One of my users dropped an otherwise perfectly good Dell E6500 laptop, and broke it to bits. Although the laptop itself it destroyed, the individual components (hard drive, optical drive, keyboard, battery/charger/power supply, monitor, touchpad, etc) are probably still functional.
Also I have salvaged a working blackberry torch, has a little LCD on it and all the usual blackberry stuff.
any cool arduino projects suited for these parts?
Thanks
Aside from the batteries, the problem with laptop and phone parts are those horrid plastic connectors and lack of documentation / information on how to drive the peripherals from a little 8-bit thing like the Arduino.
I would sell the parts for spares on eBay and buy some exciting stuff with the money:
Does the torch have a trackball? It'd be a pain to try and get off the board but they're pretty neat.
Also might be able to use the touchpad if you can find the pinout (reasonable chance if it's a synaptics one)
thanks guys
its a shame i can't do anything with the display on the blackberry...that would be fun. I guess I could mess around with dropping voltages on the pins and try to figure out how it works...then hook it up to the arduino.
there was a post on hackaday the other day of someone salvaging lcds from older blackberries. might give you some ideas. the lcd itself is driven by complex ac waveforms, you'd have to figure out the controller chips - tha's what the guy on hackaday did.