When dumpster diving is brought up it's look at with scorn by some people on here because they say it's just hoarding. Let's talk about what USEFUL components we commonly find in discarded/old electronics and where to find them. Actually, any type of found thing you use in whatever you do can go ITT as well. Let's try to talk about components that are actually being used not just glued onto something to look cool.
Old CRT monitors are super useful to me right now because I had the crazy idea of combining light guns and video synthesizers.
I remember piles of them being everywhere less than a decade ago, but it was over a month of dumpster diving before one showed up. I'm now hording three of them now.
Just a though, but why didn't you start a thread on "How to source electronic components for free" instead of dumpster diving.
This thread will devolve into people talking about that one great score they got 6 years ago, people saying they grab everything, people calling them hoarders, people saying they would shoot anyone who dived in their bins, and the other regular posts.
>>922526
Also, put an ad on CL. People will give them to you for free so they don't have to pay to bring them to the dump.
Here all the garbage goes straight to a land fill.
Every now and then I take a truck load of shit to dump and sometimes another driver and I will show each other what we got that we believe is useful.
What are the laws around that kind of stuff at local recycling centers?
>>922527
i don't know, it's just what i call it. Anyway, I find the most common thing people throw away is printers and microwaves. There's not too much in either of those but you can get DC motors out of printers as well as pin connector cables and in microwaves the most useful things to me are the limit switches on the doors.
>>922527
because lying to semiconductor companies to get samples is bad, and one day Allah will strike you down
>>922513
You aren't a dumpster diver until you have the moral and ethical dillema of finding a dead body in a dumpster.
>>922660
You aren't a dumpster diver until you pull the gold out of a dead body's mouth with a pair of pliers
>>922661
If I ever got any fillings with precious metals, I would make it a condition of my will that any descendant who wants them has to pull them out with pliers themselves.
Things to always retrieve: Motors, any loose sensors or ones on their own little boards, pots, large caps, displays, keypads, speakers
Specific things to look out for:
- Copiers and other large printing machines usually have several nice stepper motors in them, as well as normal dc motors. Additionally there are always optosensors in nice little casings.
-Fans (as in the ones for cooling you, not your computer) will yield very large motors, but a good thing to keep an eye out for are the special capacitors inside. They usually come in unique uF values that you'll be hard pressed to find anywhere else
-Dehumidifiers have many sensors in them, notably humidity sensors
-Any home A/V gear (dvd/vcr/cassette players, etc) will usually not yield many individual components, but it's always good to pick them up for a few reasons. One, the lcd, or if you're lucky the vfd usually has it's own board with it's own driver, so you'll have a nice self contained display and driver. Two, they're great for cases for projects. Three, the power supplies are usually on their own board, which means you can either leave them in the case for an a/c powered project box, or you can remove them and use them for somehting else. Usually they spit out useful voltages somewhere in the range of 3.3v to 12v
-Computer mice have those nice tactile switches for the mouse button, unless you're a little child who's afraid of a little desoldering work
-CRT TVs have a few things worth looking at. On some you can salvage the power supply. As far as components or supplies, there are always lots of big heatsinks on the main board, if you're in need of those. Additionally, if you like to experiment with magnetism, you can always grab the degaussing wire around the crt. And of course, the flyback transformer is gonna be a nice steal AS LONG AS YOU DISCHARGE IT FIRST LOOK UP HOW TO DO IT CHRIST. A few other things of note are the socket for the crt itself, if you do tube stuff, the antenna, and the speakers
>>922669
> Specific things to look out for:
Hypodermic needles
baby shit
broken glass
animals with rabies
>>922670
And cops who might want to give you shit. Shit like reaching for his gun because I'm holding a piece of PTFE tubing in a plastic bag.
>>922669
-Radios also have those nice telescopic antennas, and speakers, and often a display of some kind. Low end ones usually have 7seg, which are nice to have (and nice not to have to buy), but again, you'll have to go to the big scary solder sucker to get it off. If you're into radio stuff you can always take the variable cap and the coil, and of course you should snatch up all the knobs and pots
-LCD monitors won't offer that much usually, but if you're into certain things it can be worth it to look at them. They have the button assemblies I keep mentioning, which are just the pcbs in some devices that consist solely of buttons, so they're good for i/o stuff. Also, the backlight can be fun to mess with, and if not you still have a power supply in there.
