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Making Stuff Out Of Broken Computer Equipment?
Class Act Dynamo writes "Recently, my keyboard stopped working, so I bought a new one (nice cordless number, really excellent). I was about to throw the old keyboard out when I thought it would be interesting to take all the keys out of it and turn them into refrigerator magnets in order to have a simple 'megnetic poetry' type of thing going. As the fumes from the industrial strength glue went to my head during this project, I began to wonder what other types of craft-type projects people had undertaken with their unusable old perpherals and such. Then I began to wonder why there was a purple octopus on my couch. I decided to ask slashdot readers the first of these questions."
Most computer have lots of useless parts inside...but hard drive magnets provide hours of entertainment!
Fun party game: Stick to magnets together with random body parts in-between. Not THOSE kind of body parts you sick perverts!
I've got an old pentium 2 or so that I use to hold papers and notes on my desk. Then there's always the fun RAM keychains and motherboard clipboards I've seen around.
I've discovered a remarkable proof, but this margin is too small to contain it...
out of old HDDs http://afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeaker s.htm
I made a night vision panel out of an old LCD panel from my old laptop and a old sony handicam with Night Vision mode westcoastphreakers.eclipse-business.com
Call me and my voicemail! 914-713-6795. (wow, I have the balls to post my voip number on
My cousin has made many, many things. She has turned old hard drives into clocks, PCB from old AT motherboards into a giant table, and AT motherboards (this time with all of the components left ON the board) into clocks as well. She has made various other things that I can't think of at the moment.
Her website, including links to some kickass PC mods that she had done, can be found here.
Listen to my experimental-industrial-techno!
CPU and RAM keychains are always classic. :-)
a classic use for old computer bits is making them into jewelry- things like capacitor earrings, pendants made out of those little copper-wrapped magnets, pins made from colorful heat sinks and interestingly-patterned chips.
They make good refirgerator magnets, as well. And if you're patient, you can make your own motherboard clipboard.
Uh, "if it looks roughly mouse-shaped according to my infra-red sensitive pit, eat it"? --Chris Burke 09-08-10
There's always the classic-Mac aquarium. See some at The Apple Collection
The original, classic broken computer mod is probably still the best place to keep your purple octopus. Various references are available.
Breakfast served all day!
I'd imagine it would be difficult to write anything with only one of each letter.
First of; I make my living buying discarded computer stuff and reselling it. A lot of this stuff is broken and gets trashed. When I do have time I tend to strip the stepper motors out of disk drives and printers as well as the printer guides for CNC / robotics stuff. UPS batteries are an excellent power supply.
However mostly I use discarded equipment to put a working system together again which can be used for all kinds of things: If you are handy with linux you can make excellent routers; web servers, media servers, a TIVO, CNC control equipment out of the oldest stuff.
Hajo Monogamy: Belief so strong that millions of people end perfectly good relationships in order to start a new one.
If you've still got the rest of the keyboard you can wire up the controller to some buttons and make yourself an arcade controller. If you're really ambitious you could even go the whole hog and build yourself one of these
On a project to turn some old scsi drives into a MIDI instrument, I *LOVE* the sounds really old scsi drives make (think 4GB micropolis drives). Plan to use it in a composition :)
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
http://www.nis.lanl.gov/projects/robot//
I've been working on a project for a few months now, utilizing parts from old drives. I'm time deficient of late, but I'm hoping when I finish a current work project, I'll have more time.
All you tinkerer nerds out there, if you haven't looked into BEAM robotics, look into it. You can utilize a good deal of junk electronics.
Think for yourself, destroy your television.
I once had similar ideas for reusing the bits out of all the old PC's that collect around me (mostly P233's and desktop cases, for some reason, but I've got a PS/2 hiding somewhere).
:-)
Was going to use the old fans to make sure airflow went through my PC and even throughout the wooden cabinet that my PC is in so that it wouldn't get too hot.
Or:
Actually once crafted a primitive noise baffle for the exhaust fan from a PC by using an empty 5.25" casing and some defunct floppies arranged so that the air would zig-zag through the 5.25 case (off of a CDROM if I remember rightly, with the bits taken out).
