator IC. Costs about a buck at Radio shack. Next?

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

If you just want a square wave oscillator, then I agree with you. I think the point of this story is making an *accurate* oscillator, that's controlalble via USB or serial.

That's a little tricky with a '555 :-)

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Junior J. Junior III]

They said the same thing to car hot rodders (the real kind, not ricers), and then the world was destroyed in an atomic apocalypse, and Mad Max came along, and well, suddenly it was useful to harvest parts from dead equipment and frankenstein it back together again into something that worked.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Tony-A]

But really - what did he do?

He made a cool hack. Literally. With a hacksaw, yet.

EE's maybe do this stuff in their sleep, but I for one found it interesting and entertaining. (Not that I really understand all that he's talking about :-(

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Tony-A]

To paraphrase an IBM ad from some time back.
You're both right.

There are large and fundamental differences between:
1) making thousands of them which need to all work reliably without any fuss and feathers, and
2) hacking one out of whatever is lying around which might work and which probably has some ifs, ands and buts.

Progress actually requires both.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Brane2]

Don't be stupid. Picture shows 100 MHz square wave. What do you expect at these frequency ? Imperfections might very well be due to impedance mismatch etc and not by fault of signal generator. All in all, nice hack. I wanted to do it myself, but signal generators on the MB these days are very limited to be of real use for me. They offer a few frequencies and that's it. Some older models were much more versatile, having ability to synthesize any frequency from 0 to over 100 MHz with microHerz resolution...

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[billy_troll]

or, if you are sly, you can get the PIC for free.
just apply for a sample on the website!

just go to http://sample.microchip.com/

hoorah!

1 pic will last for ages if you treat it with care.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Hobbyist. Hobbyist. Hobbyist.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall. Who's the hobbiest of them all?

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[jo42]

Where are the cold cathode lights? The faggy case mod?

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[mrmeval]

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.

Here's why those caps are bulging and spewing.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/res ource/feb0 3/ncap.html

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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHAHA!!! Have you LOOKED at the spec sheets for jelly bean logic parts ? I DEFY you to get a 100MHz square wave that looks THAT good. I wager you've NEVER built any hardware in your life. At 100MHz and sub nanosecond risetimes, the layout and lead dress are very important.
So I say: GO FOR IT!!!!
(I also think you've never seen square waves except for 1KHz or in textbooks.... )

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[mrmeval]

Some motherboards had extremly nifty SPMS (switched mode power supply) circuits on board (non-isolated buck style). All of this stuff is expensive and/or difficult to get in small quantities.

An SMPS is an extremely efficient means of regulating a voltage and getting a voltage boost as well. While I think Maixm IC is a nifty parts maker, swiping the parts from a junk board is just easy and cheap and I'll keep doing it. I'd not hacked the board apart but may do so in the future, these parts are not easy to manipulate.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Lumpy]

The chip takes maybe a day to learn the basics, and 2 or 3 weeks to master.

this is horriby misleading. The above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general. There are some C precompilers for Pic's but the good ones are horribly overpriced. and they have one very useful app out there... picbasic. Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.

And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.

PIC's are NOT easy to get started in. there is at least a 1 month gearing up and learning curve. and at least 1-2 years to learn assembly, communications protocols and protocols for every device you want to talk to.. (Want to display on a lcd? you need to know every bit of that LCD's info.)

There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.

but the true power of a pic is in assembly. I have seen a pong game in a pic that directly generated the NTSC video signal out one of it's pins and many other accomplishments that are impossible with any language on the pic other than assembly.

I do think that everyone whould start with messing with a pic. get a basic electronics book if you dont know electronics and start there... buy a 16f84 and build a jdm programmer. and download the microchip dev kit.

Sadly...on a side note, Atmel has a better line of microcontrollers but atmel doesn't give a rats ass about home developers so their dev kit is priced to keep you and I out of them and their Non discloseure attitude keeps them at second banana. I can find 20-30 times more info and support software for microchip products and Atmel has almost ZERO for them.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

"But most EE's do this beofre the age of twelve, anyway (maybe no from motherboards, but from other devices)."

Sorry, wrong. Most 'EE's flip a coin after high school and sign up for four years of partying with their parent's money because they think 'engineer' sounds cool and might pay a lot.
They are not interested in electronics, they never got their hands dirty in high school, never bought a scope with newspaper run money, etc...

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[czion3]

It's not a waste of time if he has fun doing it.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[twiztidlojik]

Yeah, they make ATA chips too. You know, RAID, Serial ATA, the works.

There sure are a lot of them on motherboards, though.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, try getting a 555 timer to oscillate at 100 MHz. Next?

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Reziac]

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.

Re:ool, but a Waste of Time

[Michael's a Jerk!]

OK, where to begin?

above statement is true if you know assembly programming or programming in general

This is slashdot. I bet 90% of people here cana program.

Picbasic is the best way to get people started as they don't have to unbderstand RS232 communications to write a serial input routene.. while in assembly you had better understand every bit of the communications protocol you want to impliment as you are writing it at the lowest level possible.


No. Just like an other language, assebmler had libries/routines that people have given you. Check out The Piclist

And then we have getting the pic programmer to work.. If you are rich and can shell out the hundreds for the real thing that is great. the rest of us are building minimal programmers and using freeware loaders.... and fighting alot to get them to work.

Get a P16PRO40. Or Build Your Own

There are some C libraries that people have written to make LCD's Rs232, RS485 and I2C as easy as calling a subroutene, and picbasic has all of them already in it.



The piclist has all of this.

Slashdot is UberGay

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to be among faggots, slashdot is the right place.

Re:Slashdot is UberGay

[Anonymous Coward]

and your presence is warmly embraced

Re:Slashdot is UberGay

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah, it's a virtual sausage fest/circle jerk.

be kind?

[Anonymous Coward]

Be kind to my Web skills

For a moment there I thought that said "Be kind to my Web server", then I realised no one would be foolish enough to ask such a request in a slashdot article.

Re:be kind?

[Epistax]

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.

Re:be kind?

[Anonymous Coward]

I beat the Slashdot effect; if there was one. Download took me slightly under 30 seconds for the text, and by the time I'd crossed the fold to the images; they'd already downloaded as well. Rather than deriding himself for being a hardware monkey; he should congradulate himself for building a clean easily followed page. I was refreshed to actually be reading content instead of downloading core after core of worthless graphic gimmickry.

His tool: Netscape 4.76 Composer? Very good work.

Re:be kind?

[statichead]

But you have fine web skills.

Sourceforge is dying (VA Linux quartetly report)

[larry bagina]

VA Linux recently released their Quarterly earnings

Among the hilights:

• 6 million in revenue
• 3 million cost of revenue
• 3.6 million net loss

The revenue was leftovers from the hardware business (181,000), software revenue (671,000), and online revenues (5,185,000).