-The keyboards you'll most often find are the shitty membrane ones, so there won't be much to get from them, esp since they're usually asic blob circuits with few components. The one thing I've noticed is that sometimes the wire will have a little ferrite torroid on one end, which are always nice to have. Also (and this goes for the mouse too) they're a good source of USB cables if you need to fray the other end to wire up to something.
-If by chance you find any PCs or other computers in there (right now I'm referring to towers, not laptops) then assuming you aren't interested in keeping it as a whole there's the PSU in there, the fans, heatsinks, and perhaps some of the ram or the cpu or the other boards will be of use to you. Something to note is that if it's a fairly older (at least early 90s) machine then some of the PCI cards (like the sound card, graphics card, Ethernet card, etc) will have socketed (and thus removable) eeproms that you can snatch. Keep an eye out for other removable ICs too
>>922672
As bad as it sounds, if you're white (which you _all_ are and none of you can say otherwise) they'll just tell you to fuck off
>>922670
>bringing up a valid risk
Kill yourself
>>922680
-Laptops won't give you a whole lot if you're trying to scrap them unless you're willing to work for it. For starters, you have ram, the cpu, fans, heatsinc, and if you want, the screen itself. If you're into masochism (of course by which I mean playing with flatflex cables) you can see about taking the keyboard and trackpad if you have a use for them (they're tiny). Sometimes there's removable WLANs or modems or whatever, so if you need spare laptop parts then there you go i guess
-If you find discarded power tools (usually hand drills, lets be honest) you can try to dig at the motor inside, but it's usually not self contained so it'll come out in two parts. Otherwise the battery might be useful, since it's rechargable
-Electric toothbrushes and razors will have vibrating motors in them, and if you don't rip it in half while trying to pry the thing open they'll have some kind of wireless charging setup in them too. Some of the fancy ones will even have little lcds in them (though they'll probs be zebra strips so forget that noise)
-Hairdryers will have nice big switches in them, and then they'll also have big diodes and a motor assembly (usually attatched to a fan, so if you need that then there you go)
-Hard disk drives will have super strong magnets in them, but that's about all you'll find when it comes to electronically reusable components
CD/DVD/Floppy disk drives are usually worth cracking open if you don't need them as what they already are. They;ll have lots of small motors in them, including a few worm gear stepper motors. You can also try getting the laser out of the CD/DVD player head, but they're very sensitive, so don't desolder them. Also some little switches. Also http://www.instructables.com/id/eWaste-60-3DPrinter/
>>922682
Yes, he did just tell me to fuck off. Also he "confiscated" my tubing, which I assume means threw it away again once I was out of sight.
>>922682
-Cell phones (non smart ones) are a good source for smaller components. Small speakers, small microphones, and often times small motors too. The little membrane buttons for the volume controls on the side are good to try to take, since they have only a few solder joints holding them down. You'll probably want to skip the numberpad though, since it's usually on the main board itself. In a similar vein, the small screens may be tempting, but unless you don't damage them, and unless you retrieve the little flatflex connector that they'll invariably have, and unless you are willing to spend countless hours trying to work out how to drive it, I wouldn't bother. Same goes with the camera, but those are a little easier so you could hold on to it if you really wanted.
-Solid State Drives will give you nothing. Just use it as an ssd, don't try to mess with it
-Calculators won't give you a whole lot. They're with rare exception just single board, black blob asic devices, so anything you'd be able to take will be hanging off the board somewhere and be very obvious. There's the lcd, but they're often really low quality and wont come off easy. other than that there's maybe a battery or something, and often you'll see a little resonator on the board somewhere which'll be easy to desolder
-Any power cables that have those bricks on either end are usually worth grabbing, especially if you don't have some kind of variable PSU
>>922687
Well there are two schools of advice on this
One is to first learn electronics, then go and salvage what you know you need, rather than going out and getting a bunch of stuff you don't know how to use before learning how to use it.
The second is to go out and get a bunch of stuff you don't know how to use and then learn by experimenting and fucking with it and fucking it up.
