Electronics salvage

[GreenTeam]

What are some good electronic circuits to salvage for upcycking? I have here as an example a board from a drone I think. Or a hoverboard. What can I use on it?

[MagnetJuice]

Should this Topic be in the Wind section?

[DamonHD]

It can be moved if we can think of a better home...

Rgds

Damon

[Scruff]

Depends on what yer after. I made a blood sacrifice of an APC UPS to my next gens.

It's rare you can reuse the circuits unless it's a mains filter, more often the sum of their parts is more valuable.

Microwaves, old tellys, washing machines, rowing machines all good for general purpose gubbins.

I keep the sheet metals, heat sinks, fans etc off everything, I throw the board in a bucket and often go picking the bones late a night when I haven't any A-stock.

Vehicle stub axle wheel hubs often have decent thrust bearings for turnips.

It all depends on what yer building. If it's through-hole soldering it's generally worth storing dry.

Nice dremel in the shot, mine had a limit switch transplant from a microwave door switch after the OE one sh1t the bed.
They're not built to last those things, I pulled a spoonful of metal sharpnel outtov the PM commutator because the air intakes of that grinder are unprotected.

[Mary B]

FET's in the switching power supplies you find in most modern electronics are good to save IF the part number is on it and that part number comes up in a search. Switches, volume controls are worth saving... rest of it? debatable unless you have a specific project coming up and have the equipment to deal with surface mount IC's

[SparWeb]

Belongs more in Controls section:  https://www.fieldlines.com/index.php/board,22.0.html

Do you mind if we move it GreenTeam?

to your question:
Microwave ovens and computers are great for power supplies
Large printers have SSRs (Solid State Relays) and stepper motors

Obviously, I gotta say I love Upcycling industrial 3-phase motors, too!

[Scruff]

Keep all the screws too, inna jar with all the "leftover" screws. Very handy to have. Motors and transformers always handy to have. Prototyping shouldn't be expensive but you need a big pile of "junk" to keep it cheap.

I'm currently failing to build a pressure washer from an air compressor.

Mrs Scruff threw out an indispensible pressure vessel three weeks ago..

[GreenTeam]

I don't mind if it is moved
And yes I keep all the washers / nuts / bolts / screws etc I come across. What I think I had in mind was to find out if it's possible to remove the capacitors from the board and use them in a turbine build. For something like power smoothing or to reduce brown outs.

[Adriaan Kragten]

In the second photo you show the back side of the circuit board with on it, it seems to be twelve transistors. Transistors can be used in a dump load to limit the charging power for a battery. On my website on the bottom of the menu KD-reports, you find a manual of a 200 W, 27.6 V battery charge controller which uses only one power transistor and two 100 W resistors. But you can also design a dump load with only transistors. The advantage of using a combination of one transistor and two resistors is that at high powers, almost all power is dissipated in the resistors and that the maximum voltage over the transistor is rather low. If you use only transistors, you get a maximum voltage over the transistor which is close to the so called second break down voltage if you use the dump load for a 24 V battery. But for a 12 V battery, use of only transistors is no problem.

[GreenTeam]

ORLY!!! if I can build a charge controller that is better than the crappy tire one and for less than I'm all over it like bed bugs on a ragamuffin!!

[OperaHouse]

Surface mount makes a lot of circuits unusable.  I find the most handy tool is a right angle grinder with a cutoff wheel.  I can generally cut out a switching power supply section.   Many of these 100-240V supply work 0n just 60V DC at lower currents.  Just the thing when needing an isolated supply for a high side driver.  Cutting out relays is better than trying to unsolder them.

[GreenTeam]

So there is no way to desolder the capacitors and reuse them?

[Mary B]

electrolytic capacitors are not worth salvaging unless you are desperate. They shift in value as they age and dry out and are often what leads to failure in a circuit. Chip caps can be saved but you need to know what you are doing, overheat them and they lose connection making them worthless. Since chip caps are like 5 cents each on DigiKey they are not worth the effort.

[tanner0441]

Hi

I like most people on here have reclaimed many circuuit boads. I find the quickest way to remove componts is to heat the back of the board with a blowlamp and bang the boards on the floor, that removes most components though a few you have to pull with pliers while heating. if it is all surface mount the same process will work but they are cheap enough on Ebay for new ones and for some unknown reason a lot of SMD solid state and logic seem to use a lot of inhouse identification.

There are code books to download for free that lets you identify some of the codes but be prepared to print a lot of pages. I have one booklet I printed that has 68 pages. Even with a 100 page stapler it takes a lot of pressure.

