Recycling Computer chips

[Gordo4444]

I've taken apart 3 computers in my time and I have every piece sitting in my room. I was wondering if it is possible to take them apart and reuse the piece from them?

[airman00]

search the forum this question has been asked A TON of times

[Gordo4444]

Cool, I found the other post. I also just took inventory of all the crap in my room...


2 USB Keyboards
5 Video/sound cards
4 Networking cards (Ethernet and phone jack)
1 Wireless Internet card
1 Dvd drive
1 Cd Drive
and 1 motherboard with 5 sticks of RAM...

So yea... Im set for parts i guess

Is it possible to Reprogramm Computer chips?

[airman00]

Well what are you planning to build? 


computer chips cannot be reprogrammed  or they can be reprogrammed but its not worth it to do , since they need a lot of circuitry jsut to turn it on and support it.

You need a PIC microcontroller or an AVR microcontroller.


As for the computer parts you say you have , there aren't that much useful parts in them. What you should probably do is sell computer parts and use that money to buy robot components.

The dvd and cd drives have motors in them which may be useful and DVD burners have powerful lasers in them which can pop balloons and light matches . http://www.instructables.com/id/Laser-Flashlight-Hack!!/

Motherboard and wireless card, and video/sound car can be used on a PC bot like my butler bot chives ( look at my blog , website in my signature below)

But we really need to know what you plan to build and what kind of experience you have with robotics, electronics, and programming.

[Gordo4444]

Well, I haven't really thought of what I wanted to make  . I do need to make a maze solving bot for school but I planned on using the 50$ robot one. As for experience... I took a lot of stuff apart, so I know how a lot works... But i've never built a robot (waiting on he 50$ one's parts). I guess you could say my uncle and I built a RC one, out of junk but nothing programming/electronics wise. Also, I have a power supply but I'm afraid to touch it, lol.

[ed1380]

if you plug in a psu it wont turn on. you have to short some pins on the plug to start it. also if you do that make sure there is a load on it. them running idle isnt recommended

[Shags]

Ok,  on this topic (and I am sure there are posts but lets freshen it up a bit).  I know that a computer cpu focuses on memory and not on input output and a robotic microcontroller basically is the opposite focusing on inputs and outputs an very little on memory.  But what about for a larger bot the best of both worlds which would be converting a computers motherboard into a i/o intensive hybrid.  Is this possible?  Is it stupid (because one doesn't need that much memory).  If it is stupid then what about an outdated computer running at mhz vs ghz with sa 256k ram?  Is that still going to be stupid or could it be useful to create a large program capable of giving the robot lots of capabilities?

I am sorry in advance if this violates some sort of forum eticut and should be its own topic but it really does apply to this post because Gordo4444 is talking about recycling old computer parts.

Let me know what your thoughts are.

[ed1380]

in those cases there are SBC's. and other very powerful microcontrollers

[HDL_CinC_Dragon]

I dont see why it wouldnt be possible... Im sure it would take a lot of work and probably several added MCUs to handle data and translate between the Mobos and the Robots standard language... Tapping into the CPU (even running in the MHz range) would be one hell of a task... not even sure if that one would be possible with an MCU... As for using the Mobos RAM, im going to assume that its possible and that all you would have to do is figure out how to interface with the RAMs onboard controller chip... again, im sure a dedicated slave MCU taking orders from a master MCU would be able to accomplish this... What are your thoughts on that one, guys?

[Shags]

http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=2737.msg18959#msg18959

HDL_CinC_Dragon,

I think Half Shell is thinking along our same lines with his idea of using this microcomputer (see the link above).  I think what keeps robotics down to a more basic level (mostly because of the battery life question) is the fact that you just can't pack much computing power into a mobile unit.  It would be a monumental task to get a full fled cpu working in a robot but if one could work out the power questions and even make it the "dumbest" computer (circa 386 or something like that) into a really smart robot with just about unlimited potential. 

