EEVblog #345 - Electronics Dumpster Diving

[EEVblog]

Dave.

[nitro2k01]

01:54 Eww, a P4! I recognize that sticker from a mile's distance.

[firewalker]

1 minute 3 seconds late tbh. 

https://www.eevblog.com/forum/blog-specific/eevblog-345-electronics-dumpster-diving/

Alexander.

[nitro2k01]

Yeah. Coincidence, I swear. 10 hours after the video was uploaded, too...

[Ketturi]

I do dumpster diving too. We have local recycling point, where people can left old/non-working electronics. I have acquired many components, parts and whole equipment.
Today i got old Philips CD 460 cd-player which have superb sound quality compared to crappy computer cd-rom player,(only problem is that led display have dark segments, probably going to make new display/shift-register assembly for it). Also found laptop and took out core 2 duo T5800 processor, 4G 800Mhz DDR2 memory, wlan b/g/n card and 320GiB HDD, all working, only mobo and plastics were broken due previous owners failed ghettofix for broken lcd hinge cable. I have also got some industrial stuff too, big motor controller tiracs, some old cnc-controllers etc.
Even my audio system and gaming pc is mostly recycled. Dumpster Diving: saves poor students money, and environment

[Short Circuit]

Carefull with dumpster diving... 

[ToddFun]

Ha! great dive Dave! I give you a 10!
And I see like minds think the same, here is my calculator teardown post from July 2012:

http://www.toddfun.com/2012/07/08/desk-calculator-teardown-and-cleanup-swintec-401dp/

[cboy2us]

Bet those 204b Samsungs have blown caps.  Even if they work now they might be bad. I've got two of that exact model in the dining room freshly refurbished and waiting on mounts.

[vk6zgo]

It takes me back to the mid '80s when we were running a Deli (actually my wife was,I was still working at the day job).
The previous few owners had left the back yard in a mess,so we hired a "skip" to put our junk in for the big tidy up.

Some of the neighbours,either thought it was a Council bin,or didn't care,so when we woke up on the 2nd day ,we found it was half full of other people's crud!!
It wasn't a total loss,though,as someone dumped a nice big "Ghetto Blaster"which was full of useful parts!

Way back in the early '70s when colour TV first came to Oz,there were hundreds of B&W TVs dumped at the tip near my then work,so we all "glommed" onto them for bits.
One very old model of TV had a lot of front panel controls,but the manufacturers couldn't afford to have the pot shafts specially made,so they got ones with very long threaded sections & fitted multiple  star washers to them so that the knobs lined up.
Just two of these TV's yielded a nice big bag of star washers.

Tip prospecting became quite a hobby for our Caretaker/Gardener,who came in one day with a big bundle of unused PCB material.
All our hobby projects (& a few official ones!) owed quite a lot to the Kalamunda tip!

[tom66]

Unfortunately, I rarely manage to find working stuff thrown out. I do however get plenty of broken stuff, which is always an interesting puzzle to fix. Most are easy, such as bad caps. Favourite so far is the 24" LCD monitor (full HD) which had some cold joints on the IEC connector (I replaced all the caps too with Rubycon/Panasonic), and a 40" Samsung 1080p LCD TV with three bad caps.

[westfw]

The closer your dumpster is to the source of things that are actually interesting, the better.
Actual garbage dumpsters and curbsides, not so good.  Maybe illegal.
Office-building trash staging areas, like Dave's: better.
Technical company "eWaste" areas: better still.
Technical company electronics lab (or IT department) eWaste bins: excellent!

Although it depends on what you're looking for.  I've observed that if a lab throws out a computer, it's probably something that people put up with for a few years past its prime, and then sat on a rack or bench unused for another couple of years, until finally someone realized that yes, really, no one was using it and it was OK to throw it out and reclaim that space.  By that time, you're looking a P-III era machines in the dumpster.  If your beancounter throws out a computer, it's probably a lot more useful.  But the beancounter isn't going to be throwing out reels of smt components from that proto-run, ever.

I spent a fair amount of time before my retirement moving things that I had taken from eWaste bins at work, BACK into the eWaste bins.  No matter how cute it may have been when it first came out, those small 386sx systems just weren't worth the storage space they needed (when compared with a brand-new nano-itx system.)
And I've been paying something like $80/month for a "storage unit", for years now.  I'm pretty sure I've now spent more on the storage than the total value of the stuff that's in there.  Not counting those things with sentimental value like the homebuilt wire-wrapped SSI-logic ascii keyboard...

[Ed.Kloonk]

Carefull with dumpster diving... 

Funny, I was thinking the same thing. Careful Dave, you might find bloody old Harrison Ford down in there next week!

And also about the chucked out Dell computers. In the garbage room is where I think all Dell computers belong. OK, yeah you hit one out of the park with that big rig that only needed a HDD, most of the time I've found Dell shit not worth the effort.

Replacement or upgrade of memory chips, power supplies, cables - hell, even cases - can be separately purchased from a non Dell source and still be compatible with just about any computer you might have, but not if it's from Dell. And of course Dell do this deliberately. You will end up wasting time and money. I betcha.