Software revenue was sourceforge enterprise edition (10 new sales at 65,000 plus some additional licenses), and the online revenue is banner ads, /. subscriptions, and thinkgeek shit, etc.

Clearly, betting the company on sourceforge was a mistake. If VA Linux is to survive, sourceforge must die. Interestingly, the only parts of VA Linux with any potential are the pieces bought from Andover.net, and they'll be the only thing left when VA is out of the hardware and sourceforge business.

More interestingly, though, is that total assets dropped from 66 million to 51 million. That's 12 million more than than the 3.6 million loss they reported, and the loss of goodwill and equipment depreciation doesn't explain it.

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.

Re:I could use one of these

[Michael's a Jerk!]

What frequency range?

The price is something like $20, including transformer, PIC16F628 Microcontroller, FTDI serial to USB chip, etc. The problem is the clock chip. Places like radio shack etc aren't likely to have them.

The hardest part is learning PIC assembly. PIC's are weird devices, having an accumalator style, havard archecture. Take a look here for a good tutorial on PICs.

Re:I could use one of these

[cscx]

If all you want is a square wave, you can do that with a pair of op amps, a few resistors and capacitors. Total price is less than $1.50.

Re:I could use one of these

[foog]

Yeah, I like the Atmel AVRs a lot better. You can use gcc or buy a decent commercial C compiler for $200.

Re:I could use one of these

[Michael's a Jerk!]

Sure - if you don't mid a little drift. Don't forget the money for the transformer, regulator, case, pot, know, etc ;-)

Re:I could use one of these

[spongman]

yeah, the AVRs are much better chips, they're mostly pin compatible with the PICs, their assembly language is MUCH nicer, gcc produces pretty good code for it, the free debugger from atmel is excellent, they faster, use less power, and there's a huge range of different versions. and you can build a programmer for about $10.

Re:I could use one of these

[nickclarke]

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.

I believe there is at least one software-based oscilliscope around, using the PC's soundcard inputs. I would guess these would allow you to record the output

Re:I could use one of these

[b1t r0t]

Or even better, with the venerable 555 timer.

Of course the clock generator that this guy is ripping out with a hack saw is in the couple of hundred megahertz range, with crystal accuracy.

Re:I could use one of these

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the second bold claim you've made. I tell you what: go for it. Show it to me. Show me sub nanosecond rise times with a 100MHz square wave with crystal stability with 1.50$ in new parts. Email me webmaster@dfpresource.org.
Mail me the finished product so I can look at the output with 1GHz bandwidth.
Anything else is pissing in the wind.

Re:I could use one of these

[Zarquon]

And the new ATmega8515/8535. Same dip package, but add hardware mult, double the clock speed, and cheaper to boot. Makes a lot of fixed point arithmetic usable, without having to use surface mount parts.

Re:Sourceforge is dying (VA Linux quartetly report

[Anonymous Coward]

I recommend that VA shutter its offices. By shutting donw completely, they can send their crap to auction. Then pay off shareholders. If they continue on, they will be Bankrupt with nothing to sell.
.

I just got

[Anonymous Coward]

back from a date with a real girl!
What did YOU do tonight.

Re:I just got

[Anonymous Coward]

What did YOU do tonight.

• They'll tell you when they get home tomorrow morning...

Re:I just got

[Anonymous Coward]

how is kathleen fent these days? I haven't seen her since she stopped working 5th avenue.

Re:I just got

[Anonymous Coward]

I watched a movie with my real wife, in the real house that I own.

Later on I'll be having some real sex while you're sitting alone in your room masturbating and fuming about how you spent all that money on your "date" and didn't even get laid for your troubles.

How about that, trollboi?

Re:I just got

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did you come home so early? Huh, loser!

Re:I just got

[Anonymous Coward]

What did YOU do tonight.

Injected heroin into my penis. Just like every night, jackass.

This guy sounds so cool, he must get lots of girls

[Anonymous Coward]

seriously, we all know how much the ladies dig mad hardware skillz. This guy must have had sex at least 1 time in his life! YA!

alphagoogle.rb

[Anonymous Coward]

#!/usr/bin/ruby -w

# (Score: 5, Informative)

require 'net/http'

print "Top results for one-letter google searches as of #{Time.now}\n"
rx = Regexp.new("<div><p class=g><a href=(http://.*?)>(.*?)</a>")

("a".."z").eac h do |letter|
if Net::HTTP.get("www.google.com", "/search?q=#{letter}") =~ rx
print "#{letter} : <a href=#{$1}>#{$2}</a>\n"
end
end

Re:alphagoogle.rb

[Anonymous Coward]

# crapify.pl
# fear my mad perl skillz!
# actually, i don't know perl to well...
# what's the best way to do this?

@tag = ('b','strong','tt','i');
srand time;
while (<>)
{
chomp;
foreach(split "")
{
$x = (rand > 0.5) ? lc : uc;
$t = @tag[rand 4];
print "<$t>$x</$t>";
}
print "<br>\n";
}

Recycle this, slashhomos

[Anonymous Coward]

*_s_l_a_s_d_o_t_s_u_c_k_s_*_s_l_a_s_h_d_o_t_s_u_x
s_/_____\____ADVERTISE\___ON_______/__P_\______s
l|___I___|__SLASHDOT___\LOW RATES_|___U__|______l
a|__LOVE_`.__Call_1-800-BLOWTACO__|____D__:_____a
s`___M____|_____________|________\|_____G_|_____s
h_\__I____|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_____E_:____h
d__\__C___\/____--~~__________~--__|_\___&_|____d
o___\__H___\_-~____________________~-_\__T_|____o
t____\__A____\_________.--------.______\|A_|____t
s______\__E__\______//_________(_(__C__\_C_|____s
u_______\__L.__C____)_________(_(___C___|O_/____u
c_______/\_|___C_____)/_MORE_\_(____C___|_/_____c
k______/_/\|___C_____)|_DUPES|__(___C___/__\____k
s_____|___(____C_____)\__!!__/__//__C_/_____\___s
*_____|____\__C_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__*
s____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__s
l____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_l
a___|______R_______/____|_____|__\____________|_a
s___|___F__E______|____/___/.__\__\____F__G___|_s
d___|___U__A___/_/____|__SERVER_|__\____U_R____|d
o___|__C___L__/_/______\__/\___/____|___C__A___|o
t__|___K__N__/_/________|____|_______|__k__M___|t
s__|______E___|_________|____|_______|_____M___|s
u__|______W__|__________|____|_______|_____A___|u
x__|______S__|__________|____|_______|_____R___|x
*_s_l_a_s_d_o_t_s_u_c_k_s_*_s_l_a_s_h_d_o_t_s_u_x

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ImportantStuff:Pleasetrytokeeppostsontopic. Trytoreplytootherpeople'scommentsinsteadofstarting newthreads.Readotherpeople'smessagesbeforeposting yourowntoavoidsimplyduplicatingwhathasalready beensaid.Useaclearsubjectthatdescribeswhatyour messageisabout.Offtopic,Inflammatory,Inappropriate , Illegal,orOffensivecommentsmightbemoderated.(You canreadeverything,evenmoderatedposts,byadjusting yourthresholdontheUserPreferencesPage)Ifyou wantrepliestoyourcommentssenttoyou,consider logginginorcreatinganaccount.

