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Recycling Parts From Dead Motherboards
An anonymous reader writes "I had this dead motherboard on my hands and I wanted to see what would happen if I cut out the clock generator and used it stand-alone. So I removed the Winbond chip from the motherboard (I cut out the section of PCB with a hacksaw), powered it up and it was still working. Add a display, a microcontroller and two switches, and I got a cheap frequency generator. Here's my progress so far. Be kind to my Web skills, I'm really just a hardware monkey.
It's not completed yet, but I just wanted to get the idea out there."
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.
Having a brief glance at the site, this looks pretty cool/useful. Being a physics student and having to work with signal generators and oscilloscopes is fine, but when we get kicked out of the lab at the end of the day with half a project left to finish, then one of these things would start looking pretty good.
Anybody have any idea what kind of price for the additional parts would be? Couldn't find any reference on their site. Also, being able to hook the output (from the display/oscilloscope or whatever) to a computer for recording would be a very good thing too.
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
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".
you can also make a pretty cool go-kart out of an old lawnmower and an old washing machine. :)
well, not really. How do you plan to have a variable square wave output just by using flip-flops? You'd need a high speed master clock (TTL can style), flipflops, a divide-by-n chip, etc. You'd end up with a huge chip count. Using an SX style microcontrollers would be much easier.
Making a varible frew sine wave generator, now there's a worthy hack.
I'm not Seth.
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.
c - a blessed +5 grain of salt
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).
I'm not Seth.
elsewhere on his site he talks about the 1s1 sampling plug-in for the Tek 547, a 50 Mhz vacuum tube scope from the fifties (this is one of the Great Scopes of History)... that's how you measured VHF and UHF signals back in the bad old days...
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.
"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.
There are 10 kinds of people; those who know ternary, those who don't, and those now hunting for a dictionary.
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.
I'm not Seth.
There's nothing more pathetic than a heckler on a technology board. I hereby crown you king of geeks with self-esteem problems.
"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.
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.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
OK, I give up! You win!
I'm not Seth.
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.
:P
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
Just my cheapo Aussie $0.02
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!
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"
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.
Tech Public Policy stuff
Maybe this guy is on to something. This could be the new modders' realm, the Motherboard Mod. With the current batch of uber-gearheads out there that not only understand WHAT computer parts do but HOW they do it, this could be a new horizon in interoperability. Creative people could not only swap in and out parts from computer to computer, but also between anything that employs some sort of internal computer--which, nowadays, is almost everything electronic.
Oh my, does that mean that companies like Intel could rearrange chip architecture to a generic format to work in many different appliances? Could they gain a strangle hold on world electronic device manufacturing?!? The future is uncertain; however, I would point out that the idea of 'smart appliances' has been tossed around for many years; this guy is a prime example of the next step in electronics evolution.
Then again, maybe I'm full of it and don't know what the heck I'm talking about.
Losers choose to abuse the use of "loose".
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!
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.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
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.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
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.
-----im billy troll----- im better than you at everything you do.
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
*lowers to one knee* and i thought *I* was a geek :)
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!)
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
It wasn't a waste of time. My motherboards usually end up in friends computers but I have a few with those damned capacitors that had the defective electrolyte and have pulled numerous parts from them, mostly regulators and smaller surface mounts.
s ource/feb0 3/ncap.html
Here's why those caps are bulging and spewing.
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/WEBONLY/re
It wasn't worth the time to replace the capacitors and on some the leakage damaged part of the board.
If the part was damaged, so what, the author really is a hardware hacker and it's destruction would not have meant anything other than more trash to pitch. Wiring up to a board to use a single part is a part of hardware hacking, that's been done, usually by cutting traces, cutting out the whole section is a very good idea, especially on something the size of a motherboard.
This technique increases the usefulness of old, destined for the trash, motherboards as designing and etching a PCB for surface mounted devices is a bit of an investment in time. It also saves the landfill from getting as much toxic waste and garners the salvager a useful return on investment.
I have made custom PCBs or purchased 'generic' ones to mount SMD chips and such. It's slow, any relief is welcome and I do welcome this idea.
I'd go on a Vegan diet but the delivery time from Vega is too long. --brownkitty
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.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
reading your post made me want to cry, you are a bastard! dont you know these things have feelings too?
I want 2D games back.
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.
.....but anyway
By the way, with the advent of micro-atx, and this article, imagine a PDA [ not very small ] from off the shelf parts?
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?
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.
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!
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.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
The Winbond chip is pretty specific to its application, that is, making motherboard clocks. There are much better serial programmable devices that can provide a wider range of frequencies. You can get Cypress ones at Digi-Key)
Also for more accuracy, you can stack them and refactor P and Q over multiple dividers. On one project (an MPEG encoder) I did just that to make a low-jitter fully-locked 16.9344 / 12.288 / 18.432 audio reference from 27 MHz video. Each PLL was less than $2, and I used an 8051 to control it.
There are also specialty PLL chips used for cellphones that provide good accuracy using some voodoo in their dividers.
- dvd_tude
...this is not a new idea, in fact it is a very old idea. My old man used to work at IBM and back in the days they used to ship broken equipment like motherboards back to be fixed. Replace a chip here, a capacitator there, a resistor there and good as new. Of course, as things got smaller and cheaper it wasn't cost-efficient anymore.
Sure for a hobby it'll work, if you were going to fumble around with similar parts anyway. I'm sure glad noone tries to figure out the total cost of going out with the boat and throw out a line to catch fish at our vacation resort either. But you think there's a "business model" or anything here, no it isn't. There used to be, though.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings