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Ask Slashdot: Projects For a Heap of Tech Junk?
yenrabbit writes "A friend has just told me he has 80 CRT TVs, a stack of DVD players and hundreds of VCR machines, all broken and all mine free of charge. I can already think of a few awesome components I can extract (flyback transformers for high voltage contraptions and so on) and have a few ideas, such as DVD lasers, that I can build. But what else can be made from such a treasure-trove of components, and how would one go about processing such a large volume of stuff with the least amount of effort? Also, I don't have access to online shopping so I'd also like a pain free way of salvaging many simpler parts such as resistors as well."
Another reader sent in a similar question: "The other day I went down to my University's property disposition center for the first time. In addition to mundane things like chairs and desks, it also had a wealth of technological devices, from old PCs and monitors to obscure medical and chemistry equipment. Honestly, I was a bit overwhelmed. I just don't know what I'd do with a old gene sequencing machine or a broken oscilloscope. Any ideas for fun projects? Or better yet, suggestions on how I can figure out which machines (or their components) are worth playing with?"
Recycle it
Are you sure it isn't going to cost you a fortune later to get rid of the stuff you don't salvage?
... they are not nearly as straightforward to use as you might have imagined, even if you thought it would be difficult to use. If you don't have access to a way to purify your DNA for it, forget about it. Even if you could purify your DNA well, you would still need the supplies (primers, buffers, molecular-grade H2O, etc) to run the reactions and then the software to analyze the results. And then once you get one reaction to work you have to set up and run many many more to sequence even one important gene to a meaningful extent. That said, don't even dream of sequencing your entire genome at home with an older sequencer (or any other that you could afford on the kind of salary that a slashdot reader is paid).
If you want some of your own DNA sequenced, send it off and then throw a big crazy party with the time, money, and space you saved by not attempting to do it yourself.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
You quite rightly said that it'll be full of:
Coils, ferrite magnets, capacitors, resistors, various discrete transistors and IC's, wires, motors, transducers (build a whacky digital backup medium using VHS tapes!), chassis pieces to build new projects on, raw materials (steel, plastic).
If you can't think of anything, don't take it on. Recycling at the component level is VERY labour-intensive - one idea (and I don't want to give too many for free because this is my business) is to train volunteers for accredited qualifications in electronic repair and servicing (City and Guilds do a good course at different levels with almost that exact name). While they're learning, they can be labouring :-)
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And call yourself a Ham.
;o)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
EGA monitors are pretty rare these days. If you find some, offer them to the folks at the Vintage Computer Forums, they'll be appreciated.
VCF would be a great place to find good homes for a lot of these items actually. Things like EMS cards for XT machines, or anything EISA.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I can think of a use for all the crt's. Here in RI we're still waging the marriage equality battle and the bigots like to bus them in. So I thought to be funny - I could get there ahead of time and setup a bunch of monitors around the room and just have it cycle through the faces of the supporters. Talk about an art installation.
At worst...maybe make one and only one pass through to see if anything is genuinely useful. But one thing I've found is...quit just gathering stuff that *might* be useful some day for *some* project.
That type of thinking lands you where I once was, and to where a number of my friends are, namely they have workshops, garages and even spreading into their very HOUSES just heaps of junk. Stuff piling up everywhere.
I've basically given myself a new mode of action. I have about 2-3 projects, things I can and will realistically get to in the next few months. I will collect things for those, buy them, or otherwise attain them.
Anything else, I pass on.
I've made up my mind, that I will not move a ton of useless, outdated shit around any more.
I'm still going through my stuff after the last one.
I found books, tons of stuff, tech stuff that was outdated. Into the trash.
I had a number of CRT monitors, I kept only the ones I needed for computers I have that do not yet have flat screens. The rest of them...in the trash.
Old SGI workstations? In the trash.
Old network cards, old ram, keyboards I didn't need, etc....in the trash.
I'm actually once again starting to have a home office where I can find stuff I actually need to do the things I'm actually working on.
I still have a ways to go, but I'm unloading. I make enough money these days to where I can buy new or used stuff WHEN I NEED it for something I'm currently working on.
This also keeps me from getting into too many projects at once....and never having time to finish one. I have one friend, that bless his heart, he is like a cat and a laser pointer, always seeing something 'new' to start on, yet rarely finishing the last interesting project last month and way beyond, and yet, still accumulating stuff for all of them.
I know people like this...they have rooms that look like an audition for the tv show "Hoarders", and while I don't think it is so much a mental problem for them, it is the MO of always seeing possible treasure in a pile of shit, harvesting it, but never getting to it.
