Parts from Old Scanners

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Sunday, July 31st, 2011

Thanks to the electronics I picked out from the Eco-Quartier e-waste drop off, I had 5 huge old scanners to scavenge parts from!

Old scanners are a great place to find stepper motors (like the ones I used for Scrumbleflit)!

Plus, FREE GEARS!

The mirrors are also spiffy to use in laser projects:

And the cold cathodes are always cool

One of the things that I found funny was that you could almost see a progression of time from when the scanners were made. Two of them had the ULN2003 as a DIP format, whereas the other three were more new and used the SMD format. However, those three new ones were not constructed to use screws. It was molded plastic that clips together. This kind of makes me think, who on earth thought it was a great idea to not use screws anymore?

There was also a scanner that did not have a cold cathode like the others. Weird!

These are some components that I’m not entirely sure what they do, but they look really cool:

All in all, this was pretty fantastic to get 5 new steppers to use on a robot. I’m really excited to use the mirrors for some funky lighting effects too! It makes me extremely happy to use recycled steppers from old scanners. YAY FOR FREE PARTS! You can see more photos on flickr!

If you are thinking that you need more motors for your robot, just get out there to your local e-waste area and find some old scanners to take apart! Be creative and recycle

Posted in: Recycling.

Stanford’s Version of MIT OCW

Posted by Erin, the RobotGrrl on Friday, September 19th, 2008

Looks like Stanford has their own version of MIT OCW with some neat courses up! It’s called Stanford Engineering Everywhere.

I’m just looking at the Machine Learning course now… it looks pretty fun – definitely worth checking out

SEE

Posted in: News, Other News.