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Hardware

Recycling Parts From Dead Motherboards 198

Posted by timothy from the creative-semi-destruction dept.
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."
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Recycling Parts From Dead Motherboards More

Recycling Parts From Dead Motherboards

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  • can you imagine setting up a cluster of these in a ripple design for an undergrad CS class?

    • This is a DMCA violation. (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This man never got permission to use the motherboard in this unlicenced fashion.
      • I know you got modded as "Flamebait," but this is an excellent point. One wonders how long it will be before the ASIC manufacturer starts going after somebody because this hacker is using their protected "intellectual Property," contained in the design of the traces on the board.

  • be kind? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, 2003 @01:31AM (#6033907)
    Be kind to my Web skills

    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.

    • Re:be kind? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Epistax ( 544591 )
      Be kind to my Web skills, I'm really just a hardware monkey.
      I wanted to reply to this as well.
      His page is perfectly readable, and isn't bogged down by anything. It's pure content and better than most websites out there. The flow of the page is obvious, and I'm not forced to read mulitiple pages for the same article. The only downfall I can possibly see is the page being too much for an old modem to read quickly.

  • I could use one of these (Score:5, Interesting)

    by colonelteddy ( 556564 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @01:38AM (#6033919) Journal
    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.

    • Re:I could use one of these (Score:5, Informative)

      by Michael's a Jerk! ( 668185 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @01:43AM (#6033933) Homepage Journal
      What frequency range?

      The price is something like $20, including transformer, PIC16F628 Microcontroller, FTDI serial to USB chip, etc. The problem is the clock chip. Places like radio shack etc aren't likely to have them.

      The hardest part is learning PIC assembly. PIC's are weird devices, having an accumalator style, havard archecture. Take a look here [btinternet.co.uk] for a good tutorial on PICs.

    • there's a better answer (Score:5, Informative)

      by alizard ( 107678 ) <alizard&ecis,com> on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:03AM (#6034096) Homepage
      I think the general solution for your problem and the problem of many people here who have an occasional need for test equipment like signal generators, frequency counters, etc. is to find a connection for used / surplus electronic test gear.

      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.

    • 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.

      I believe there is at least one software-based oscilliscope around, using the PC's soundcard inputs. I would guess these would allow you to record the output

  • Following the same logic, (Score:3, Funny)

    by EvilStein ( 414640 ) <.ten.pbp. .ta. .maps.> on Sunday May 25, 2003 @01:46AM (#6033942)
    you can also make a pretty cool go-kart out of an old lawnmower and an old washing machine. :)

  • That guy... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...has an 1 Ghz scope. He must be god or something.

  • He's still not /.ed? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ambush ( 120586 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:05AM (#6033990)
    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.
    You're kidding, right? I'd say it's an amazing feat still being up an running about now, what with the usual slashdotting. ;-)

  • Keep hacking and keep building web pages (Score:5, Insightful)

    by HotNeedleOfInquiry ( 598897 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:15AM (#6034006)
    Great stuff. I don't know whether you're a student or what, but you have a great future building embedded computer equipment if you choose that career path. You have curiosity, brains, and excellent prototyping and documentation skills.

    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.

    • 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.

      Thus spake McGyver.

      Seriously, I consider myself a graduate of "The School of Match, Patch and Blend". If I don't have what I need, there's usually something around that I can make work until I can get the proper parts. I once actaully saved a project dealine by repairing a PC with paper-clips and elastic bands. No, I'm not kidding - there was no where I could g
      • It's amazing what people throw away. I regularly pick up perfectly good motherboards and power supplies that people throw away, because they're "outdated". I've also got a box of junk parts that I continually add to as I upgrade my own machines, or cart away salvage. A day or so of elbow grease on a spare weekend, and a couple of boxes of junk turn into a spare workstation (if it's a Pentium 200 or better) or a server (anything less than a Pentium 200.) Of course, the marginal HDs I can't use on a Linux

    • Re:Keep hacking and keep building web pages (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Lumpy ( 12016 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @09:58AM (#6034710) Homepage
      many here have balked at using parts off of dead motherboards. I personally get my hands on every dead motherboard and every dead sattelite reciever I can get.

      Why?

      my hobby's costs have went from $30.00 a month for buying surface mount discreet components to ZERO because of this. I have more resistors capicators, inductors, and basic logic chips that I will ever need. (Yes 74lsXX series are still used today! as well as 40XX series)

      as soon as you get past the "OH MY GOD!" stage of working with surface mount it 's easier than through the hole. I can etch a board and use it instead of wasting another 10 minutes and probably 3 bits drilling the holes.

  • Is it really worth it? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by dbglt ( 668805 )
    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.

