Slashdot Mirror
Last Year's Gadgets Get New Life As... Jewelry
Will Sherman writes "Liz McLean Knight, a Chicago native, has applied her interest in electronics, computers, and music to a line of jewelry created under the name, Zelle. The catch? She almost exclusively uses spare computer and electronics parts in her work. Many of her pieces would be a perfect gift for your LAN admin, that cute girl in the IT department, or your favorite DJ. Among other things, she sells a belt made from IDE cable, necklaces made from capacitors, and a cuff bracelet made of midi cables. But can she turn my broken iPod into something wearable?"
I ran across a link involving the same jewelry not long ago. In case (read: when) the main site gets slashdotted, or if one just wants to see all products without pagination, you can view them all here:
http://www.zellestyle.com/catalog/index.htm
It is slashdotted, but I think we can assume the caps are in series or not connected to eachother. A large series of caps isn't going to be dangerous. Neither are individual ones.
A large number of caps in parallel might be bad if someone intentionally charged them, but I can't see how that could happen accidentally.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Keychain made out of old RAM - easy to do, just get a key ring and any old SIMM, DIMM, or SODIMM (I advise against a SODIMM, though. The EDO SODIMMs are worth their weight in gold due to inflation, the SDR SODIMMs are still kinda useful, and the DDR SODIMMs are really useful. If it's dead, OTOH...)
;-)
Keychain made out of an old/dead CPU - if it's ceramic, don't bother. If it's organic (like a P3, some socketed K7s, P4, P-M, or K8) or plastic (like some Pentiums (Classic and MMX), socketed Mendocino Celerons), it's fairly easy.
Now, I just want to meet the girl that would wear the capacitor necklace... I've got dibs on her
Actually, the capacitor necklace is like one of those costume jewelry necklaces with a black (plastic?) hoop to go around your neck, and semicircular rings hanging from the front with other semicircular rings hanging from them. This is sort of like a short netting with the capacitors hanging down. So it appears that some of the capacitors would be in parallel, but I don't think they are actually attached electrically. Also there are only six of them, and they are probably in the 50-100uF range, so they wouldn't pack much of a punch.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Yep, when she gets sick from the heavy metals in capacitors.
Seriously- someone needs to tell this woman that a fair bit of the stuff in electronic components is TOXIC, and very much so.
Please help metamoderate.