Brian

[Scruff]

I salvage caps.

Spend hundreds on test gear and soldering tools and you can save cents on components! 

tbh I have the gear for repair work and cheapo ESR meters are really not bad on Eblague. You get what you pay for with those desolder stations..I've a clone of Dave's and it's a right lemon. I usually resort to gravity and a hand vacuum pump.
There's also security of supply. Back before Maplins went tits up from being rip-off merchants I used to look at their website, convince myself a resistor wasn't worth €1 (and they'd probably give me the wrong one after walking there and back) and pull one off a salvage board...in fact, their website was usually a motivator to salvage. I found I more often than not had better stock, more of it, readily and freely available by not throwing useful boards away after appliances expired/reached end of life/usefulness.

[Mary B]

I am spoiled, Digi Key is overnight shipping for me, at worst 2 days and they have really good pricing.

[Scruff]

I'm switching to farnell (free shipping if I spend €50), the search is clunky but RS are pi$$ing me off with recurring missed deliveries, backorder changes to indefinate, empty apologies (the kind that offer no compensation), listing items as obsolete that are definitely not and sometimes after I place an order without notification that they suddenly decided to stop stocking them.

I've spent a lot in RS lately for them to come up short on the items I placed the order for without notifying me until after I ask where it is, but deliver the sundries I used to pad the order so not be willing to refund me for the order.

[tanner0441]

Hi

Scruff I stopped dealing with RS many years ago when they told me I wasn't ordering enough to maintain a trade account. I showed them I was doing design work and I was specifying their part numbers and cataloue page numbers to my customers who were ordering large quantities of components.

I was living in Birmingham at the time so swapped suppliers and contacted my customers with an updated component list. Farnel were good but at that time they didn't have a good mail order facility so it involed a ride up the A38 to their base in Slack Lane Derby about 80 miles round trip, so it was predominantly test equipment orders.

Now with the internet 10 or 15 mins and you can sit back having ordered evrything you want with a safe bet it would be with you in a few days.
Even now when my involvement is mainly at a hobby level I tend to order quantities, you can order 50 or more transistors for little more than the cost of 1,  and either sell or give any surplus to a couple of friends.

Brian

[DamonHD]

I've kept my account with RS for ahem 30ish years.  That obsession with a minimum order volume per year has long since gone, and indeed all orders still seem to be free P&P however small these days.  That may not last for ever.

Rgds

Damon

[Scruff]

There's no free shipping with either in Éire...Paddy tax...

Farnell is technically a handling charge and free over €50.

If I need 1 component I order 10. My than likely I'll want another later/break it.

The maintaining of a useful and manageable stock up the side of a mountain here comes from this principle. I don't speculatively order stuff I might need. If I find I need it, I order lots. Much cheaper in the long run and faster.

[clockmanFRA]

Yes, RS has become unstable with there products, probably employing sales reps as buyers than using higher salary electrical engineers.

I ordered from a RS depot in the south of England and then would collect when i was passing on my travels especially large steel enclosures.  I ordered some large, and new to RS range Ferrite Chokes as the price was not bad.    However when i called to collect the ferrite cores were half only,  DERRR!?  ie they show the 2 sides in the Pic but you only get half,   and one was broken as they were loose in a posted jiffy bag.  In the end i never got all my money back from that order.    Nope RS are expensive and expensive on P+P even if the order is hundreds.  I also find there actual counter staff condescending even on a pick up drop.

So I advice all OzInverter makers to order from Farnell in the first instance as they now have many depots scattered across the World.  Although i did have once some Fake Driver chips, not in spec, but that was soon rectified.  Capacitors especially the big ones we use, i state spec a make and then actual physical can size. 
Regards the large Ferrite Cores, i give details of the actual manufacture in Bulgaria who will send just one, (a Pair of half's) anywhere in the World and they are always well packed.

Fleebay and AliEx-press are now pot luck what you will get. At first 2015 i got what ordered and tested each large FET and chips.  Now 2020 its real bad.

Scruff, the World is ever changing.  And today i have to test every component i purchase.

A pic of the special 8010 PWM chip for toroid's,  with all the correct codes in 2015 could only be purchased from Ali-press, had to buy 50, but heck they were not expensive in the bigger picture of things.  Some later 8010 chips were missing some code on their chips and they wouldn't do some of the tasks ask for and in the spec.