Or:
The metal casing of an old PC is good for keeping all those ADSL routers, printer server boxes, ethernet hubs etc. that are on 24/7 but just get in the way when you're rereouting cables.
Bung them inside an old desktop case (even mount them in the drivebays or whatnot), run all the cables through the PCI backplates and power them off the inside of the power socket (even room for a power strip with a few "brick" power adaptors in there). If your stuff needs 12 or 5v, you could even run it direct off of the old PSU, I suppose.
That way, one box and plug powers all the silly peripherals but you haven't got millions of wires tangling and twenty brick adaptors stuck to the wall.
You can move the bits inside around so that you can see the LED status of things from the drive bays etc., can power from the power supply, can even re-use the PSU or case fans to make sure they have adequate cooling etc.
Or:
Some people try to hide their computers in their furniture (e.g. wooden cabinets/cupboards/desks), why not go the other way... convert the front of a desktop case to become a fold-open drawer or storage area.
Or:
See how many LED's you can fit onto the outside of an old PC case so that you can have that authentic "Star Trek" feel. Bonus points for them actually working, extra for flashing effects etc.
Or:
Build a race track using old PCI cards as barriers, upside-down motherboards as the floor and the balls from mice as the "cars", like blow football, only more geeky.
I once read of someone using a 68040 on their keychain. It sounded like a good idea until the drilling came, and it took more than one rather tough jeweller's drill bit to make the hole in the corner.
:).
It turns out that those older chips (and some new ones I think) are made from an aluminum oxide (al2o3) ceramic. That's the second hardest substance, just after diamond. I'm guessing the only reason it didn't go through more drill bits is that it's not a single crystal of the stuff (if it were you'd have sapphire or ruby CPUs
A hot air paint stripper will surface mount components even more easily but it's hard to use surface mount components.
Since you're only using the keys from a single keyboard for your fridge magnets, a question arises: what's the longest english word that only uses each letter once? How about the longest sentence?
A local (for me, local = Des Moines) band (long disbanded, alas; they were quite good) used broken terminals as a backdrop for a performance. They weren't hooked up to anything (save the outlet, of course), but they were sufficiently fried that the CRT traced a pattern on the screen with no input at all.
a classic hack (i don't know who first thought of this) is to take a handful of 128k macs and line them up and run software to display the time of day, one digit per screen. you can get arbitratily complex, with or without seconds, with a screens for the colons (flashing or not), date, networked or not, dali morphing, etc.
Other then the tried and true practice of using toasted CDs as coasters, a friend of mine found old processors (of the socket 370 variety) made an excellent comb for his goatee.
At a computer place where I volunteer, they hand out old RAM chips cut in half as key chains. They slide the ring though the holes where the memory would click into place and slap a sticker with their name and phone number on the back. A big bowl of them sits on the front counter and the majority of people who come through take one.
telnet://zombiemud.org:3000
9 out of 10 English teachers agree that the English language is full of stupid hacks.
It would be one thing to make fun of somebody for screwing up a plural if English had an easy and intuitive system for pluralization. But it doesn't. Thus, you have anal hotshots who pride themselves on memorizing trivial and non-sensical pluralizations, and then you have everyone else who doesn't give a shit, and uses plural forms that make sense.
Not that the octopus example helps me... octopus / octopuses. But now consider:
Mouse / Mice? House / Houses?!? Hice!
Foot / feet? Tooth / Teeth? Boot / boots?!? beet!
Ridiculous. Any plural that isn't the singular form with -s or -es on the end is non-intuitive crap and should be stricken.
-ZOD-
I found out that printers, especially those made by Lexmark, make very functional doorstops.
I purchased a lexmark printer last year and it turned out that they didn't make win XP drivers for it. I called tech support and they told me that I could use my printer if I reverted back to win ME or earlier.
Having no use for the printer, I affixed an appropriate sign to it expressing my discontent with lexmark and used it as a doorstop. It worked well for propping the door open a few inches, the flex of the plastic helped to bounce the door back so it wouldn't hit so forcefully, and best of all, whenever I was pissed off, I could just kick the printer against the wall.