Personally the way I first started learning about electronics was salvaging all this shit and then looking up the datasheets and trying to see how they worked. It helped me in a few ways, such as teaching me different types of components, and all the different appearances of the components, as well as seeing different ways of how certain circuits are designed and layed out. Also taught me how to read the datasheets. Also taught me to hate datasheet indexing websites.
>>922684
#AllLivesMatter
Also on this board here (which is from a tv) there are a few through-hole components that we can look at.
1 is crystals, which in theory would be good to take, but make sure you can use the specific frequency they have.
2 is caps. Don't salvage caps unless you know the good brands. Those are Nippon Chemo-Con, which are good.
3 is resistor networks. They can be nice
4 are through hole flatflex sockets, which are nice if you have to use those cables
5 is the shielded circuitry you sometimes see on these tv/radio boards, which are sometimes worth prying open to look inside
6 are ICs. Sometimes worth the trouble, most times not.
7 are the TO-220 heatsinks I mentioned.
I stole this image from >>922117
>>922690
>best spots to find this crap? most big box places use compactors, so...?
>>922698
>afraid of compactors
Every business that owns a dumpster throws out electronics.
>>922699
pls keep up the good work...appreciate the posts and the cancer nap cap callouts
>>922526
>That probe to alligator clip to banana jack chain
You savage
>>922703
Did I mention that my scope probes are knives.
>>922710
if you didn't have the legacy of the shopping cart thing i'd be so upset at you
I dumpster dive for good scrap steel. Like pipes and such. I usually get only what I need for my ongoing projects, meaning that I don't board motors and such as they are easy enough to acquire. This is excluding aforementioned steel (or aluminium) pipes, flat stock and the such that can be used in lots of projects. Aluminium is a special one, that I melt down.
>>922546
>microwaves the most useful things to me are the limit switches on the doors.
Transformer, Capacitor, Motors, Fan, Touch pad can be used as a cool timer switch, some of them are made of Stainless Steel which can be hacked up for HHO plates.
>>922705
>university dumpsters
First off, as I mentioned earlier, watch out for cops, they like to tell us whities to fuck off. If the cops leave you alone, you can find all sorts of fun stuff at unis. Fun components can be taken from some, and other stuff just works fine as it is and can be used or sold. Some of my finds:
-A centrifuge. Its circuit board was badly corroded in one corner, but a bit of point-to-point wiring fixed it right up.
-Scales. I've found a couple nice Ohaus scales that work perfectly.
-Motors. Broken lab equipment often has some fun moving parts that still work fine. Want to build a CNC machine of some sort? Take apart some lab equipment you don't know what it does and take all those sweet, sweet NEMA 23 steppers.
-Good keyboards, occasionally. I found a 90s mechanical keyboard, and my friend found a 70s mechanical keyboard from an electronic adding machine.
-Soldering irons. My friend found three Weller WTCPTs, two of which worked fine and one of which needed a new cable to the pencil.
-Unused electronic parts. I'm pretty sure this find was a result of one department cleaning up a closet from when another department used a building years ago. A big recycling bin was just full of components like 555 timers, various op-amps, TTL chips, and discrete components. I've also found a bunch of breadboards, to the point where I no longer have a strong need to remove circuits from them.
Basically, unis are GOAT for electronics.
My father garbage picked a laptop recently.
8 gigs of ram
i7 laptop processor
1920×1080
Dell workstation
Works perfectly, just had a battery of improper voltage or something that can be replaced.
For now, I just keep it plugged in, so the battery isn't an issue
>>922760
>Stainless Steel which can be hacked up for HHO plates.
Consider suicide.
>>922769
Protip: If you're a student, become buddies with science profs and they will often hook you up with the shit before it even goes into the trash.
Also remember if some item has it's cord cut, use it with caution, that's the non-asshole's way of telling you that it doesn't function as intended or is outright dangerous.
>>922956
I usually cut the plugs off the electrics I throw away because a lot of items we get here whatever plugs Chinese people and brazilians use while we use type g plugs
>>922769
Best finds for me were a micro innovations trackball mouse, a digital designer from the 70s, the guts of some Fluke equipment, and a shit ton of components. also got a really nice desk clamp.