ImportantStuff:Pleasetrytokeeppostsontopic. Trytoreplytootherpeople'scommentsinste

Re:How RedHat's Linux Can Defeat Micr$oft's Windoz

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol! Is this is the best troll I've ever read. A+

Following the same logic,

[EvilStein]

you can also make a pretty cool go-kart out of an old lawnmower and an old washing machine. :)

Re:Following the same logic,

[Rick.C]

you can also make a pretty cool go-kart out of an old lawnmower and an old washing machine. :)

Tried that. Worked well at first, until it went into the "spin" cycle.

Re:Following the same logic,

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice joke, hehe.

Re:Following the same logic,

[SN74S181]

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. ;)

Re:Following the same logic,

[acyron]

I made a three wheeler out of a lawn mower rear end and a discarded front end of a moped, when I was a kid, it was top heavy but it sure was fun and it didn't go fast enough to get hurt on.

Re:Following the same logic,

[Anonymous Coward]

Following the same logic... .....fuck you.

Re:How RedHat's Linux Can Defeat Micr$oft's Windoz

[Anonymous Coward]

omg, that rules. i'm off finding some little linux board and post it there NOW!

Mmmm, memories...

[Uller-RM]

The credit for this one goes to USian Pie, posted on April 18th 2001. The damned thing still makes me laugh to this day. Alas, I've had to modify the punctuation and spacing a little because of the minimum-avg-characters-per-line rule. The stupid filters aren't stopping the trolls anyways, you know... they're just as clever as you.

A long, long time ago
I can still remember how
the trollers used to make me smile
And I knew that if I had to boast
that I could try to get first post
and maybe I'd be happy for a while
But moderators made me shiver, with every minus they'd deliver
DoS scripts couldn't stop it -- they scored them all "Offtopic."
I know that it's cheap crack they smoke, and meta-moderation's broke,
At first I thought it was a joke... The day that trolltalk died

Chorus: [2]
Bye, bye, MEEPTy, OOG, and Grits guy
Drove the Cruiser like some loser who starts posts with a *sigh*
Those Steve Woston posts that we all knew were a lie
Wonder what became of girls petrified?
What became of girls petrified?

Did you write a bunch of Perl, and did it make you want to hurl feces at the wall?
Can you believe these lame-ass polls? Do you post big stretched-out assholes?
Can you make the goatse.cx link not show?
Well I know you think that Siggy sucked -- Will the real Bruce Perens please stand up?
The bots don't have a clue. Man, I dig those trolls from Shoe!
I was a rabid Free Speech advocate, with a Red Hat T-shirt and a Free Beer gut
Bought my Sony laptop working Pizza Hut, the day that trolltalk died...

-- Repeat Chorus --

It's been two years since the IPO, and LNUX sinks to all-time lows, but that's not how it used to be
When Spiral showed how it was done, trolling as Jon Erikson, who worked for NPO Technologies
Oh, and while they tried to filter posts, somebody rooted Slashdot's host.
"Crack Slashdot? That's absurd!" Better go change your password...
While JonKatz wrote a Hellmouth book by using posts he simply took
And we flamed him till he was cooked, the day that trolltalk died

And we were singin...

-- Repeat Chorus --

10 grams. Inchfan. Didn't log out, goddamn -- the mods will find the sid real soon, man.
You can't hide if you aren't AC...
Your bud (George here) tried BSD, a dead streetlawyer's tips were free
And WIPO helped letsriot turn Nazi
70 made his percents up, while 80md warned "liberals suck"
The moon does not exist, it's just a liberal myth!
Oh, and as Taco tried to take a nap, we forced him to invoke bitchslaps
Do you recall the flood of crap the day that trolltalk died?

We started singin...

-- Repeat Chorus --

Oh and then we were wearing out "All your base"
and started posting monospace, the better for our penis birds
So come on, be a zealot, be a dick, you don't think Anne Marie's a chick?
Because lying's all we do about HURD
So go and push for BSD, and say GPL isn't free
Slow down, cowboy! The limit is one post every minute!
Now tell the right wing facist slime infringing on Your Rights Online that they can't censor all the time
The day that trolltalk died...

-- Repeat Chorus --

I met a troll they called The Rev and asked him if CD BREAK HEAD. He said, "That's old. Get over it."
And with all the courage I could muster, "Imagine what a Beowulf cluster ..." but it wasn't worth the trouble to submit
The karma caps are just plain jive, and everyone's moved to K5
The steelcage has grown rusted. and Geekizoid is busted
And the three sites I don't see for weeks: Segfault, kernel, and Comp-u-geek
Code is not art. This ain't Freshmeat. The day that trolltalk died

-- Repeat Chorus --

On that note, I wonder why there haven't been any stories about NVidia claiming that Futuremark is lying and trying to smear their name... funny how things have changed from the days where everyone cheating on benchmarks was just a given. But then, ATI seems to be cheating on 3DMark03 too -- they just didn't do nearly as thorough of a job as NVidia.

Re:Mmmm, memories...

[mobets]

What the heck is a troll doing with the highest score on the article.

Re:Mmmm, memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

anybody remember old hack replacing 14.3MHz clock with 16MHz clock?

That guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

...has an 1 Ghz scope. He must be god or something.

Re:That guy...

[foog]

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...

Re:That guy...

[choprboy]

Not really...

You can pick up a good Tektronix 7104 1GHz scope mainframe for a few hundred bucks.

Re:That guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. But he's an ass for mentioning that he watched a crappy 100-something Mhz square wave on his ONE GIGAHERTZ SCOPE. What a poser.

Re:That guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Working? Honestly, where then?

Re:That guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I admit, I was kind of proud writing that. But it is is important to document the make and model and setup of how a measurement was made. And I was wanting to play with analog sampling for a while, so I was happy. What can I say?

Re:That guy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I've thought it over. Next time, I'll look at my crappy 100MHz square waves on a 100MHz scope.
Happy?

your wife

[Anonymous Coward]

I just had sex with your wife, and I'm sorry to say this but her pussy isn't tight and she can't suck a dick to save her life. Her ass wasn't bad though, so I didn't have to beat her too hard.

Re:your wife

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry to say this but her pussy isn't tight

Ever stop to think that the guys who complain about "loose pussy" are really admitting that they have teeny-tiny dicks?

Sucks to be you, micropenis boi.

Re:your wife

[Anonymous Coward]

so, this guy doesn't have a loose asshole?

or mybe you just have a small dick?