Break the mindless monotony!
Harddrive magnets are great. In fact, they are rather expensive, and quite strong!
Even better, if you have a broken CD/DVD-player, you can extract the electric motor. It's a high-quality product. A lot of people convert them into small, high-performing engines on R/C aircraft. This is one example
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Making stuff out of broken computer equipment in nothing. Back in my day, we were making computer equipment out of broken stuff. And we were grateful! Seriously. Have you ever made hundreds of NAND gates out of broken TVs and radios from the junk yard and used them to build a huge binary calculator? With multiplication? You might laugh, but in my opinion that was something to be proud of.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
I built a 4 color marble sorter out of two stepper motors from 5-1/4 inch drives, a photo-sensitive cell and some PC software driving parallel port inputs and outputs. It won $150 in a engineering contest at Auburn University.
I once used the lens of an old CD-ROM drive as a keychain. I used the holes where the slide goes through to slide in the chain.
10 Bits= $.25
100 Bits= $.50
110 Bits= $.75
1000 Bits= 1 byte
Recently I took apart several old 2.4 gig full height hard drives and recovered the magnets. These guys are extremely powerful and will cause injury to fingers if careless handling two of them at the same time.
Anyways I found them to be very good stud finders as they will quickly locate the screws or nails hidden in drywall and are powerful enough to hold themselves in place.
I have taken two of them and fashioned a small clip on top and pulled a chalk line between them. This arrangment is great for creating a nail line.
Also a placed one in a small pocket in my electrical tool holster. Then fasteners and small parts stay attached to the outside making them very accessible. In fact, when working on something I just throw the small parts in the general direction of the pocket with the magnet and they stick.
I used Linux, TerminatorX a broken optical mouse and a $10 used turntable I bought from a grandmotherly looking ladies garage sale.
Picture here
Out of curiousity, what nation's currency do you use, such that this would work? I believe the Dutch and Canadians use at least some magnetic coins. The coins that currently clank in my pocket are American, however, and are all non-magnetic.
To make a sentence using the 26 letters only once, you need acronyms, initials and such.
Here ya go:
Glum Schwartzkopf vex'd by NJIQ.
I don't use that particular sentence as much as this one though:
Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q.
I keep old, broken processors/motherboards on my wall for decoration. I know, I'm a freak.
Jay | http://oldos.org
I've had ideas for things to do with dead hardware, but I dont have enough of it layin around. Where do you guys go to find good stuff when you have a project in mind? Right now I'm think I need some dead hard drives, which I could probably find if I jumped into a computer shop's dumpster. But it'd be nice to get my hands on something larger than a 3.5".
Install pegboard to entirely cover one wall of your computer room or office.
Mount the boards via standoffs to the pegboard.
Bonus points:
In Latin you would say 'octopedae' -- 'pus,'foot' and 'pedae', 'feet'.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
Platters from dead hard drives make really cool sounding wind chimes. They also develop an interesting patina after a little bit of outdoor weathering.
Oh man, this is slashdot.
First off, women just won't use any old thing that vibrates. The dildo market is pretty innovative and many women prefer certain types over others. Go to your local adult "bookstore" and take a look, you'll see all sorts of designs, but the phallus with the clit stimulator is pretty popular. There are all sorts of plastics/latex/whatever that aim for either realism or just pleasure. Lets not assume that we can't out-do mother nature, but a vibrating computer mouse is a pretty crappy idea.
If anything, you could hide a little pipe in there and smoke pot out of it. Mom and Dad will probably never guess that that old Logitech mouse hides your stash and is really a pipe. A nice hack off the top of my head is to use an optical mouse, stuff a pipe in there, and let the powerful red LED bounce off the smoke revealing particulate patterns. A wireless mouse would just work off the battery, a normal one would work off the ps2/usb port.
I got a Pentium II from Intel for my keychain. It was put in metal, with a hars like substance, so you could actually see the design of the CPU (the caches are, for instance, quite easy to identify).