If you ever played games like Traveller and such the ships never ran on a single program they instead employed software/hardware programs to complete certain tasks in defense and improved attacks.  I think if you had a robot with a lot of expandability one would "teach" the robot to do one thing such as line following then teach it other things through new functions and extension of classes and then work specifically on giving it the AI to figure out which functions or programs to run, or run them on multiple threads at the same time so as to have the robot running more than one program simultaneously.  Then you use logic to give precendence over which threads get more cycles to complete.  For instance you would want the thread that controls object avoidance to have more cycles than the one that controls an arm to pick up an object.

One would have to come up with some doozie algorithms to make everything work real-time but what the heck (the wright brothers weren't flying jets were they?)

In closing why should only the major researcher's and the government be the only ones to have memory on their bots with lots of processing power.  If a cpu board could be tapped into then we could all create some pretty cool programs to make our bots even more autonomous.

[HDL_CinC_Dragon]

My thoughts exactly We have the resources. Why not give it a shot?

[paulstreats]

its my thoughts that a computer processor is nothing but that, a logic device like on the $30 microcontroller tutorial (maybe a bit more complex).

It doesnt do anything unless its told to. It receives its basic program through the bios which is an external unit (like the eeprom in the $30 microcontroller). The bios is what tells it what its pin outs are, so some get connected to 1 bus (like the ide bus), some get connected to the pci bus etc.... so they have a pin out like a low end mcu, its just that the pins are organised to standard data busses. The trick is in finding out what the pins are etc.. then you can use the pinout for what you want. I presume that they run standard intel hex from the bios.

Once the bios program runs, it connects some of the processors input pins to the ide system so its capable of reading in its hex data from a hard drive (most programs that you run are compiled into hex on the harddrive).

In some ways it sounds quite easy to use an computer processor, although im sure that there are many pitfalls to overcome, it just takes somebody with a spare processor and a bit of time to work it out. If you can get the initial eeprom (bios type thing) to connect the processor direct to a flash drive of some sort, you can cut out a hard drive - and the need for powering the hard drive constantly

[ed1380]

i thought thats what the north and south bridge are for 

either way what ^ said

[paulstreats]

I was using the bus connections quite loosley, the processor connects to the bridges which then connects to the busses. (The processor connects to the bridge systems using just a few communication wires, the busses then connect to the pci bus etc.. When you think that a pci slot has about 124 ish ? pins which is more than the processor has and then connect to the ide controller etc., its an efficient way of handling this. think about an lcd screen, traditionally you used to have to connect 8 datapins from your mcu to it, now they usually have a serial interface allow 2 data wires. or even just 1 if you are only going to perform write operations. You can make your own with a seperate mcu if you like, get it to act as an i2c slave from a master mcu, and then output the i2c data along 8 pins to the lcd)

[negroslim]

http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=2737.msg18959#msg18959

HDL_CinC_Dragon,

I think Half Shell is thinking along our same lines with his idea of using this microcomputer (see the link above).  I think what keeps robotics down to a more basic level (mostly because of the battery life question) is the fact that you just can't pack much computing power into a mobile unit.  It would be a monumental task to get a full fled cpu working in a robot but if one could work out the power questions and even make it the "dumbest" computer (circa 386 or something like that) into a really smart robot with just about unlimited potential. 

If you ever played games like Traveller and such the ships never ran on a single program they instead employed software/hardware programs to complete certain tasks in defense and improved attacks.  I think if you had a robot with a lot of expandability one would "teach" the robot to do one thing such as line following then teach it other things through new functions and extension of classes and then work specifically on giving it the AI to figure out which functions or programs to run, or run them on multiple threads at the same time so as to have the robot running more than one program simultaneously.  Then you use logic to give precendence over which threads get more cycles to complete.  For instance you would want the thread that controls object avoidance to have more cycles than the one that controls an arm to pick up an object.

One would have to come up with some doozie algorithms to make everything work real-time but what the heck (the wright brothers weren't flying jets were they?)

In closing why should only the major researcher's and the government be the only ones to have memory on their bots with lots of processing power.  If a cpu board could be tapped into then we could all create some pretty cool programs to make our bots even more autonomous.

just use the components out of a netbook