Re:your wife

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah! Sorry for the earlier comment. It looks like your problem is of a different nature:

You simply don't understand the difference between a man's asshole and a woman's pussy.

Again, sucks to be you.

Hacksaws not Needed.

[Anonymous Coward]

Use an electric paint stripper gun - you can 'nude' a PC mobo real quick.
Use component tester to test bits/waveforms.

He's still not /.ed?

[Ambush]

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.

You're kidding, right? I'd say it's an amazing feat still being up an running about now, what with the usual slashdotting. ;-)

Re:He's still not /.ed?

[czion3]

just give us time.................

Re:He's still not /.ed?

[/dev/trash]

Web skills ( or lack of) are generally not the reason a site goes down after being listed on Slashdot.

Hosting the site on your 128k upstream DSL conenction is.

Re:This guy sounds so cool, he must get lots of gi

[Anonymous Coward]

There's nothing more pathetic than a heckler on a technology board. I hereby crown you king of geeks with self-esteem problems.

Keep hacking and keep building web pages

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Great stuff. I don't know whether you're a student or what, but you have a great future building embedded computer equipment if you choose that career path. You have curiosity, brains, and excellent prototyping and documentation skills.

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.

Re:Keep hacking and keep building web pages

[Soko]

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.

Thus spake McGyver.

Seriously, I consider myself a graduate of "The School of Match, Patch and Blend". If I don't have what I need, there's usually something around that I can make work until I can get the proper parts. I once actaully saved a project dealine by repairing a PC with paper-clips and elastic bands. No, I'm not kidding - there was no where I could get proper motherboard stand-offs at 10pm, so I made do.

Having an old, dead PC around at the time would have lead to a much more professional (and not nearly as scary) repair.

Soko

Re:Keep hacking and keep building web pages

[silentbozo]

It's amazing what people throw away. I regularly pick up perfectly good motherboards and power supplies that people throw away, because they're "outdated". I've also got a box of junk parts that I continually add to as I upgrade my own machines, or cart away salvage. A day or so of elbow grease on a spare weekend, and a couple of boxes of junk turn into a spare workstation (if it's a Pentium 200 or better) or a server (anything less than a Pentium 200.) Of course, the marginal HDs I can't use on a Linux box - I save those for when I get the components for a Windows PC.

My best finds were a totally complete PII 266 workstation with a bad power supply (swapped that out and it booted fine), and a mint-condition vintage Mac Plus (with 1 meg of ram, and original floppy-port hard drive.)

Even stripped machines are useful - you can always reuse the cases to upgrade mini-baby ATs into tower ATs, or further disassemble the case for the LEDs, standoffs, screws, rear plates, motherboard cover plates, etc. Trashed hard drives and non-functional CD-ROMs are a good source for motors, more screws, and raw scrap (I've been meaning to break out a pair of surplus fresnel lenses to use in a solar furnace - melt that metal into slag for other uses.) If you're good with a drill and tap, you can convert bad CD-ROM drives into pretty good 3.5 to 5.25 bay adapters by stripping off everything but the metal base plate and putting holes in the appropriate places.

Re:Keep hacking and keep building web pages

[Lumpy]

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.

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do these types of trolls never get old?

I guess

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

moderation is broke tonight.

Re:I guess

[aminorex]

broke tonight, and bankrupt for the last 5 years

Dear Trolls,

[Anonymous Coward]

I proudly proclaim a new era in trolling, when people throw ducks at balloons, and nothing is as it seems.

Lorem Ipsum Doler,
Jiminy KRiKKiT
h4x0r extraordinaire
member of the league

whatch your p's and q's

Re:This guy sounds so cool, he must get lots of gi

[Anonymous Coward]

hey fuck you mister

you're a pathetic loser

i'm in high school and i just talked to a girl for the first time tonight and now i'm cooler than EVERYONE at slashdot

ha ha bow before me

This is a DMCA violation.

[Anonymous Coward]

This man never got permission to use the motherboard in this unlicenced fashion.

Re:This is a DMCA violation.

[Your Anus]

I know you got modded as "Flamebait," but this is an excellent point. One wonders how long it will be before the ASIC manufacturer starts going after somebody because this hacker is using their protected "intellectual Property," contained in the design of the traces on the board.

Re:This is a DMCA violation.

[acyron]

Why does someone always try and burst anothers bubble? Many times new inventions are made by someone putting two or more parts together to make a home project work. My complements to the guy who built his project. Maybe if more people were willing to venture without the BIG BROTHER SYNDROME to worry them the world would be a better place. You would probably be the type who would want to put someone in prison for putting a Chevy tailpipe on a Ford.

Re:This is a DMCA violation.

[Anonymous Coward]

*sigh*

you're so cute.

Re:This is a DMCA violation.

[poppycat]

Does this mean I can no longer pass on old hardware to my mom for making bird scarers out of? Motherboards are nearly as good as AOL cds for keeping the birds out of the plum trees!

Is it really worth it?

[dbglt]

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.

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 :P

Just my cheapo Aussie $0.02

Re:Is it really worth it?

[rusty0101]

Just a couple of points.

By building his own high frequency oscilator, he has a better understanding of just what it is capable of. It's one thing to have a table of possible outputs for your high frequency oscilator. It's something different to know why those outputs are what they are.

Buying a 33.3, 100, 133 mhz oscilator should not be particularly difficult. I am reasonably sure that you could pick up some on e-bay and have them delivered next week. At the same time you will probably not get the experience you may some day need to replace the component should it fail on you. You will probably have to go out and pick up another one. By building your own, out of cast away parts, you will know what to look for to repair or upgrade the one you build. With 400mhz FSB systems out there today, (and higher) when one of these motherboards fails, you may find that it is exceedingly simple to determine what component failed, and possibly upgrade your variable frequency oscilator.

In a high proportion of the motherboards that I have seen fail, the primary culprit is the hig curremt transistors that support the CPU. When these go, it is very often visable as they leave a smoke patern on the heat sink they are mounted to. you may even see the resin housing for the transistor shattered or cracked.

If this is what has failed, then the CPU will not get power, and the board is functionally dead. It is very unusual for a failure of this type to have harmed the clock chip on the motherboard. I will grant that this is not always the case. It is possible to blow the clock chip, at which point the MB won't be able to start the CPU, or any of a dozen other chips and asics that will cause different failurs.

If you have a PCI modem, that takes a lightning strike, the most likely candidate for failure is the PCI bus controller. This does have a lead that goes to the clock chip, so you may loose the clock as well, but as he pointed out in the article, you can apply power to the clock chip and see if it generates a square wave on the outputs you are expecting, and if not, you haven't invested more than a little bit of time and thought to the project.

Then again, that's just my opinion. I don't claim to speak for the author of the article.

-Rusty

Re:Is it really worth it?