It might be difficult to get that same effect with an old CPU though, since that would mean that you can open the box and get to the actual CPU, without damaging it too much. I could get it right with calculator IC's though, so maybe it is possible.
With the new CPU's from Intel, ther ere no pins to remove at least.
I have a friend who used some hard drive magnets in the gas tank of his '65 Mini so it would collect all the bits of rust and metal to it instead of feed them through the pump and clog up his fuel filter. Mind, it would have been better to replace the tank...but hey, it's cool.
Oh they are. They deffinately are. I sat on one and have the scars to prove it. Ouch, ouch, ouch. (It was a 486, for the record.)
I work on different art projects, and one of my current projects involves using parts savaged from chucked out PC's, printers, montiors, and the like.
My carrying structural element is a plastic milk bottle, common down under.
Out of all this and with the help of a black marker, I create little Milkbottle People (old CD's are great for ears).
I wanted to make people smile, when they see them. Thinking especially of kids. Then at night I go around, and hang them up in different places. Trying to integrate the Milkbottle Person, with its environment (e.g. make them look at something specific).
In another project, I use broken bits of circuit board to draw portraits. This is more difficult, and to be honest, I haven't managed to create a satisfying object yet.
I have also used the discs of hard drives, to create a mirror for a geeky friend of mine, who needed a little mirror for shaving.
Last but not least, I use the empty cases to build my shelves, desks, and other non-secific-use objects (coffee table, morph, laptop table, morph, lamp stand,...). Besides the fact that I don't have much money to my disposal, I can't be bothered with worrying about my furniture every time I move. Which I seem to be doing a fair bit.
ive just glued toghether aol disks and made lamps or paperweights
My wife makes and sells custom collages out of old parts... typically framed 3' x 4' works of three-dimensional art.
Kewl in hi-tech lobbies, conference rooms, offices etc. Much better than sending the stuff to a landfill.
See example.
Actually, the English system for pluralization is quite simple compared to many languages. We do in fact have a fairly regular pluralization scheme. There are several exceptions to the simple -s/-es pluralization, but take a look at some other languages. Latin has 5 different declensions, each with their own pluralization. Even with this many classes, there are still exceptions. German pluralization is very complex. Nouns may pluralize with -n, -en, -e, -er, or by remaining the same (there may be even more, my German is a bit rusty) based on the ending, and sometimes involves a vowel shift somewhere else in the word. Old English, like these other languages, had several noun classes with several pluralization schemata. It is only due to the Normal conquest in the 11th century that Middle English and Modern English are as simple as they are in this regard. English during the Norman occupation was a language of the common people, with Norman French being the language of court. This led to a lot of simplification in the language. The words that have irregular pluralization are generally the result of one of two scenarios. If the word is Germanic in origin (as are all of the examples you gave, as well as many more: child, sheep, deer, fish, ox, etc.) then generally is has kept a version of it original plural because it was so frequently used. Each successive generation could hear the "proper" plural frequently and emulate it, while being corrected by their parents if they improperly pluralized it. This would not happen as frequently if a word was not used as often. We can see this even now. We are much more likely to know that the proper plural of child is children than we are to know that the proper plural of matrix is matrices. The other branch of irregulars are words that were imported from another language, such as octopus (Greek in this case). I don't think that the person (or persons) who corrected the pluralization of octopus were doing so to make fun of the individual who pluralized it as octopi. I know when I found out that the plural was octopodes, I was highly entertained, and told lots of people about it, because it is one of those instances where many of us (myself included, in this case) try to sound educated by using the "proper" plural instead of saying octopuses (which is a totally acceptable plural, by the way), and it turns out that octopuses would have been closer to correct. We just overgeneralized a rule that applied to Latin loan words and used it with something that is not from Latin. Also, I disagree with your suggestion to strike all irregular plurals from the English language. Language is a free-flowing thing. For years, countless people have tried to change language to suit them and what they see as logical, it just doesn't work. If you were to succeed in your vision there, we would not really be speaking English, but rather a created language based on it. But don't worry, we seem to be moving closer to regular pluralization. A lot of the acedemic imports from Greek and Latin are at least beginning to get -s and -es endings. Children and feet are probably going to be around for quite a while, but time will probably regularize many of the less-frequently-used irregulars. OK, now that I am done with that frightfully long and very off-topic soliloquy, let's get back to using computer parts in innovative ways.
I used to have a 80386 and a 80286 on mine about ten years ago. I drilled the 286 with a regular high speed steel bit. I didn't drill the 386, I just used a bit of hobby grade CA (super glue) glue to hold a bit of insulated copper wire to it.
I also had a "bug" that someone (I think my brother) bought for me. It was made from an IC. It had two eyes and two "antennae."
"Sometimes a man's gotta do what a woman wouldn't consider." - Red Green
Personally, I've made an aquarium from an old monitor, and countless clocks from 3" and 5" HDD's. I've also made a few photo frames from old laptops. Usually I end up giving them to friends and family since they're sort of first to request. I've also made the (already mentioned) keychains from ram chips, but I can't think of what to use all the HDD magnets for. I also have a ton of HDD, misc PCI, and MB PCB's that I can't decide what to do with. I've seen cufflinks on Thinkgeek, and clipboards a few years back, but I hate ripping off all the components from the boards...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
I made this a few years ago: http://www.particlesphere.com/gallery/animeart/Lai n_Assemblage_1
particlesphere.com - quantum
From about 1995 - 2000 my keychain consisted of an 8mb sim (dual sided) from our old ibm RT 1200.... It was cool because the actual memory chips were on both sides of the pcb for the sim... over the course of that 5 years all but 3 of the ram modules popped off.
I actually still have a pile of them stashed away somehere... I had even bought the key ring things from the craft store and thought of making them and selling them at lan parties and such... Eventually I realized they didn't look as cool as I once thought they did... (Old Age?) bleh...
--- Relax, that mass muderer is just trying to reduce our carbon footprint, one fetus at a time...
I support a lot of public schools, and I have a master building key for most, which are kept IN the school. I use 72pinn dimm's as keychains (use the existing hole), so when I loose it (not good to do with a master key), everyone knows who's it is.
My gf likes to pull apart old computers. She wears ram in her hair (on a head band), and has installed a cpu fan in a pair of pants (rigged up to work with a battery). Those pants also have a number of resistors stitched down the seam as a binary representation of the asci characters: 'V', '=', 'I', and 'R'. She is currently working on using old motherboards (and other components) to create body armour.
I did something like that, but for a zipper pull on my winter coat - got tired of fumbling for the little string with my heavy gloves on. I cut out the chip from a dead NIC (hacksaws work great on circuit boards) soldered a piece of straigtened out paper clip (a big one) in under the legs on one side, looped it through the zipper, and then soldered the other side in. Kind of a pain, but it hasn't come out yet, and I've been yanking on it a couple years at least.
On a similar note, I also make keychain tags out of ciruit boards from dead hard drives and stuff. I pick a chip, usually, cut around it leaving enough space to drill a hole in one corner, and hang it from my keyring with a 2-2.5" piece of pull-chain. Whatever you call it. The stuff one sees on lamps with a pull switch. Looks like small metal beads.
"Ad infinitem et ultra!" - Buzz Lightyear
You can make quite interesting ancient-Egyptian-looking (sort of) necklaces out of various resistors. Packages of new ones, to be had cheaply at the Shack, are better for this purpose than recycled ones.
We have a Mac-Quarium here in the house, created by my son. All I can say is that it's a mixed blessing. If you decide to build one, cultivate the friendship of the person who cuts your glass for you--you'll be seeing a lot of him. It has leaks despite the best prescribed adhesives. It also won't accommodate the heater, filter, and aerator needed for any sort of interesting tropical fish, so you're pretty much limited to a goldfish or two.
I believe ours has become a Mac-Terrarium for that reason.
Anne
DUCT TAPE: The Election Supervisors' Secret Weapon
me and this other tech at a mac repair shop were taking apart a dead Umax scanner one day, and had a handful of parts- a motor, a couple of switches, a power supply, a flourescent lamp, and a big metal bar.
