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."

Comments

Your can make speakers...

[Anonymous Coward]

out of old HDDs http://afrotechmods.com/cheap/hdspeakers/hdspeaker s.htm

My cousin

[Egekrusher2K]

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.

Re:My cousin

[Suidae]

I turned an old harddrive into a binary clock.

I just stripped out all the parts, built the circuit on perf board, milled some holes into the back of bottom of the case behind the platter and mounted blue LEDs in the holes. I drilled holes in the platter (very carefully so I could keep the very flat mirror surface that makes the platters look so neat in the first place) and mounted some little plastic rods with frosted ends in the holes to diffuse the light from the leds.

In an improvement over the Think Geek clock, I have the LEDs set up to fade on and off over a quarter second, instead of the abrupt blink on and off in the TG clocks.

The bottom register is seconds, right is minutes, and top is hours. Its easier to read than the TG clocks, but doesn't generate the cool patterns.

I cut down one of those clear CD blanks that you find on top of a spindal of CDR's so that it fit neatly over the electronics, then frosted it with some sandpaper so it has a nice diagonal grain. This fits over electronics so they are less obvious, but can still be seen if you care to look.

Heres a picture of the clock. The lighting isn't great, so its hard to see how clearly the bits of each register light up. The frosted end of each rod lights up brightly, while the sides are water-clear, so it ends up looking like a bright blue disk 'floating' above the mirrored surface. Really looks pretty good.

Here is a photo of the clock

Re:My cousin

[Suidae]

Thanks. Yup, its really mine. :)

Here are some more supplies for clocks, and the back of this one (forgive the libral use of hot glue, its just a prototype :)).

I thought about selling the design, but the idea is really almost trivial, the software design (done in AVRGCC, maybe 200 LOC at most) took an evening and only that long because I'm pretty clueless when it comes to C coding. I kept K&R's _The C Programming Language_ handy and spent quite a bit of time screwing up the switch statement.

The hardware was time consuming because I was using perfboard and wiring up all those damned headers. I won't make that mistake again. Next time I'll just have the PCB made professionally and save myself hours of frustration soldering hookup wire.

You are right though, it would be nice to be able to refrence it in a resume. Perhaps I'll reduce it to a single board design (one PCB behind the platter with SMT LEDs) and have a few boards made. Would be fun anyway.

Re:My cousin

[adrn01]

Old 5.25 inch floppy drives are worth taking apart for the cool looking drive motor windings. Basically, a radial arangement of coils,
\|/
-0-
/|\
above which the spinning hub is mounted. It looks a lot like a WWI era radial engine. The hub has a toroidal magnet mounted to the edge -- not very strong, but enough to hold a few papers to a fridge. The same drives -- possibly 3.5 in drives as well, have head positioning stepper motors with a fairly strong magnet shaped like two stacked gears. ( --||-- ) Just perfect for holding dentist picks, jeweler screwdrivers, and jeweler files. Hard drives have small radial coils glued to the frame underneath the disk hub. Removed, they would make cool ( although a bit heavy ) earrings. The hubs have corresponding toroidal magnets, also good for fridges if the bottom of the hub ends flush with the magnets. A robot using hard drive head positioning arms for legs would be cool.

Jewelry

[turtledawn]

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.

Tried but true

[thejoelpatrol]

There's always the classic-Mac aquarium. See some at The Apple Collection

Mac fish tank

[PCM2]

The original, classic broken computer mod is probably still the best place to keep your purple octopus. Various references are available.

Re:Mac fish tank

[mikael]

The original, classic broken computer mod is probably still the best place to keep your purple octopus.

Unfortunately not. As the octopus is a very intelligent and curious creature, when placed in a small confined space, it will always try to find a way out. If placed in a fish tank, it will try and find a way out. It will climb over the edges of an open tank. Even when there is a lid on the fish tank, it will attempt to squeeze through the gaps of the lid. Failing that it will try and prise the lid open by attaching its arm suckers to the lid and walls, then contracting its muscles. And if that doesn't work, it will attempt to prise open the walls of the fish tank.
Even a a 1lb octopus can lift a 40lb aquarium lid.
As an example of the flexibility of an octopus, Discovery Channel Canada have a cool video of an octopus squeezing into a beer bottle.

Stepper motors for CNC, UPS batteries for RC boat

[hajo]

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.

Daft idea

[ledow]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[danamania]

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 :).

Re-use electronic components!

[enosys]

If I have a useless board with at least some components that aren't surface mount I use a hot air paint stripper to remove the components. Then I reuse them in various projects. I have a well over 90% success rate with ICs.

A hot air paint stripper will surface mount components even more easily but it's hard to use surface mount components.

classic mac clock

[trb]

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.

Re:Why is there a purple octopus on your couch?

[zod1025]

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.

Re:Rip apart the hard drives and take out the magn

[boaworm]

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

Stepper Motors = Marble Sorter

[auburnate]

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.

Stud finders

[Camel Pilot]

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 made the first optical turntable

[t0qer]

I used Linux, TerminatorX a broken optical mouse and a $10 used turntable I bought from a grandmotherly looking ladies garage sale.

Picture here

Wind Chimes

[Rex Code]

Platters from dead hard drives make really cool sounding wind chimes. They also develop an interesting patina after a little bit of outdoor weathering.

HD Magnets

[big_groo]

I use an old HD magnet as a coin catcher. Just keep it away from your credit cards ;) ...

Re:Hmmm

[garignak]

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."

Re:Hmmm

[sjs132]

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...

Re:Hmmm

[JasontheMason]

You unseat the chip, weave a bent paperclip around the pins, and reseat the chip. providing a loop for a key ring without excessive damage or hassle.

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.

Re:Rip apart the hard drives and take out the magn

[polymath69]

U.S. currency contains no ferrous metals...

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.

Re:"...Possible tall tale alert.

[Technician]

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.

Re:Hmmm

[Rei]

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. :)

Re:Hmmm

[jadenyk]

I actually worked at a company that did this for art on their walls, but they framed them in nice black boxes with glass fronts that were hand made by the owner of the company. Funny thing was, he wasn't into computers at all, nor was he all that into art. He thought it was a cheap way to make the place look "new age" and get rid of old hardware at the same time.

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.