[Anonymous Coward]

If my motherboard dies for some reason, I know I can usually fix it. But I am not going to, because something else I didn't see might have also been fried or at least partially affected, making stability elusive with random crashes, and I don't have time to dick around with that.

Re:Is it really worth it?

[nebular]

Actually he's talking about the equipment you BUILD with old parts. you know exactly what's in there so you know what to do when something ain't working

Hey, I resemble this article!

[sec]

However, I find that it's easier to remove components from circuit boards by taking a heat gun (ie. the kind you use for removing paint) and using it to melt the solder. Yes, on high heat, most heat guns get hot enough to melt solder. Just direct the gun at the back of the circuit board while gently prying or tapping at the component you're trying to remove from the front.

Just be sure to do this in a _very_ well ventilated area (ie. outside) because if you leave the heat gun in one place too long, which you probably will sooner or later, you'll burn the board, which produces some of the most evil smelling smoke you've ever had the misfortune of smelling.

Also, I find that dead motherboards aren't particularly fertile grounds for component salvaging. Once, I got a whole skid full of old scientific instruments at a government surplus auction for $10. The load of components I salvaged from this was quite unreal!

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[rusty0101]

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

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[Anonymous Coward]

...remove components from circuit boards by taking a heat gun...

Nice tip, I'll keep that in mind. I've used a manual solder sucker w/ mixed results, baided copper is a pain. I keep a dremel in my arsenal as well; the abrasive cut-off disks works well with mixed media.

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[BobStikigreen]

The burners of a electric stove work too. I needed some RAM for a VESA EIDE caching HD controler (this was a while back). I found this dusty EGA card in my closet with the exact chips I needed. I turned on the stove, waited until it was red hot, and mashed the board solder side down on the burner. It smelled horrid. When the solder melted I scooped off the chips with a butter knife as fast as I could. My roomate walked in while I was doing this and asked "what are you doing?", I smiled and said "making chips" =P. I installed the card and ran the RAM checking ROM routines on it in a 666 cycle loop, checked out fine. Used that card for a couple years with no problems.

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[sec]

Of course. There's simply no right or wrong way to do these things. If you end up with a working project at the end, or even if you don't, if you've learned a thing or two, and had some fun doing it, that's what counts more than anything else.

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[b1t r0t]

But the brilliant innovation in this case was that by sawing out a piece of PCB, he not only got a surface mount chip mounted to a board without having to do SMT rework, but he also got the support circuitry for the chip!

I avoid SMT myself, since it's a pain in the butt if you don't have something to mount it to. But almost anything with DIP pins that isn't a One Time Programmable device (like PROMs, PALs, and windowless EPROMs) is potentially useful. And many of the programmable parts are socketed for easy removal. As for soldered chips, they're a pain to remove without proper tools (though the electric stove idea above sounds pretty cool), so I limit myself to just the most useful. Maybe I should seriously look into getting a proper soldering iron DIP head.

I started messing with TTL chips when I was a kid back in the late '70s, thanks to The TTL Cookbook. I even did mods to my TRS-80 (a Model I before they were called Model anything) back in the day, from which I learned the subtle art of piggybacking chips.

It is unfortunate that we've entered an era where almost everything is SMT and multi-layer boards, stuff that is too small and intricate to work with without lots of fiddling and expensive tools, and bus speeds so fast that you need SMT and multi-layer boards to make everything work. That's one reason classic video games are a hobby of mine. Because they date back to the era of DIP chips and double-sided PCBs, and are easy to hack.

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[Reziac]

Appropriately enough, my pre-morning-caffeine eyes read your subject line as "Hey, I reassemble this article!"

Close enough :)

BTW, watch out for vapourised lead and other not so nifty things to breathe (more reasons to do your cooking with a vent hood or outdoors).

Re:Hey, I resemble this article!

[oman_]

Anyone working with surface mount components needs to check out ChipQuick. It's a solder-like material that you melt into the solder on your components. It lowers the melting point of the solder enough that you can use a standard iron for most anything.

I've used it quite a bit to pull 160 pin qfp packaged chips off of boards.

Re:This guy sounds so cool, he must get lots of gi

[Anonymous Coward]

actually, that was hemos. Don't let the dress fool you. If there's a bulge in the crotch, it's not a girl.

Of course, hemos has a small cock, so it's hard to tell.

Or maybe...

[Anonymous Coward]

the moderators are high on that cheap crack again.

suck my nuts!

[Anonymous Coward]

h i ,

i ' V e a l w A Y S u s e d W i n d o W z A N D I c o N s I D E R m y S E L f a N E X C e p t I O N A l v I S u a l
b A S i C p r o g R A m M e r , s O i k n o W C O m P u T E r S P r E T t y g o O D . I n f a c t i G O T A N a -
I n M y p R O g R a m M I n g C l A s s L a S T t e r M . B u T I ' m A l i T T l e w a R Y O f h O w m u c h
P o w E r M i C R o S O f t h a s I N T h E c o M p U t e R f I E L D . M a n y O F m y f r i e N d S u S E
r e D H A T A N d I ' v e R e c E N t l Y I N s T A l L e D i t o n M Y M A C h i n e a t h O M e . a l T H O u g h
i h A V e n ' T H a D A S m u c h C H a N c e T O p l a y w i T h I t

Re:suck my nuts!

[Anonymous Coward]

combine the attributes at random for added confusion.

Re:suck my nuts!

[Anonymous Coward]

good idea!

Slashdot Problems

[Georules]

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.

Re:Slashdot Problems

[Pike65]

Oh the irony . . .

Re:Slashdot Problems

[stiller]

Which is why we have the moderation system...

Coo'

[Anonymous Coward]

That damn Ruby crap didn't work for me.
Perl all the way

La grande r�gion de Ste-Agathe

[Anonymous Coward]

La grande région de Ste-Agathe est composée de plusieurs municipalités: Ste-Agathe-des-Monts, Ste-Agathe-Nord, St-Adolphe d'Howard, Ivry-sur-le-Lac; on peut même considérer les municipalités de Lantier et de Ste-Lucie comme faisant partie de cette grande région.

Le coeur de cette région se compose de 2 municipalités bien imbriquées l'une dans l'autre: Ste-Agathe-des-Monts et Ste-Agathe-Sud. Si bien bien imbriquées ensemble qu'elles ont fusionnées. Mais pour les gens de l'extérieur, ces divisions administratives ont peu d'importance: on vient passer ses vacances à Ste-Agathe!

Cette région est bien garnie en infrastructures de tourisme et Ste-Agathe peut se vanter d'avoir accueilli des générations de villégiateurs et de touristes. Quels que soient vos besoins, Ste-Agathe peut se vanter de pouvoir les combler sur place. L'hôtellerie et la restauration y tiennent une place de choix.