I figured out, the garbageman is my friend. I find something I've not used in awhile, it simply goes into the trash can, and they haul it away for me.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
19" CRTs with 100-degree tubes are highly prized by collectors/restorers of arcade equipment. (The 19VLUP22 used in Tempest used a 100-degree angle of deflection, rather than the more common 90-degree deflection. The game was prone to burning holes in the phosphor under certain hardware failure conditions, and a collection of 80 or so CRT TVs may have something useful in them. Black-and-white 15" and 19" tubes are also useful to restorers of vintage gaming hardware.)
If you go to Weird Stuff Warehouse in Silicon Valley, you can get enough cheap previous-generation stuff to build a data center.
That's all working stuff, not junk. It's kind of depressing. Most of the gear there was valuable only a few years ago.
There's a service in Oakland CA which takes discarded desktop systems. They check them out, try some board swaps to get them to work, clean them up, build them up to a minimally usable standard, wipe the hard drives, install Ubuntu Linux, and send them out to schools that need computers. That's about as good as recycling seems to get.
Laser CNC should be plausible with a lot of the parts from the VCRs / DVDs, assuming you can get or already have the controller boards (or are "electronic" enough to build them from reclaimed bits).
He said DVD *players*, not DVD burners, I don't think he can even melt wax with a 5mw DVD player laser.
A 150mw laser diode from a DVD burner laser might be able to melt plastic, but it sounds like a lot of work for little gain. Blu-ray burners are said to be closer to 1W.
But if you value your eyes, where appropriate laser goggles since an errant reflection from a powerful laser can quickly cause eye damage.
Before throwing electronics away make sure to check the appropriate regulations in your area. Many of these things are actually classified as hazardous waste under various jurisdictions and must be handled differently than normal trash.
Why don't you put things up on freecycle instead, maybe someone can find a use for them rather than making more e-waste.
and a lawsuit for all the toxins which will get spewed into the air:
- leaded glass in the CRTs (not to mention the voltage danger)
- lead in the solder
- cadmium in the PCBs
&c.
Please recycle it responsibly.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I'm not sure what anyone would do with a Beowulf cluster of VCRs, but I think it would be awesome!
Redundancy is good And also good.
Couldn't have said it better.. the only thing I would add is find your local recycling center (most county/city gov offices have them in some capacity) and drop it off there, rather than directly to the trash.
Some things you can't do with LCDs; tinker with the electronics until you have an unscanned beam of electrons from the back of the monitor tube making a bright spot on the screen and use a magnet to move it around. Make it safe for kids to touch the display and work the magnet. Set up an after-school event to talk to them about relativity, charge, atomic structure, bremsstrahlung, X-rays, the LHC etc.
I used to mess up TV pictures with a magnet when I was a kid, it was fun to distort the actors on screen, but a lot of kids today may not get that experience. It's not a big thing, but I believe the experiences all add up.
Nullius in verba
Gold is at 1,573.00 an ounce today.
Here's a link to check out cpu prices based on gold content:
http://www.ozcopper.com/computer-cpu-gold-yields/
Scanners and printers are a good source of hard polished rods and bushings, belts and stepper motors with pulleys. You can build 3D printers and small desktop CNC mills with these parts. Old business-grade hardware usually has better parts too such as thicker rods and stronger motors.
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Agreed completely.
But everywhere you used the word "trash", the reader should infer the word "recycle". Many communities have recycling centers that will accept electronics for free.
For the adventurous among you, you might consider attempting to recover the precious metals yourself. I have a friend who recovers the gold from plated card-edge fingers. His last run of perhaps 14 old ISA bus cards yielded about 20 grams of gold. The drawback, of course, is that it uses corrosive chemicals, including nitric and hydrochloric acids, which have to be safely disposed of.
John
Hmm...I'd almost agree, though IMO one should never give up the opportunity to throw a perfectly good CRT off of the side of a building. They make awesome noises when they hit the ground.
Haven't you ever had to throw a big piece of glass away, and you ask yourself: Why am I just going to "throw" this away without breaking it first? Honestly I rarely if ever throw away big pieces of glass without breaking it first, and I think everybody here agrees. CRT's are equally fun to destroy.
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Windows 3 on a 486? You're being generous.
I'd go with Windows 3.11 on a 286 with a Hercules graphic card.
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Although psychically provocative, blowing up CRTs spews lead around. Those things should be disposed of properly.