While physically digging in the dumpster I've made contact with several teachers, faculty, and security ppl. They don't give a fuck, bro.
>>922953
Thanks for submitting your opinion, it has been taken into consideration. All our operators are currently busy, we will contact you again as soon as possible.
>>923144
You can heat the other side with a heat gun and scrape the components off with a screw driver or whatever.
>>923144
I would imagine that guy used a desoldering pump. So one by one. There are methods where you can use reflow ovens or something to melt all the solder so all the components fall out at once, but that's not really very common. Or useful.
>>922513
Everyone here is talking about electronics as that pretains to their hobbys.
Side of the road stuff thats fucking fantastic. Windows with the glass intact or even better old sliding glass doors!! Big ass heavy piece of glass. Old bicycle tires/inner tubes. You can cut the tubes and use bulldog clips to cover the edges of your loose glass pieces. Grill grates are good too for projects. Sometimes you get lucky and someone goes out and cleans up their garage and throws away all the loose nails and screws and shit those are great.. Sometimes people throw out ugly furniture that may be broken or something and its made of cherry wood or hardmaple those are good for recutting and using for other projects. Tubes, pipes, square stock, solid rods, chains. All good too. Now if its like 2 inches of cut off tube or chain.. Dont take or you will not use it.
Just some minor points to add:
>>922669
>AV gear.
Also analog ICs and blocks of RCA connectors. Convenient when constructing something with sound or other analog signals.
>>922682
>Hard disks. Old hard drives have RAM chips which are a bit tedious to desolder, but some share pinouts with PCI video card RAM chips, so if you have one with empty expansion sockets, you can upgrade your retro computer from 199x. If you are into programming, some (usually older ones) have generic microcontrollers which can be reused in your projects. The motor that spins the plate + its IC driver can also be reused. IDE connector can be torn apart for its breadboard-compatible pins - cheaper than buying jumper wires.
These components are usually surface mounted (unless you find REALLY old one), so it takes some practice to learn to remove them.
>>922689
>Calculators
Some have piezo speakers, which can successfully be used as audio transducers
>>922697
I personally take all crystals I find. They don't take much space and sometimes frequency does not need to be accurate, order of magnitude is enough.
As for ICs, obviously, look up datasheets on the internet before throwing them out.
>>922769
>University dumpsters.
Oh god, yes.
*Assembled 4 PCs from the crap they threw out. CPUs ranged from 386 to Pentium 3. Full with video cards, sound cards, Ethernet, you name it.
*Also a box of unused ICs, among which were 7 8080 CPUs plus their supporting ICs (I am a masochist).
*transistors that handle hundreds of watts, some optical sensors.
*two disassembled Cisco switches with loads of Altera FPGAs and 68k CPU.
*working shelf multimeter that (correctly!) measures in the nA range. It also has fully working nixie tube display.
And the sad part is that recently I missed when the recycling company came and took nearly 100 lbs of PCBs for a couple of dollars...
>>922513
>they say it's just hoarding
Hoarding is something completely different.
I do almost all my prototyping with salvaged components.
i just remembered a few other things
-lighting ballasts are sometimes good to have if you need power boosting stuff
-ive seen a lot of Keurig coffee maker things in the trash, and they are absolute gold for hydraulic/pneumatic components, as well as some sensors (heat, etc)
-old co/smoke detectors might have some nice stuff in them. If it's in the trash the sensor is usually bad, but the rest of the components would be just fine
-game controllers have some nice stuff, whether it's an xfaux controller or a guitar hero guitar/drumset. For controllers, the obvious thing is gonna be the dual axis joysticks, as well as maybe some switches or something. Also, most controllers have that vibration shit, which means there's motors in there somewhere, usually one in each handgrip. For guitar hero/rockb& stuff, in the drums there'll be piezoelectric sensors of some kind, and usually the foot pedal can be used for something. The guitars will mostly be switches, but you might find some motion sensors/reed relays in there. Also keep an eye out for the little bluetooth boards you can salvage, as long as you can find the pinout.
-Vacuum cleaners will also have decent sized dc motors in them. maybe some switches and stuff too. I found a dead rat in one once.
-If you like doing smaller stuff then keep an eye out for earbuds. Obviously they'll have small speakers in them, but even if you don't care about that, look for the ones with the little microphone/button thing on them, then you can get really small mics and switches.
>>922513
>because they say it's just hoarding
Are you sure it's not because you're scum who is going through trash?
Where do you guys typically find this shit? I've been to like 20 stores in my area, most of which had trash compactors and the rest had nothing of value.
If that isn't enough, the local school district has a 20 foot pole up its ass when it comes to throwing out old technology. All their shit is sold off at reasonable prices (as in you'll buy it if you need it). My university also has a service come and take almost anything that goes bad. The rest is mixed in with the standard trash and its small stuff like broken cables.
On the upside, my friend's headphones stopped working and it seems like a simple issue. Because he's a fag he already bought new ones, so he let me keep the broken ones. Gonna crack those open tomorrow and look into repairing them.
>>923547
>>922713
THIS 100x
i used to have a tv hoarding problem until i broke them down into components==saved space and components
>>923549
Luck mostly. Check for trash containers of block houses every other day. Most often its bad food, but today I found a perfectly working external DVD rewriter with is plastic covers still in place.
Another thing you can do is join local freecycle / freegan groups on facebook if you have one in your area. Sometimes people give away old electronics on these. Most recent find there was 1W USB WiFi dongle an a pair of small speakers.
Anyone have experience with fridges/microwaves
>>923549
Schools and Universities are public funded and thus have different disposal rules. Electronics (namely computers, tablets, and other devices that store personal data) at them generally are handled by Asset protection/abatement companies. Basically they are sold to a company who is legally responsible for them. They have to destroy all data (they use hard drive shredders) and then break the device down into components and sell them.
Now these places also take non-computer devices too, but since they usually only come in when they are doing a large computer turnover, they get pitched in the trash.
Schools and universities are not legally allowed to give ANYTHING that was paid for by tax money or sate or federal grants away. They must dispose of it or sell it in an approved way (generally auction). This doesn't mean that teachers/profs don't though. Just don't go telling everyone they did, or they're on the hook.
>>923710
I like drawing arcs from microwave oven transformers.
>>922526
+ this.
Old CRT's are awesome if you get one that's got a decent resolution. Or you can scrap em for like, 20$ of copper if you know what you're doing.
Apart from being useful embedded systems as a whole (most of them run linux and can be modded to do all sort of stuff), wireless routers and APs can be salvaged for parts, let's see some of the more interesting ones:
>rj45 connectors
as cat5 cables are ubiquitous and cheap, together with these connectors they can be used to link and power all sorts of stuff, i've seen some guy link a bunch of 1-wire dallas thermometers using these, for tens of meters.
>rp-sma antenna connectors
useful for making custom antennas and connecting them to all sorts of wlan cards, some routers have pigtail-to-rp-sma, others have them soldered straight to the board
>memory chips
single sdr or ddr rams are not too interesting. serial flash chips (usually 2MB to 16MB) are more useful for projects and repairing stuff (same ones hold bios on most modern pc mobos)
>plastic/metal cases
for all sorts of projects
>heatsinks
sometimes seen on chipsets inside
>caps, leds, crystals, usb sockets, voltage regulators and dc-dc converters
plentiful and also seen in all other kinds of electronics, marginally useful
>>923549
yard sales can be good, flea markets(though flea market vendors are usually wackos that think things are worth more than they are), and generally just garbage day in more affluent areas. Rich people throw perfectly functional stuff away constantly.
>>924236
Most of that 20$ will come from the coil around the electron gun
Two microwaves, jacked their transformers to generate 2k volts. I stepped the other transformer down to make 1.6 volts, and can pull some 400 Amps through it. And a bunch of motherboards which I made into dank key rings.
>>922526
Are you the anon that was messing with that circuit bent Nintendo gun? If so, would you mind sharing some tips on spoofing a vga signal again?
I had an idea for an art project in mind that requires providing a custom vga signal to a monitor, and I want to be able to modulate the signal in to various patterns. Any tips for generating and modifying the signals?
>>926207
those are some dank memes
>>926207
>And a bunch of motherboards which I made into dank key rings.
kek, I have a 2n3055 transistor on my keyring. I need to round off the legs as I keep stabbing myself with it.
>>926207
a friend of mine was making keyrings from old 80's SRAM boards
the only pitfall was they were usually thin double sided boards, and over the time the mounting hole where the keyring is threaded gets scratched too much from the keys swinging to the point it just breaks.
I guess using multilayer hard PCB from a motherboard has longer life, tho...
>>922513
Transformers.
ALL tiypes of sexy sexy transformers. Super easy to salvage. and easy to test in you have a multimeter and can still read the specks, and if you cant you can always use an oscilloscope and a few voltmeters to figure it out. And these things have a thousand uses. Form power transformers to output cupling transformers. And if they're shorted out, you can rewind them to what you want/need, as well as use the leftover copper for nefarious purposes. like tesla coils or soldering iron tip cleaers/desoldering.
>>926394
>use the leftover copper
it's pointless. You never know where the wire got shorted, plus they are usually covered in enamel (a second coat after winding) that fucks up the original wire enamel and makes them sketchy as fuck.
>>926401
Tesla coils don't care about your girly short circuits and enema wires, tesla coils understand!
Pic related. Made from an old wall-wart batter charger I found had a short in the secondary. Used the primary coil to wind this. Works fine enough as a CFL tester. But I use it in college presentations when we have highschool kids over. They loose their minds over these sort of trinkets. At the end of the day I give out a few to their physics professors who are always glad to get free stuff.
If you're not in to using it for something functional dump it in some acetone, leave it over night and you can use it to clean the tip of your soldering iron while working.
>>926418
>Made from an old wall-wart
How did you remove the core lamination's? I've removed the "---" half but can't get the "T" parts to slide out.
>>926424
oh buddy you roughed it up pretty bad there :(
What you call the T part is the E parts ...the I is I.
Pic related its the transformer I rook apart I kept the core in case I wanted to rewind.
The best way I found was to push out one I part with a small screwdriver. Than said screwdriver in the I slot and tap it lightly with a hammer until it pushes the E out. Try to tap all 3 side evenly for easy removal. After that you can use this E to push out the other Es instead of a screwdriver.
Cores are rarely laminated to the point where it's a problem for disassembly, so I just ignore it, but if you really need to remove it give it a wash in some acetone. The lamination is just a thin lacquer on the surface so as to protect butchers from getting shocked when handling them if the coils short out to the core
>>926433
why did you disassemble the core, tho?
It should came in two I and E pieces.
>>926433
Thanks anon I'll give that a go, I've taken them apart before but this one seems very stiff for some reason.
I even tried clamping it in a vice and hammering with a chisel but in hindsight I suppose the vice would have prevented any movement of the E parts.
>What you call the T part is the E parts
Shit I actually meant to say E, my mind is not in gear today.
>>926435
The core pieces are in an alternating pattern.
>>926437
ah... those are shitty (but more effective) transformers indeed
>>926435
I see you've been watching a lot of microwave oven to welder conversion videos.
Most MOT come in tow parts that are welded together so E an I are two solid pieces. Smaller transformers are made from a lot of small E I pieces layered in opposite directions so you cant just cut the top off. Pic related.
>>926442
I was mostly dealing with larger transformers before. The small one i have are salvaged from CRT monitors, and they are all Ferrite core ones.
>>926433
>Than said screwdriver in the I slot and tap it lightly with a hammer until it pushes the E out.
You wonderful person, thankyou!
>Hoarding
Brought home three 2009 mid-range computer towers with bad power supplies, a silly picture frame thing with a broken backlight, and a fully working, gorgeous 24", 1920x1200, 6-tube backlit LCD monitor with some kind of *VA panel.
I'm going to repair the power supplies, maybe repair the picture frame, and definitely use the monitor because anyone who doesn't know the glory of multi-tube backlit VA panels doesn't know one of the greatest joys in life.
>>926630
These multi-CCFL backlit *VAs are just so beautiful. It's old enough to be yellowing, but it still does 274 cd/m^2 and it's almost spot on 6500K at default settings. Whoever threw this away definitely got themselves a downgrade in image quality.
1u servers out back of a video production company.
>>926666
>>926666
I lost all respect for your find when I saw what was on the screen and the fact you had to make a webm out of it t
>>926666
My local recycling facility will let ppl rife thru and take the screens that are brought in.
>>926679
I made that webm solely for your response. Chill out, man. That show does a good job at showing colours.
>>926666
>europlugs
>mlp
Eugene?
>>922513
I want some old computers to dick around with were is best to dive for them
>>926804
Depends where you live. Here its illegal to go dumpster diving, and the recycling center immediately get ownership of the tat people drop off.
>>926666
>quads
>got a nice monitor from dumpsterdiving
>unironically playing mlp
I really wish i could send a nuthunter to your house, that will not kill you, not rape you even. He'll just shoot you in the testicles and leave.
>>926875
lol u buttmad
>>926795
No.
>>926875
I think you're overestimating my sincerity.
Here's last month's dumpster dive score. A fully optioned up Studio XPS 13 with mild mechanical damage and a few missing parts.
>>922934
Lucky bastard
>>926666
I've seen you around a bit. Do you stop by the general at all?
>>926686
there are alot of shows that can do that. you just chose to make us aware that you are a brony horsefucker, to which we dont care.
>>927052
Not often. I make related Youtube videos, though. https://youtube.com/user/FFcossag
>>927089
"Lots of shows demonstrate colours nicely"
"The one you used also does that, but I don't want you to use it."
"I don't care about which shows you watch."
Do you not see how silly you sound? Please stop caring, man. Chill out. Look at this picture of a trash-picked pair of Philips 541MFBs that I got a few months ago.
>>926825
Oh what a truly wicked place is that. Anywhere yurop or murrica?
>>927103
>it shows colour nicely
Please stop. While your work station is quite nice, your my little pony wall stickers and my little pony videos to demonstrate screen quality shows that you are in fact at least close to a brony, so you have some kind of mental issue which you either need to accept or work on.
>>927089
If you don't care, why are you talking about it? Clearly you do care, anon. You care deeply.
>>926216
I am that person.
This is the thread I created for the project in September: https://warosu.org/diy/thread/S881954#p882465
Start a video synth thread describing your project and I'll drop some pointers.
>>927171
Where is that? You do art shows or something?
>>927176
It was an art show.
>>926207
i made one of these out of half a stick or ram
i soldered leds and a usbminiport on the side
>cool keychain bro
>>927171
Russel you magnificent bastard. I look forward to your mad projects with great enthusiasm.
>>922756
Be careful where you do this. If it's a scrap steel skip at a fabrication shop etc then you're stealing, as the steal is put in a skip ready for weighing in.
>>926666
nice quads...
haven't kept in touch with mlp for a while, but holy shit,
>erectile horn confirmed
i'm having the weirdest boner right now.
>>927151
I indulge fully in my madness. You're just getting really annoyed about it for some reason, to the point of derailing the thread. I'm just pointing that out to you, like >>927158 also is.
Here's a picture of my 100 % trash picked UPS. Black metal Smart-UPS units are worthy of hoarding, they are incredibly strong. They all get bad 22 µF capacitors which makes them sound bad but still work fine, replacing those essentially leaves you with a like-new unit.
>>922546
If you ever wanted to make a tesla coil but don't have many available funds then a microwave transformer or two with a bank of liden jars can work well
>>927339
that is the worst cable tie application i have ever seen
and that fucking bread bag tie holding up the shitty network cable is pretty pathetic too.
this was before you picked them out of the trash?
>>927347
You can buy a decent capacitor bank with the price of a single jar.
But if you're on a 0 budget list, aluminium foil and was paper also make a decent capacitor. You can make a spark gap from copper wire and some screws.
The only hard part of the tesla is the accrual coil. You don't really need it to be a coil but if you want the cool effect you need to have it look like a giant lightning jazzing dick.
And for that a transformer is your best friend. better yet if it's not tapped since you can source more copper wire from it. just wind it around a PVC pipe and boom you got your self a decent primary. The secondary can be any old power cord shaped to a rough circle, secondary windings are much much smaller, but may need to be a bit thicker to handle more current.