    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 us

    • Re:Is it really worth it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:28AM (#6034153) Homepage Journal
      Just a couple of points.

      By building his own high frequency oscilator, he has a better understanding of just what it is capable of. It's one thing to have a table of possible outputs for your high frequency oscilator. It's something different to know why those outputs are what they are.

      Buying a 33.3, 100, 133 mhz oscilator should not be particularly difficult. I am reasonably sure that you could pick up some on e-bay and have them delivered next week. At the same time you will probably not get the experience you may some day need to replace the component should it fail on you. You will probably have to go out and pick up another one. By building your own, out of cast away parts, you will know what to look for to repair or upgrade the one you build. With 400mhz FSB systems out there today, (and higher) when one of these motherboards fails, you may find that it is exceedingly simple to determine what component failed, and possibly upgrade your variable frequency oscilator.

      In a high proportion of the motherboards that I have seen fail, the primary culprit is the hig curremt transistors that support the CPU. When these go, it is very often visable as they leave a smoke patern on the heat sink they are mounted to. you may even see the resin housing for the transistor shattered or cracked.

      If this is what has failed, then the CPU will not get power, and the board is functionally dead. It is very unusual for a failure of this type to have harmed the clock chip on the motherboard. I will grant that this is not always the case. It is possible to blow the clock chip, at which point the MB won't be able to start the CPU, or any of a dozen other chips and asics that will cause different failurs.

      If you have a PCI modem, that takes a lightning strike, the most likely candidate for failure is the PCI bus controller. This does have a lead that goes to the clock chip, so you may loose the clock as well, but as he pointed out in the article, you can apply power to the clock chip and see if it generates a square wave on the outputs you are expecting, and if not, you haven't invested more than a little bit of time and thought to the project.

      Then again, that's just my opinion. I don't claim to speak for the author of the article.

      -Rusty

  • Hey, I resemble this article! (Score:5, Informative)

    by sec ( 20916 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:25AM (#6034027)
    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!

    • Re:Hey, I resemble this article! (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rusty0101 ( 565565 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:10AM (#6034110) Homepage Journal
      If all you want is the clock chip itself, then yes, using a heat gun to remove it would work.

      From reading the article, it appears that he wanted to use the clock chip while doing a minimum of circuit design to support the chip itself. To do this, it helps to have the terminating resistors remain attached so you do not have to try to match them back up manually.

      From looking at the pictures in the article, it also appeared that the chip was a surface mount package, meaning that he would have had to either come up with a generic surface mount breadboard with the correct pad layout, and solder it down (carefully so he didn't cross any traces), or etch his own breadboard for the project. From what I could read he was probably capable of either, however he (correctly in my opinion, perhaps not yours) chose to make use of the components that were already around the chip he wanted to use.

      I find no fault in what he did, or potentially in your case if you just want to harvest the parts, in what you do.

      -Rusty
      • Of course. There's simply no right or wrong way to do these things. If you end up with a working project at the end, or even if you don't, if you've learned a thing or two, and had some fun doing it, that's what counts more than anything else.

    • Re:Hey, I resemble this article! (Score:4, Funny)

      by BobStikigreen ( 621661 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:23AM (#6034137) Homepage
      The burners of a electric stove work too. I needed some RAM for a VESA EIDE caching HD controler (this was a while back). I found this dusty EGA card in my closet with the exact chips I needed. I turned on the stove, waited until it was red hot, and mashed the board solder side down on the burner. It smelled horrid. When the solder melted I scooped off the chips with a butter knife as fast as I could. My roomate walked in while I was doing this and asked "what are you doing?", I smiled and said "making chips" =P. I installed the card and ran the RAM checking ROM routines on it in a 666 cycle loop, checked out fine. Used that card for a couple years with no problems.

    • Halogen lamps work, too. (Score:5, Informative)

      by XNormal ( 8617 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @07:40AM (#6034483) Homepage
      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!)
    • But the brilliant innovation in this case was that by sawing out a piece of PCB, he not only got a surface mount chip mounted to a board without having to do SMT rework, but he also got the support circuitry for the chip!

      I avoid SMT myself, since it's a pain in the butt if you don't have something to mount it to. But almost anything with DIP pins that isn't a One Time Programmable device (like PROMs, PALs, and windowless EPROMs) is potentially useful. And many of the programmable parts are socketed for e

    • Appropriately enough, my pre-morning-caffeine eyes read your subject line as "Hey, I reassemble this article!"

      Close enough :)

      BTW, watch out for vapourised lead and other not so nifty things to breathe (more reasons to do your cooking with a vent hood or outdoors).


    • Anyone working with surface mount components needs to check out ChipQuick. It's a solder-like material that you melt into the solder on your components. It lowers the melting point of the solder enough that you can use a standard iron for most anything.