Le train ne passe plus à Ste-Agathe? Qu'importe! On rénove la gare et on transforme le chemin de fer en piste cyclable, un concept unique en Amérique du Nord. Fruit d'une concertation de la région touristique des Laurentides le parc linéaire "Le p'tit Train du Nord" traverse des dizaines de villages tout au long de ses 200 kilomètres. Vous pouvez l'utiliser le plus facilement du monde à partir de Ste-Agathe, au site de l'ancienne gare, par les différents moyens adaptés aux saisons: motoneige, ski de randonnée, cyclisme et randonnée pédestre. Ce parc est probablement l'une des plus belles réalisations touristiques des Laurentides.

Dans cette grande région, les sports et les activités d'hiver n'ont rien à envier à celles de l'été. L'hiver en Nord, grande fête de l'hiver à Ste-Agathe, permet de bien apprécier les splendeurs de l'hiver. L'été apporte également son lot d'activités: plage, natation, motomarine, bateau, voile, cyclisme, randonnée pédestre, et encore plus...

Quel que soit votre séjour dans la grande région de Ste-Agathe, nous pouvons vous assurer que vous en partirez enchanté. Et que vous y reviendrez!

I'll tell you what is a waste of time...

[kinema]

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"

BWAHAHAHA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some goatse for your tea, govna'?

*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_
g_______________________________________________g_
o_/_____\_____________\____________/____\_______o_
a|_______|_____________\__________|______|______a_
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t_
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s_
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e_
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x_
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*_
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g_
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>__\___|____o_
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>__|__/____a_
t_______/\_|___C_____)/______\_(_____>__|_/_____t_
s______/_/\|___C_____)|Georules_(___>___/__\____s_
e_____|___(____C_____)\______/__//__/_/_____\___e_
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x_
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*_
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g_
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o_
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a_
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t_
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s_
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e_
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x_
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_e_x_*_


Goatse in your EYE!

Fuck Slashdot!

KILL WHITEY!


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Don't read this

[Anonymous Coward]

Recycling Parts From Dead Jews

Posted by timothy on Sunday May 25, @01:23AM
from the timothy-rides-with-hitler dept.

Re:La grande r�gion de Ste-Agathe

[heff]

now in babelvision
-------------------
Babel Fish Translation Help

In English:

The great area of Ste-Agathe is made up of several municipalities: Ste-Agathe-of-mounts, Ste-Agathe-North, St-Adolphe d' Howard, Ivry-on-the-Lake; one can even regard the municipalities of Lantier and Ste-Lucie as belonging to this great area. The heart of this area is composed of 2 quite overlapping municipalities one in the other: Ste-Agathe-of-mounts and Ste-Agathe-South. So well quite overlapping unit which they amalgamated. But for people of outside, these administrative divisions have little importance: one comes to spend his holidays to Ste-Agathe! This area is well furnished in infrastructures with tourism and Ste-Agathe can praise herself to have accomodated generations of holiday makers and tourists. Whatever your needs, Ste-Agathe can praise capacity to fill them on the spot. Hotel trade and the restoration hold a place of choice to with it. Doesn't the train pass to Ste-Agathe any more? What imports! One renovates the station and one transforms the railroad into cycle track, a single concept in North America. Fruit of a dialogue of the tourist area of Laurentides the linear park "the p' tit Train of North" crosses tens of villages throughout its 200 kilometers. You can most easily use it of the world starting from Ste-Agathe, with the site of the old station, by the various means adapted to the seasons: motoneige, ski touring, cycling and pedestrian excursion. This park is probably one of the most beautiful tourist achievements of Laurentides. In this great area, the sports and the activities of winter do not have anything to envy those of the summer. The winter in North, great festival of the winter with Ste-Agathe, makes it possible to appreciate splendours of the winter well. The summer also brings its batch of activities: beach, swimming, motomarine, boat, veil, cycling, pedestrian excursion, and even more... Whatever your stay in the great area of Ste-Agathe, we can ensure you that you will leave there magic. And to how will return you there!

don't ruin slashdot with offtopic replies?

[Anonymous Coward]

that's like asking someone not to ruin your festering pile of shit by spitting on it

Re:don't ruin slashdot with offtopic replies?

[Georules]

my question for you then is, why are you hanging around here if you think slashdot is such a peice of crap?

Re:don't ruin slashdot with offtopic replies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably in the same way nobody can look away from a car accident

Friggen krauts

[Anonymous Coward]

Take your laderhosen wearing ass back to Germany.

there's a better answer

[alizard]

I think the general solution for your problem and the problem of many people here who have an occasional need for test equipment like signal generators, frequency counters, etc. is to find a connection for used / surplus electronic test gear.

You generally don't need the latest / greatest / hottest for what you're doing, there's probably vacuum tube gear that is alive, well, and will probably solve some of your problems if you poke around a bit for a lot less money than you'd expect, especially if you value your time.

Most metropolitan areas have at least one or two places for this sort of thing.

Google is your friend. Try searching on:
used electronic test
or on the specific gear you want.

Not to say there's anything wrong with this project, it's a cool hack and anyone who gets into electronic hardware is going to have a growing pile of junk to recycle parts off.

A sign of things to come?

[PoisonousPhat]

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.

Re:A sign of things to come?

[Urkki]

Swap parts in and out of computer... I don't want to sound boring, but that's what the mobo/computer makers designed ISA, PCI etc for... And generic parts and cheap mass-production don't really go hand-in-hand. For cheap mass-manufacturing you want one ASIC, minimal amount of support components, and a production line in a cheap labor country. So this guy (the one who's article this is) is onto something we might see going away soon. For most "smart appliance" stuff, the parts won't be salvageable, 'cos there won't be any generic components. Sad.

Re:A sign of things to come?

[Anonymous Coward]

Study electronic engineering, even as a hobby, and all this will become much more clear. :-)

Re:A sign of things to come?

[Anonymous Coward]

You say, "Then again, maybe I'm full of it and don't know what the heck I'm talking about."
Gosh, man, no way. It's really important to understand what's happening, why, and how.
I'm a retired electronic tech. who started when the usual technology was octal-based tubes (6L6's in guitar amps. are octal-based). Fortunately, I've been able to keep up pretty well with what's going on, and the level of sophistication and complexity we consider routine is really awe-inspiring to this old fogy.

Enby in Waltham = nbodley [at} theworld [dot} com

mod this parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow - I think you really missed the point of his post.

The comment about ordering by the 1000's was about the fact that getting a replacement part would be next to impossible (from the supplier).

The comment about working with possibly broken parts is referring to the difficulty in debugging a system in which you aren't sure if the components work. (Think programming and using a half broken API - you won't know if the problem is in your code or the code you're calling).

Re:mod this parent down

[Tony-A]

The comment about working with possibly broken parts is referring to the difficulty in debugging a system in which you aren't sure if the components work. (Think programming and using a half broken API - you won't know if the problem is in your code or the code you're calling).

Kinda like the real world, isn't it?

