Your latest scrounge/acquirement

I thought I heard some noise every now and then, but by the time I first logged on it was low

On Saturday I scored 6 metres of UPVC fascia panel for nothing. This is for a Dr who Prop See image -

This may become relevant if I manage to get my head around programming my Arduino to make the prop 'function'.

This will consist of counting from 8 - 0 rounds, detecting that the magazine then has been changed to begin again. Also each shot requires the gun to be 'cocked' using the pump action. Sound and muzzle flash will also be a part of the effect.

In theory Arduino will make this simple, in terms of component count and simplicity and allow for a realistic operation of the 'BFG'.

I have a circuit drawn up that uses 3 555 chips and 2 chips to drive a 7 segment display which will work fine. At this time this circuit has the upper hand......On the Arduino I can make the LED blink, several LED's blink but so far Mr Lightbulb hasn't gone 'DING'

regards

Fenris

Hey I am sorry. All I was trying to do is to walk around and go home. Did it get back home? (2:45pm Central time)? =( :sweat_smile:

Oh, now it back at the station.

liudr:
Hey I am sorry. All I was trying to do is to walk around and go home. Did it get back home? (2:45pm Central time)? =( :sweat_smile:

Sounds like this is getting a bit off topic - perhaps a new thread :slight_smile:

Looking at a VCR - should I scrounge it?

Any fun in VCR's? Had a few laying around, threw them out... Opened them, saw a flat boring print, some custom motors and gears... boooooooooring... :grin:

bld:
Any fun in VCR's? Had a few laying around, threw them out... Opened them, saw a flat boring print, some custom motors and gears... boooooooooring... :grin:

Aren't the bearings on the heads really nice?

Yea, I've heard a couple times that VCRs have a few nice things in them

focalist:
OK guys don't make me regret this:

http://24.60.232.215:9000

That's the Rovio. Take her for a drive... maybe 30 mins of battery at best...

I may have just attacked your dog, and you. Maybe, not saying anything for sure...
:slight_smile:

Sorry!

That was entertaining.
:slight_smile:

If you really want to go crazy, go to your local photocopier repair shop!
Switches, LED's, LCD's, motors (stepper and DC), optics, driver transistors and best of all...
bearings, gears, shafts, ladder chain and sprockets!

Where I used to live the guy who owned to store said "yeah, go for it, just don't make a mess."

I reduced 20 photo copiers to bare chassis in a couple of hours!

I have discovered that a multi-thousand dollar (?) video conferencing camera system contains several rather neat motors probably worth $10 each or more. The best was a DC gear motor used to move a shutter in front of the camera (why? There was a glass panel in front of that... Just cool factor, or may so you know that you can't be seen when it's shut?) Pan and tilt accomplished by small geared stepper motors. Autofocus and zoom internal to the lens itself are very tiny steppers with very tiny ball screws.

It looked like there was a neat MEMS microphone array (6 mics?) and some nice stepper drivers as well, but in such tiny packages that I didn't feel they were removable from the PCBs. Sigh. In general, I find this sort of "reduction in value" from a working product to reusable parts sorta depressing. But I guess that's looking at it backward; better a few cheap parts than a pile of nameless eWaste. (and the stuff we throw out had better remain nameless and not intact as well. Recycling is good, and scrounging is probably permissible, but having your trash show up on the user market would be a pretty substantial scandal!)

westfw:
In general, I find this sort of "reduction in value" from a working product to reusable parts sorta depressing. But I guess that's looking at it backward; better a few cheap parts than a pile of nameless eWaste.

I think you are looking at it wrong; its like looking at wrecked or junked/rusting automobiles, and thinking they're nothing but a bunch of scrap metal.

Meanwhile, tons of pick-ur-part places make a lot of money off those same vehicles (and whatever is left gets sent to a recycler scrap yard).

Generally - marketed properly - you can take "junk", take it apart, sort the parts and such, get enough of them and sell them as used components for hobbyists, if you wanted to. You might get something for free, or buy something at goodwill or a yard sale (for a few dollars) - tear it down, sort the parts, package them up, and sell them to others (who either don't or can't do what you did). You could, in theory, turn a $5.00 "junk" device into $10.00 of parts.

Here's a "for instance" - priced the Senscomp ultrasonic kits?:

http://www.senscomp.com/products.htm

Kinda expensive, huh? But they're pretty nice kits - in some ways better than the PING-type sensors, but not in price.

But there's a cheaper alternative, if your willing to do the work to remove it - from a Polaroid camera (Sun 660, Spectra, plus some others). You can find these all the time at yard sales and goodwills, generally for less than $10.00 (most of the ones I've found have been for $5.00 or less).