The motor was dead, or at least we couldn't get it to work, but it seemed the power supply was still putting out voltage, so when we hooked it up to the flourescent lamp it turned on! The possibilities...
Being a repair shop, we often had to dim the lights to do monitor adjustments. The other techs (not having night vision goggles) would have to stop their work and wait through this.
So, connect the dots- We got some drywall screws, attached the flourescent bulb in it's housing to the bottom of a shelf over the bench, hooked up the control panel from the front of the scanner to the power supply so when you held down 'SCAN' the light would come on. The best part was that the buttons were some kind of varistor, so the power to the bulb was variable, a pressure-sensitive dimmer switch! Of couse we also made a real flip-switch so you could turn on the light without having to hold the button down constantly.
We kept the metal bar around beat the sales guys away when they came back to try and sell our tools to the customers...
-mike
Try french? You should ask Mark Twain about german!
In Soviet Russia the insensitive clod is YOU!
Ferrous metals aren't neccessary to the demonstration of inductive braking. The relative motion of the coin to the magnets induces eddy currents in accordance with Lenz's Law. The eddy currents generate their own magnetic field opposed to that from the magnets, causing the inductive braking effect.
With strong magnets like those found in harddrives, the effect is quite pronounced with a simple coin.
Please refer to this article for more information and links.
Doesn't matter. Magnetic braking is caused when conductive material is moved through a magnetic field. The induced current causes a resistive force in the moving metal, slowing it down. This works very well even in completely nonferromagnetic material such as aluminum.
Magnetic braking is in fact used in vending machines to slow coins by just a certain amount, to test against slugs. Wrong alloys will be slowed too much or not enough; either way, they can be rejected.
See question and answer #14 here for more details.
--
I don't want to rule the world... I just want to be in charge of mayonnaise.
Handicam's in the US use NTSC. Most laptops use a propritory digital parallel interface. Most are VGA and above. They DON'T use the slow television sweep speeds. Unless they used a scan converter, broke out RGB analog and converted it to RGB digital, I doubt anything as simple as connecting the output of a camera to the input of the LCD display happened. Using a portable DVD player with a video input would be more believable. Getting consumer NTSC video into a laptop display has never been an easy patch.
Better night vision can be had with an IR sensitive monochrome security camera and IR LED floodlight. Find a camera with a removable IR filter or one without one made for IR use.
The truth shall set you free!
Actually English is the most difficult major language for a non-native to learn on the planet.
Utter and total crap. English is a very easy english to learn, because your english doesn't need to be perfect for you to be considered proficient. For normal, day-to-day communication you need something like 1000 words. One thousand words, and you can get by in any place in America.
On the other hand, take Polish. In English you conjugate verbs, in Polish you conjugate verbs, nouns, adjectives, proper nouns, etc. You need to have a much larger vocabulary - adjectives aren't as descriptive (eg. blue is niebieski, light blue is blekit, dark blue is granat). You have similar spelling problems as with English, words written in different ways are pronounced exactly the same. Hell, you even have a often used construction, in which the pronoun is implied, based on the conjugation of the verbs or pronouns.
After living in the states for 2-3 years most of my Polish friends spoke passable English, but I know Americans who have lived in Poland for 6+ years and barely speak the native tounge.
Larger boards look really nice on the wall.
:)
No, I'm serious! Put some up on your wall of the room where you have your computer at 45 degree angles in a loose arrangement. It looks surprisingly nice - almost like modern art.
I just invaded Grammar Czechoslovakia and duped Grammar Neville Chamberlain; now it's on to Grammar Poland.
No one over the age of 12 has become fluent in Navajo. I believe there been attempts to document it since the 50's, but I'm not sure how successful that's been.
Is it a rule, that there's an exception to every rule?
They do look really nice. Especially if you get the older server boards that are extraordinarily large. Piece of advice: clean them up first. Dust boards don't look as nice hung on the wall. Also, for ATA cards or what-not, leave the ribbon cables attached, just arrange them nicely. That looks really cool.
You turn it into a VAX BAR!
You can see it here. I've really not heard of anything that can top that, in terms of the size and quality of the conversion...