Junkyard cost-benefit analysis...

[rMortyH]

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!

Re:Junkyard cost-benefit analysis...

[twiztidlojik]

covered in sockets full of 74xx logic chips

Sweet! Like the 7400 chip I have in my Powerbook?

Wait, no, I guess not. Drat. I was really hoping for some cheap G4's! ;)

So you must be the "head" moderator, right?

[Anonymous Coward]

nm

limited utility

[frovingslosh]

The clock chip in question (and others like it) produces some pretty specific clock frequencies, but overall the frequencies provided don't seem to have much use. On the other hand, he's added a pic to the process, and by itself the pic could output a wide range of frequencies under program control. True, it can't directly output as high of frequencies, but I don't know what big use he could have for that limited selection of high frequencies.

I do like the idea of a usb controled and powered frequency source, but I would settle for lower frequencies but greater tunability than just a dozen presets and use the PIC directly. Or better yet, use the PIC and a multiplier circuit if you want the high frequency values the PC clock circuit offers.

Since the clock chip in question uses a 14.318 mhz crystal and PLL frequency multiplication to get the higher frequencies, you might even be able to still use a hacked MB clock circuit, but feed it a clock generated by the PIC rather than from the clock crystal. The top end would still be lower with this approach (better to just use a stand alone PLL and a divider feedback circuit), but it would allow one to get reasonably high frequency by very tunable signals.

Re:limited utility

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just about certain that you can get chips to put out a closely-spaced, very-large number of frequencies (one at a time; if you want lots at once, look into ADSL DMT and Fourier synthesis, probably). Sorry not to have more info, but try frequency synthesis for a search term.

Enby in Waltham

ok

[Billly Gates]

Can someone explain to me what he building?

Re:ok

[Soko]

Basically, it's a frequency generator. Produces square-wave voltage signals at a frequency set by the buttons and shown on the display.

Good for prototyping logic circuits, etc.

Soko

Re:ok

[Billly Gates]

So basically its a striped down oscliscope?

Re:ok

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's precisely the opposite of a scope, dumbshit.

Re:ok

[ocelotbob]

No. A scope measures and displays a signal. This device generates a signal. Totally different tools here. One may use a frequency generator in conjunction with a scope, but the two tools are totally separate from each other.

Re:ok

[Paddyish]

also known as a 'function' generator. Though this one only generates a square waveform, and a dirty one at that. An expensive digital function generator makes nearly perfect square, sawtooth, sine, triangle and dc leveling waveforms.

To further the explanation - a function generator outputs a known waveform at a known frequency with known amplitude so that, like ocelotbob said, a given circuit can be tested. You can use it to simulate output of various single components, thereby testing only a little piece of a bigger circuit, or it can be used to simulate a standard (or nonstandard) input to a bigger circuit, and see how that circuit performs when connected 'scope.

It is an essential tool to have when working with complex electronics and digital logic.

Re:ok

[Anonymous Coward]

Dirty... Please get it cleaner then. Show it to me, in the real world. No simulations. A real piece of PCB with a coax and a connector. You can get much lower than 10nH and 5pF parasitics total?
Riiiiiiight.
I think you might need to check the output of a 100MHz function generator.
Don't forget that if your scope has a low bandwidth (not 1GHz like *mine* :) ), the scope acts as a filter, and you won't see the 'dirt' you see on mine. It's called 'inaccurate measurement'. Get your head out of the textbooks and look at some real waveforms.
I recommend you plug your generator to my scope, and then we'll see....
PS: I think you don't know the difference between a function generator and a synthesizer.
Compare output amplitudes, risetimes, stability and frequency range.

Re:ok

[Paddyish]

You're right, I don't know the difference :o) Though I'll soon remedy that.

What I do know:
All waveforms on said lab function generator are composed fundamentally of sinusoids, so there is no actual perfectly clean signal. I have indeed hooked a good scope up to it and (out of curiosity) examined the point at which the signal visibly breaks down.

I'm well aware that no measurement equipment can be hooked into a circuit without affecting the output to some degree. I generally assume that most people realize that fact.

I guess what this comes down to is that I'm guilty of not reading the article close enough. Oh well. 10nH, eh?

It is indeed an impressive piece of hacked hardware. Nice scope, btw.

Worthwhile ...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Shutup fuckdick

[Anonymous Coward]

eat a cock techno pussy

GRRRREEAAAT!

[Rxke]

So, if I understand this right, all i have to do is open the chassis (check,) get out me hacksaw (check,) and star Fè6('NO CARRIER

Re:GRRRREEAAAT!

[b1t r0t]

So, if I understand this right, all i have to do is open the chassis (check,) get out me hacksaw (check,) and star Fè6('NO CARRIER

I think you should probably go here for more helpful tips.

Old Dreamcast (slight OT)

[Renraku]

I had this Dreamcast that stopped working a long time ago. Part of me wanted to salvage, and part of me wanted to punish. This was after weeks of frustration trying to repair it myself. So I went to a friend's house, plugged it in, and popped a music CD into it. Rather than salvaging parts, I tortured it. I shorted out parts and capacitors directly to sensitive chips. I randomly ripped board components out. All the time it kept playing that CD until the motor itself burnt out from 120vAC directly to its windings. My point is, maybe its funner to destroy than it is to try to remove everything with such caution. Or maybe I'm just a sick and twisted man that enjoyed preforming fatal brain surgery upon a faulty Dreamcast

Re:Old Dreamcast (slight OT)

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's just easier to destroy.

Re:Old Dreamcast (slight OT)

[paradesign]

reading your post made me want to cry, you are a bastard! dont you know these things have feelings too?

umm

[222]

*lowers to one knee* and i thought *I* was a geek :)

Stating the Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else notice that his webpage has a very nice layout, regardless of how much of a hardware guy he is? I for one am impressed by it. It's not cluttered, it's easy to read, and best of all, it's not slashdotted.

Memorial Day

[Vollernurd]

I think we missed an option off the Slashdot poll for this holiday... ;)

Now where's my soldering iron...?

Halogen lamps work, too.

[XNormal]

Blacken the solder you want to remove with a candle. Wipe the soot from parts you don't want to heat too much. If necessary, cover them with aluminum foil. Place the circuit close to a high powered halogen lamp and - presto. Even PGA parts with high pin count can be pulled out with relative ease (try doing that with a soldering iron and wick!)

Buy it Now for $630.

[Anonymous Coward]

choprboy: Not really... You can pick up a good Tektronix 7104 1GHz scope mainframe for a few hundred bucks.

Anonymous Coward: Working? Honestly, where then?

Only listing at ebay is a used model for $530.00 (Buy it Now for $630).

At that point, I guess you're into a semantic argument over the nature of the phrase "a few."

Recycling Parts from dead motherboards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

By the way, with the advent of micro-atx, and this article, imagine a PDA [ not very small ] from off the shelf parts? .....but anyway
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?

Re:Recycling Parts from dead motherboards

[Reziac]

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. ;)

Speak-n-spell

[acordes]

Yeah, let me tell you about hacking the speak-n-spell. This one time, after I lured an alien into my house with Reeses Pieces, he showed me how to turn one of those things into an intergalactic communicator! But not until after we got drunk on a few beers and made out with a Baywatch star.

DFPresource guy here

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for all the input guys! I got some good laughs and some very nice compliments too! This is great, and the thing isn't even finished!
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!

Re:DFPresource guy here

[Reziac]

Wow, talk about making do with what you've got -- not only the recycling of odd parts to build stuff, but the improvised camera work. Good job!

Re:DFPresource guy here

[ecarlson]

> The color pictures were taken with a QX-3 USB microscope, much better.

Nice site, and cool project. I was going to say that the color macro shots looked quite good. The microscope explains that one. What type of lighting did you use?

Got a dead laptop laying around

[Anonymous Coward]

one day i got this 'crazy' idea, why not try to make a tv from the laptops display? The motherboard is damaged but the display should still be fine. Sure it's a tiny screen , but i would be ideal for my bedroom. Any ideas ? Links ?

Re:Got a dead laptop laying around

[Anonymous Coward]

Now you know why I called the site DFPresource. Digital Flat Panels were a hobby of mine, but it turns out you need some serious hardware hacking to get a laptop display to work as a generic DVI display. So I canned that idea, but I still had the domain name...

Re:Got a dead laptop laying around

[Brane2]

No, but you can make very effective dead portable TV from the dead laptop, providing you have PCI slot for TV-tuner card. Bonus is, that the card can be dead, too ;o)

Re:Got a dead laptop laying around

[phorm]

I think that a lot of the problem with this is that laptops tends to be quite different parts-wise, and what is true to one doesn't stay true to another. In particular, I remember reading that while some people had decoded the way to manipulate the screen for XX laptop, they could not do the same for the display on laptop YY.

As offtopic as it gets

[freeweed]

Microchip Samples Web Site Requirements

The Microchip SampleMe web site has been optimized for Microsoft Internet Explorer Version 4.0 or Netscape Version 4.0 or greater. Please upgrade your browser to the latest version for free by going to either the Microsoft or Netscape web sites. When your upgrade is complete, please come back to our web site again.

Using Opera 6, displaying MSIE 5 user-agent headers, so they're parsing way down to see the word "Opera" in there.

They'll be getting an email shortly stating "when your site is upgraded to actually allow use by people that aren't just follwing the herd, please come back and I might just be a customer".

Stupid fuckwits.

Re:As offtopic as it gets

[Anonymous Coward]

They'll be getting an email shortly stating "when your site is upgraded to actually allow use by people that aren't just follwing the herd, please come back and I might just be a customer".

If you whine this much even before you're a customer, would they really want you to talk about them or their product in any way? Would they want to give you tech support for a real product, as you've already knowingly complained about a non-defective product of theirs?

There are more valuable customers out there, who are worth their time to support.

Intriguing

[oaf357]

Very, very interesting work.

I'm sure the accuracy of the frequency at this point is hard to determine but if I were building something like this I'd want a highly accurate frequency generator. That might be a little much to ask but it would be great.

Re:Intriguing

[Anonymous Coward]

You want a frequency counter, too.

Maybe a fun hack but not all that useful

[dvd_tude]

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

In case anyone was wondering...

[Kjella]

...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

Rather use a Paint Stripper

[HermanAB]

to remove the IC from the mother board (takes about 30s - much less than cutting the board up), then make a new PCB. This guy is using a microcontroller anyway, so a proper PCb would be worth the effort.

Another OT comment...

[bhtooefr]

Yeah, right. I've tried IE6 (it worked), Opera 7 (as IE6 and Moz5), and Moz1.3.1. O7 (the BEST browser, by far) didn't work because these fsckers act like MS.

Note to Opera Software: Bork sample.microchip.com!

Frankenstein

[jr87]

IT'S ALIVE!!! IT's ALIVE

Discarding mobos with 99.9% good parts

[Anonymous Coward]

I dare say that nearly all bad mobos (except for lightning hits) have only *very* few bad components. I'm an old-timer, a Navy fire control tech (272-tube radar; impressive), and the economics of repair was *really* different. As well, technical progress was slower.

It hurts to see an otherwise-good mobo discarded because the Li clock cell is soldered in, no jumper scheme for a replacement, and the local small shop doesn't have the knowledge to consider replacing it; they probably don't even know how to solder.

Enby in Waltham

Sorry, dead link...

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/resource/feb0 3/ncap.html

Maybe you need to have permission...
Sorry.

Re:Sorry, dead link...

[mrmeval]

This is a bug in the way long URLs do in slashdot when using POT, the feb0 3 needs to be feb03.

Sorry for the inconvienience, till I find a simple slashdot-html editor I use "not so plain old text" and some URLs never come out right.

Some resources

[Anonymous Coward]

Hands-on experience is truly valuable. The kind of understanding you get, by feedback you see/hear, etc. from the thing you have made and done, simply just doesn't compare with only reading and writing. It's even more true of hardware. There's a really-unfortunate and silly anti-hardware prejudice around; please don't fall for it!

Some resources you might not know about:

Astonishingly-good book on electronics -- even has its own Web site! It's The Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. Not cheap, but more than worth its price to people who need it. Very practical, yet as deep as it needs to be. Teaches enough electronics for any intelligent person to design and build anything low-powered (including microprocessors) that doesn't involve much RF. For the latter, see radio amateur references.
Monthly magazine, which grew out of a great column in Byte: Circuit Cellar It's for engineers who design embedded micros, but more than that.
Hobbyist magazine -- they suffer from a lack of good material, sometimes: Nuts & Volts. Has lots of good ads!
Don Lancaster's site: <www.tinaja.com> He has written a lot of good stuff in his columns over the years. He's a PostScript language expert.
Tools and supplies for manufacturing -- nice company. fine product line: Contact East
USENET: sci.electronics.*
The Radio Amateur's Handbook, published by the ARRL; back issues are useful, but just be aware of what's no longer the best way/available/etc.

Here's a guy who designed his own instruction set, and built the hardware out of SSI chips to run it. No, it won't play Quake. Doesn't even have an OS. He's one of my very-few heroes!
http://www.vttoth.com/vicproc.htm

Enby in Waltham

Ouch! I just spent about a half hour keying in a nice article, using this forms window, Googled for another reference without opening a new window, closed the window, and all the text, URLs, etc. was gone. Might still have been in RAM, but no way I know of to search, if it hadn't been already reallocated. :( ARGH!
Sorry, I just don't have the patience/energy to do it all again. As well, Googling to find links might reduce the slashdotting of some of these sites. (No, I'm not really mean, but typing up a decent hyperlink by hand is a mess!)