But for a first tesla build I would recommend the slayer exciter circuit. its simple cheap and gets some wow factor out of it. And besides you might not need a bigger coil once you have it. It's also not that hard to scale up if you want it bigger. And it's somewhat safe, working off a battery it wont have enough power to actually kill you.
>>927348
I'm not a fan of tying things down, I believe in the freedom of cables to move.
>>927339
I snagged a couple smaller UPS that were being tossed and replaced the batteries
Score
>>922513
Sup /diy/
Not strictly dumpster diving, but I've seen 25 'faulty' slot loading drives for sale for like $25.
I was considering harvesting the parts from them.
Can you find decent small stepper motors in slot loading disk drives?
I was thinking about making an arduino driven CNC
>>927453
>slot loading disk drives
The ones in slot loaders are gonna be extra small and very delicate, plus they're in weird shapes.
You probably still could, tho
>>927512
IME, a slot-loading drive is just a tray-loading drive where the tray has been replaced with a Heath-Robinson array of arms, levers, rollers, and plastic gears.
If you want to change the laser on a PS3, first you need to open the lid and watch all these bits go "sproing".
I've repaired CD autochangers with fewer parts.
>>927375
im jelly of that cirque touchpad, those fuckers are rare.
>>924394
I actually find old ram more interesting, as I've made it one of my specialties under computer architecture.
throw it in an old system, adjust timings, and you can max out old gaming motherboards for vintage and nostagia sake. A program called memset and its sister cpu tweaker can change timings in windows on a variety of chipsets, of course assuming you're focusing on that over a basic linux box. The performance you can get out of some oem ram is surprising.
while looking for useful components
did you ever stop & think that maybe buying them online is the best option that way as to not bring a flea infestation home to your family
aint nobody got time 4 that though
talk about ghetto lee
>>927797
What's particular about it? I never thought twice about it, except for the fact that it's attached to a mechanical keyboard with a USB hub.
>>927873
FWIW I work in higher ed (aka state government) and we throw everything away on it's 4th birthday. Think thousands of pounds of FC/SAS drives, fully populated Cat6511s, racks of servers, etc.
Just a matter of which dumpster to dive in ..
>>928161
I saw one of those e-waste documentaries where they were going through the landfill in Ghana, and they were looking at all the "Property of US Government" or "Property of University of Whatever" stickers on all the computers and CRTs and stuff.
I need a new monitor.
Most likely areas to find one in a dumpster?
>>928197
>one of those e-waste documentaries
sauce plz?
other decent documentaries on e-waste would be appreciated too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXDrIvShZKU
I know more about dumpster diving than all of you. Seriously. Heres some tips. Apartment complexes a day or two before the end of the month, depending on when trashman comes. People move get evicted and literally throw everything away. I mean real shit.
Businesses are 99 percent of the time not even worth looking at because the sort of people who run successful shops dont waste anything ever. Clothes are usually fine. Wadded up bedding means STDs. Wash your hands, bleach. Always wear gloves. Never jump in unless you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN of what you are landing on, or you WILL die. Power tools usually work. Lawn tools usually dont. Go late at night, real early. Never during business hours. DO NOT LOITER. Each dumpster should take ten or twenty seconds max. When you find the motherlode, it isnt. Just take the ONE or two nice things and go.
Most of the dead babies dont make the news.
Prescriptions are usually a felony per pill, the good ones anyway. No one gives a shit that you're in the trash except for employees who will call the cops, and serial killers. Dont start talking just apologize and leave immediately. If someone says you dont want something, you dont.
>>929060
dayum bro
I just take sometimes some stuff that is by the side of the trash bin...
>>923144
I haven't done it myself, because I don't have the gear, but the most efficient way I've seen on youtube is to use clamps to hold a PCB vertically, then use a hot air gun/heat gun on one side to melt the solder, and a pair of pliers in the other hand to pry the components loose.
Maybe you can also put the board upside down and let the components drop out, but I think stickyness will keep many of them on.
>>929060
This guy knows what he's talking about here, can confirm.
Businesses can be good lots of the time tho, at least where I am (suburbs). Mostly tvs and commercial stuff. With bigger places like office buildings the real score is unfortunately inaccessible, the trash room in the building itself. >>928246
Not sure about that specific one but there's E-wasteland. It's online for free.