      I've used it quite a bit to pull 160 pin qfp packaged chips off of boards.

  • Slashdot Problems (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Georules ( 655379 )
    This is my first post even though I have read slashdot for a very long time now. These posts I have been reading in reply are rather disturbing, while I have fun and laugh at many trolls and such around, the excessive offtopic posting is just lame. Please stop, don't ruin slashdot by making every reply offtopic. To the actual issue here, while this news isn't much, I am impressed by the technical ability of this guy. I am trying to learn about some of that stuff myself.

  • 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 c

    • Swap parts in and out of computer... I don't want to sound boring, but that's what the mobo/computer makers designed ISA, PCI etc for... And generic parts and cheap mass-production don't really go hand-in-hand. For cheap mass-manufacturing you want one ASIC, minimal amount of support components, and a production line in a cheap labor country. So this guy (the one who's article this is) is onto something we might see going away soon. For most "smart appliance" stuff, the parts won't be salvageable, 'cos

  • Junkyard cost-benefit analysis... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rMortyH ( 40227 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:07AM (#6034105)
    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!

  • limited utility (Score:5, Informative)

    by frovingslosh ( 582462 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @03:12AM (#6034113)
    The clock chip in question (and others like it) produces some pretty specific clock frequencies, but overall the frequencies provided don't seem to have much use. On the other hand, he's added a pic to the process, and by itself the pic could output a wide range of frequencies under program control. True, it can't directly output as high of frequencies, but I don't know what big use he could have for that limited selection of high frequencies.

    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.

  • Can someone explain to me what he building?

    • Re:ok (Score:2)

      by Soko ( 17987 )
      Basically, it's a frequency generator. Produces square-wave voltage signals at a frequency set by the buttons and shown on the display.

      Good for prototyping logic circuits, etc.

      Soko
      • So basically its a striped down oscliscope?

        • No. A scope measures and displays a signal. This device generates a signal. Totally different tools here. One may use a frequency generator in conjunction with a scope, but the two tools are totally separate from each other.
          • also known as a 'function' generator. Though this one only generates a square waveform, and a dirty one at that. An expensive digital function generator makes nearly perfect square, sawtooth, sine, triangle and dc leveling waveforms.

            To further the explanation - a function generator outputs a known waveform at a known frequency with known amplitude so that, like ocelotbob said, a given circuit can be tested. You can use it to simulate output of various single components, thereby testing only a little pie

  • Worthwhile ... (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

  • GRRRREEAAAT! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rxke ( 644923 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @04:56AM (#6034275) Homepage
    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
    • 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

      I think you should probably go here [datadocktorn.nu] for more helpful tips.

  • I had this Dreamcast that stopped working a long time ago. Part of me wanted to salvage, and part of me wanted to punish. This was after weeks of frustration trying to repair it myself. So I went to a friend's house, plugged it in, and popped a music CD into it. Rather than salvaging parts, I tortured it. I shorted out parts and capacitors directly to sensitive chips. I randomly ripped board components out. All the time it kept playing that CD until the motor itself burnt out from 120vAC directly to

  • umm (Score:4, Funny)

    by 222 ( 551054 ) <stormseeker@nOsPAm.gmail.com> on Sunday May 25, 2003 @06:22AM (#6034380) Homepage
    *lowers to one knee* and i thought *I* was a geek :)

  • Stating the Obvious (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Did anyone else notice that his webpage has a very nice layout, regardless of how much of a hardware guy he is? I for one am impressed by it. It's not cluttered, it's easy to read, and best of all, it's not slashdotted.
  • I think we missed an option off the Slashdot poll for this holiday... ;)

    Now where's my soldering iron...?

  • Recycling Parts from dead motherboards (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, 2003 @10:12AM (#6034751)
    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.

    By the way, with the advent of micro-atx, and this article, imagine a PDA [ not very small ] from off the shelf parts? .....but anyway
    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?
    • Back in the early 1980s I used to live near a small plant that made mainboards for electronic stuff. They used to pitch out their quality-failed pieces, til they noticed all the artists scrounging their trash every morning, then they started selling 'em. The boards were cool to look at all by themselves, and made nifty backgrounds for 3-D wall art.

      Some motherboards are also asthetically pleasing, and if cleaned of solder and unwanted chips and slots, would likely be just as useful for artwork bases. Of cou

  • DFPresource guy here (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday May 25, 2003 @10:48AM (#6034863)
    Thanks for all the input guys! I got some good laughs and some very nice compliments too! This is great, and the thing isn't even finished!
    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!

  • 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 [digikey.com])

    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 cont

  • In case anyone was wondering... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Sunday May 25, 2003 @02:04PM (#6035849) Homepage
    ...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

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