[Scruff]

I won't buy chips off ebay nor amazon CM. They're very expensive and usually fake. I repaired a laptop with eBay SMD chips, they either failed on first run or a year after...total waste of time.

RS have for sale enclosures without lids, compression glands without locknuts etc etc..

You have to be careful to check the listing. In fact one of the search refinements for compression glands is "with locknuts".

I'm currently refurbishing a tinternet interface machine (this one I'm using).
I spectacularly managed to murder my last one, you could say subconsciously and the two spare motherboards to accompany it after a failed attempt to resolder a CMOS cell followed by a non polarised power connector misnomer.

New to me machine is double better than the last. €300 with minor damage and the specs would put a modern apple to shame. I replaced the keyboard (new), optical drive (donor), CPU fan (new), thermal paste and currently working on an 18650 transplant from the donortop I murdered.

She'll be right shiny in no time. I was pondering the 18650 transplant and thinking how I can't do that with a macinposh because they're proprietary pouches and the machines are designed to break if you try to open them.
Then I realised the reason they're twice the price of comparative hardware was to finance all the engineered failure modes and the high cost of bespoke production runs to make the devices less serviceable.

Macinposh are the greatest opposition to the right to repair movement...scumbags!

[SparWeb]

There's no free shipping with either in Éire...Paddy tax...

Know how you feel.  I get to pay the "Hoser tax". 
All prices I see are in USD.  Conversion to CAD is definitely not the price I will pay by the time it arrives here in the white frozen wilderness.

I'm still quite faithful to Digi-key.  They follow up quickly if they think there will be a problem with an order or its delivery. 
The selection is fantastic and I've never been stiffed on a part supposedly in stock but due to an inventory error, wasn't.

[Scruff]

Used to be the Uk was Ireland's "local distributor" for European manufacturers. I blame the schools for teaching the two feet and waist-deep in the grave Gaelic instead of a useful language that people use to communicate with each other as opposed to a quaint tourist attraction to write on signposts and political documents.

The Paddy tax originated as the conversion from € to £ to € +5% & 4 days extra shipping.
Thanks to Brexit it's now 5% currency conversion + 20% Import duty (of EU goods going back into the EU) and a €4.50 handling charge.

The neighbours are dopes for shooting themselves in the foot.
I can't understand why we feel the need to sink with the ship.

If we were smarter we'd be opening EU trade to Northern Ireland and the Paddy tax would be thuther way around.
Two years it's been in the post and every retailer here is all of a sudden surprised that their suppliers are no longer viable.

That's like the time we closed the country because we ran out of road salt after a week's snow.
Or the years after we salted the shyte outtov the roads when it was +5°C because we had something to prove that wasn't increasing car sales.
Or the two cold taps in every house..a red one and a blue one.
Or the terrible insulation.
Or the no solar panels.
Or the ......huh what?!

Oh the 18650s er...yeah...I made a monster, then I killed it....wasn't worth losing a laptop over...you can't not wire a laptop battery live.
Looked for a genuine replacement. Seems like China are photoshopping the stickers and putting "genuine" on the listing...I can tell they're not by the mould injection dimples and the inconsistency.

Is fake genuine better than aftermarket? 

[Mary B]

I won't buy chips off ebay nor amazon CM. They're very expensive and usually fake. I repaired a laptop with eBay SMD chips, they either failed on first run or a year after...total waste of time.

RS have for sale enclosures without lids, compression glands without locknuts etc etc..

You have to be careful to check the listing. In fact one of the search refinements for compression glands is "with locknuts".

I'm currently refurbishing a tinternet interface machine (this one I'm using).
I spectacularly managed to murder my last one, you could say subconsciously and the two spare motherboards to accompany it after a failed attempt to resolder a CMOS cell followed by a non polarised power connector misnomer.

New to me machine is double better than the last. €300 with minor damage and the specs would put a modern apple to shame. I replaced the keyboard (new), optical drive (donor), CPU fan (new), thermal paste and currently working on an 18650 transplant from the donortop I murdered.

She'll be right shiny in no time. I was pondering the 18650 transplant and thinking how I can't do that with a macinposh because they're proprietary pouches and the machines are designed to break if you try to open them.
Then I realised the reason they're twice the price of comparative hardware was to finance all the engineered failure modes and the high cost of bespoke production runs to make the devices less serviceable.

Macinposh are the greatest opposition to the right to repair movement...scumbags!

Macs won't break just form opening but you need the right screwdrivers. There is a YouTube channel that specializes in them... and he sells tool kits