Go shoot watermelons with a .222 - about the same level of visceral satisfaction.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That's a shame, because CRT monitors are still superior to LCD monitors. CRT monitors can handle various resolutions without having to scale, and the more expensive ones offer resolutions higher than HD. In several ways, LCD was a step back.
Please turn in your geek card. CRTs still make fine monitors for computers and video game systems.
Whatever you do, don't throw it in your ordinary trash. The only thing worse than paying $1000/month rent for a house full of junk is ruining our environment with something that does have value. Check your local area, electronics recycling is a value proposition for some metals (e.g. gold) but also for the rare earth elements in capacitors and hard drive magnets.
If you have to ask on /., you really shouldn't be here in the first place.
Never put a "free" sign on anything if you want said items to go away. Put a sign on it with a viable price, and it will probably disappear (read: "be stolen by local tweekers") within a week.
If you don't mind some light, but hard work, bordering on drudgery:
an old CRT has over a pound of copper in it. Older ones have quite a bit more.
When you get down to old processors and other circuitry there are some people who are able to salvage the gold out of them, but the parts need separated first. When I was in high school I helped sort and strip and salvage a couple hundred 286, 386 and 486 computers that were being disposed of by some large local businesses as a "donation" to the school my mom worked for. There was a jeweler who took the processors and gold plated connectors for cash. I know a large coffee can of parts was worth over $100, and we generated quite a few can fulls.
Circuit boards can be recycled and have value once separated and in the pounds of materials.
Parted out there is a good possibility of a few hundred dollars worth of salvage in that pile. Even sheet steel has significant salvage value once you get to 100 pounds of material.
There is a reason junk collectors, people who take all the salvageable trash off the curb on trash day, can do this instead of having a "real" job.
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Every time I see a post like this, I'm reminded that I have been down this road myself, and seen my family members suffer for it.
If this is tempting, be honest with yourself, and look at your track record. I'll bet that you have alot of parts lying around for projects that are still "in progress". You have a reason that they are still "in progress", but realistically, you are never going to complete it. They are all waiting on something, and that thing they are waiting on is not actually in progress.
Now you want to take in enough derelict electronics to fill a shipping container, because having 53, low power, invisible, assorted brands and designs of IR lasers, still buried inside their cases, is somehow better than not having them.
Do yourself a favor and tell your "friend" to hire an electronics disposal company. He should be paying you to take all that crap off his hands.
When the day comes that a flyback transformer or DVD laser is the last part needed to complete your Tesla coil or whatever, $5 in gas money and Craigslist will get you your part.
Windows 3.11 on a 286 with a Hercules graphic card.
And a 2400 bps modem. Hopefully you can still find a copy of Trumpet Winsock around somewhere!
Before throwing electronics away make sure to check the appropriate regulations in your area. Many of these things are actually classified as hazardous waste under various jurisdictions and must be handled differently than normal trash.
Here's how they're handled differently: Non-hazardous waste it placed in a nearby, sealed, sanitary landfill. The hazardous e-waste is piled out in the open in undeveloped countries where it freely contaminates their local water supplies.
Thank you, Edward Snowden.
"Arguments from authority are worthless." —Carl Sagan
Wait, Why was this modded down?
This is the crux of the problem. Not putting things in the recycle chain because you believe there is still a useful life for that 386 is exactly the problem. You save it, you pawn it off on some kid or some church and they leave it in a garage or something. Just take it to recycle. Maybe they do the right thing, but its almost certain that pawning it off on someone else does nothing good for anybody.
Get it in the recycle chain even if you have to take it apart and recycle the plastic, the chassis, the transformers etc separately. Your time is free to you, but if a recycler has to pay someone to sort ewaste, chances are they will just shred the whole mess and bury it somewhere.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Agreed completely.
But everywhere you used the word "trash", the reader should infer the word "recycle". Many communities have recycling centers that will accept electronics for free.
And there lies the problem. They "take" the stuff to "recycle" and cash in on it themselves. What would I get if I were the one who did the favor to send it to recycling? Not a fucking thing. So, aside from aluminum and other metals, which the local recycling center actually pays for, everything goes to the curb in bags. Straight to the dump. As soon as they give me incentive to recycle glass beer bottles, I will. As soon as they give something in return for the profit they will undoubtedly make off computer hardware, I'll think about it. As soon as they give me a reason to recycle stupid plastic bottles... well, nothing will change, because plastic will never be worth shit. As for paper... well it'll continue going in the garbage; they easily have enough tree farms out there to keep paper products in supply. And if they run out... well maybe they'll legalize hemp and stop relying on such slow-growing plants.