I bet - if you removed such a sensor from the camera - and set it up to be controlled by the Arduino (few parts are needed for this; it was detailed in Servo magazine not too long back by the member of SRS who originally showed how to use such devices with a PC parallel port) - with testing, packaging, marketing, and maybe some code - you could probably sell them for somewhat more than the PING-style sensor, but waaay less than the Senscomp kit, and easily make a healthy profit, while providing a useful device for hobbyists (or students, or educators) at a more affordable price.

:slight_smile:

A monroe L-series (don't know which one it is off the top of my head) mechanical calculator.

My grandpa found it at a tagsale.

Its pretty rusty and consequently not working, but some WD-40 seems to do the trick.

mechanical calculator.

Cool - I've always kinda wanted one. :slight_smile:

I can actually say that in some ways it is superior to the scientific calculator I use for math class.
10 digit display vs a whopping 16!!! :astonished:
It can multiply any numbers up to 8 digits, with no loss in accuracy, as opposed to the modern calculator's approximated answer.

I don't know if this counts as a "scrounge", but...

A friend was called out of town unexpectedly on business. I spotted a garage sale on craigslist offering some stuff I knew he'd be extremely interested in. So I emailed him, and wound up going as his proxy.

The seller was pleased enough with the deal I made on my friend's behalf that he threw in a pair of "air drumsticks" that I was vacillating about buying.

I was going to buy them because I thought that they were made with something like piezo sensors to detect their being tapped on a tabletop or somesuch, but it looks like they actually use accelerometers to detect motion through the air.

Does anyone know whether they've already been hacked? I did a quick google search for info on their internals, but all I got was "for sale" ads.

Just picked up off the side of the road this morning an old PC; has a 5.25 floppy, 3.5 floppy, and a CD-ROM drive, VGA card, plus (IIRC) a dual game port card or something (maybe it was a sound card - didn't look too closely). Somebody throwing away junk, and I couldn't help myself. LOL. Over the weekend I got some more Goodwill junk: A couple more Polaroid Sun 660 cameras for the ultrasonic, a Saitek Cyborg Command Pad Unit, a Quickcam 4000, an Intel X3 USB microscope, plus a few other pieces of junk (one of those was some kind of SMA connector wifi triple-antenna unit with magnetic mount).

/I've got problems...

a multi-thousand dollar (?) video conferencing camera system

Apparently these are the "cheap" $600 home-video-conferencing cameras. That's not so bad!

an Intel X3 USB microscope

Those are fun. We have the "digital blue" version (from when they were commercially available.) Drivers are still available...

I've got problems...

Every once in a while I contemplate the relative thinness of the line between the inveterate high-tech junk collector and the street people with their shopping cart full of their favorite junk...

westfw:
Those are fun. We have the "digital blue" version (from when they were commercially available.) Drivers are still available...

Yeah - I meant "QX3" and it is the "digital blue"; I got it working on my Ubuntu box fairly easily - found a driver that I compiled to allow me to turn off/on the lights, but the resolution is fairly pitiful (CIF? 352 x 288?). Still, I was able to get some interesting close-ups. I'm thinking about marrying the quickcam to the scope, or using the optics from it with a different cam I have that does 640 x 480. Some future weird project, maybe. It would be nice for circuit board inspection (would beat using a jeweler's loupe or handheld microscope, like I do now).

westfw:
Every once in a while I contemplate the relative thinness of the line between the inveterate high-tech junk collector and the street people with their shopping cart full of their favorite junk...

LOL. My shop's getting crowded, I need to do a major tear-down of stuff, a goodwill donation run for some other stuff, and parting out other things. Ugh.

I opened up the PC I grabbed when I got home; no hard drive, but the inside was fairly clean (I opened it up outside - I've heard of people finding all sorts of ungodly stuff and bugs inside unknown PCs - I wasn't going to do that inside the house). Turns out what it had was a 486 board of some kind, but the CPU was replaced with some kind of "Evergreen" CPU upgrade (586? Fake Pentium? Dunno yet), and the SIMM slots had a tower expander off one slot filled with RAM, and a Promise multi-port IO card (with IDE ports, floppy drive connectors, and serial/parallel ports on a EISA card). There was also an EISA VGA card, plus a modem card. I'll probably keep the parts and ditch the case (it's a weird non-standard case with an older huge PSU on it). I'm actually glad it had the multi-port card; I need one for a 386 I'm building up (that's going to be a weird one - I have the 386 board, I'm going to stuff it to the gills with as much RAM as it will take, and I have a Cyrix 386-to-486 upgrade CPU as well that might go into it - maybe).

I must be crazy... :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:

Hey "crazy" cr0sh, I'm interested in the evergreen. I could trade with you (Phi-1 shield PCB) if you're interested. PM me with a couple pictures of the chip and the board. Thanks.

As for me, I didn't pay but I did grab a few ribbon cables 40-60 pins from a "dump place". Going to do some projects with the cables.