[/end_surprise_rant]
 

[IanB]

Tip prospecting became quite a hobby for our Caretaker/Gardener,who came in one day with a big bundle of unused PCB material.
All our hobby projects (& a few official ones!) owed quite a lot to the Kalamunda tip!

Ah yes. When I was a kid growing up there were some local landfill sites that were used to dispose of industrial waste from factories nearby. I collected armfuls of large copper clad boards from there (e.g. 1 ft x 2 ft) that supported all my early experiments in PCB etching. It makes me smile (and grimace) when I see how much copper clad board costs these days brand new.

One of the downsides of landfill sites is that the material there has been through a skip and a dumpster truck and then been processed by a bulldozer. Quite a lot of stuff was obviously crushed, but I found some very nice bulbs, computer boards and other stuff that had survived intact.

When you are a teenager it's a bit like finding gold at the end of the rainbow 

[vk6zgo]

Tip prospecting became quite a hobby for our Caretaker/Gardener,who came in one day with a big bundle of unused PCB material.
All our hobby projects (& a few official ones!) owed quite a lot to the Kalamunda tip!

Ah yes. When I was a kid growing up there were some local landfill sites that were used to dispose of industrial waste from factories nearby. I collected armfuls of large copper clad boards from there (e.g. 1 ft x 2 ft) that supported all my early experiments in PCB etching. It makes me smile (and grimace) when I see how much copper clad board costs these days brand new.

One of the downsides of landfill sites is that the material there has been through a skip and a dumpster truck and then been processed by a bulldozer. Quite a lot of stuff was obviously crushed, but I found some very nice bulbs, computer boards and other stuff that had survived intact.

When you are a teenager it's a bit like finding gold at the end of the rainbow 

Yeah,used to be,some sites didn't really care if you took stuff,but after a while they tightened up.

I remember going to the tip & seeing some beautiful lengths of jarrah timber sitting there.
They were too big to move,but sitting on top of them was a nice transistor radio--it looked like someone had left it accidentally.
It had been dumped,(very gently,though).
Resoldering one speaker lead,& replacing a damaged battery holder (around 80 cents) & I had a good radio!

Around that time,the bloke next door asked me "to have a look at" his daughter's car radio.
Well,it was a mongrel!!
The Audio output module was intermittent and an orphan!
I couldn't find anything like it,till one day I walked through Tandys & found an electrically similar thing in another package.

A few months later,he brought over a big 1960s AWA transistor radio ,with the complaint that the batteries went flat very fast.
And well they might,with one of the Complementary Symmetry transistor pair short circuit.
I knew he worked for the Council,but now I found out  he worked at the tip.
Nice deal,pick up dead radios & get the mug next door to fix them!

I had a pair of transistors out of some other thing I'd pulled apart,so I chucked them in--a bit of an edge to the sound,but to hell with it!
I declined any further work.

[aargee]

Really shows the wasteful society we live in (unless Dave or one of us live nearby!), I bet there was no good *technical* reason half this gear is thrown out, I doubt even the 'compatibility with software' would even be an excuse.

More likely is "the lease has finished on that stuff, let's go and get some new stuff..."


Great vid, Dave.

[JoannaK]

Really shows the wasteful society we live in (unless Dave or one of us live nearby!), I bet there was no good *technical* reason half this gear is thrown out, I doubt even the 'compatibility with software' would even be an excuse.

More likely is "the lease has finished on that stuff, let's go and get some new stuff..."


Great vid, Dave.

I agree fully .. I'd only wish I had as good dumpster nearby..

[David_AVD]

I fished an electric (battery) lawnmower out of an industrial bin a few years ago.  All I had to do was resolder a cracked joint inside the charger and it ran fine!   

[guillep2k]

It must be really nice to live in a country where people can afford dumping WORKING computers, photocopiers and stuff that was worth hundreds of dollars when bought.

[Bored@Work]

It must be really nice to live in a country where people can afford dumping WORKING computers, photocopiers and stuff that was worth hundreds of dollars when bought.

It is not about being able to afford dumping equipment, it is about not being able to afford service and repair when it is broken, or to afford continuing usage when it isn't.

Getting this stuff repaired is either impossible, because you can't find anyone who wants to do it any more, or it gets much more expensive than buying a new replacement.

Prolonging usage of old but working stuff is also often not economical. Planed obsolescence of consumables, incompatibilities with other new stuff, to slow, to loud, to large, no longer compliant with new workspace regulations and other things can make it uneconomic to use.

[RJSC]

I agree fully .. I'd only wish I had as good dumpster nearby..

Me too!
The Electronics dumpsters here only get 10-20+ years stuff and now they are under surveillance and if you try to get something out, a security guard will come and make you deposit all back!

This is because the greedy "licensed" electronics junk collector doesn't want to loose a penny even if they are taking electronics to shred and melt that would otherwise would got a second life.

[billclay]

I think Dave entered the last three digits of pi wrong on the calculator.  I'm one of those people who have pi in my brain to many (more than I'd like to admit) decimal places.

Video was very entertaining tho!

[tom66]

I used to dumpster dive - but nowadays, I procure all my broken electronics from free ad sites.