Monthly Archives: December 2016

Christmas Printer Salvage

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For a “Christmas Present”, I got an outdated and somewhat broken HP Deskjet 520 for salvage. What I ended up with was a brushed DC motor, a stepper motor, a few circuit boards, 2 very nice steel rods, and the printer’s power supply (~10-0-10).

P.S. Merry Christmas!

P.P.S I know I’m posting this after Christmas.

The control panel on the printer.
The rather strange power suppply
The printer with it’s cover off.
This is off-topic, but I got new screwdrivers!
Some circuit boards on the bottom.
I got the bottom off of the printer.
A nice big motor was exposed!
The “Motherboard” of the printer.
The circuit board that most likely rectifies the power and distributes it.
Some more plastic taken off the printer exposes more parts!
That large motor removed
Where the ink cartrige used to be.
A drive belt and pully.
One steel bar with the print head thing on it.
The printer is running low on parts!
This steel rod has many rollers on it.
The gear at the end of the steel rod.
The stepper motor!

 

My “New” Server: a Dell PowerEdge 750.

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I recently saved another piece of equipment from electronic recycling. It is a Dell PowerEdge 750 server. It came with windows server 2003, but since it used to be on a domain, I could not sign in or do anything. It needed a new OS. The issue is that it has a 32 bit processor and all the windows server operating systems past windows server 2008 are 64 bit only. So the hunt for a new OS begins. I can take windows server 2003 off the list right away since you can’t even download it anymore, and windows server 2008 was equally as hard to find. Luckily there was a “Windows Server 2008 32-bit DEMO” on the Microsoft website. They also had free product keys for these outdated systems so I was able to install it on this server and it finally worked.

P.S. Sorry about some of the pictures being low-quality. My camera’s battery died and I had to use my phone.

The front of the server.
The server turned on.
The inside of the server is fairly simple.
The inside of this Dell PowerEdge 2950 is much more complex than the PowerEdge 750.
The server’s “new” OS looks a lot like windows XP…

More Stuff!

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I recently picked up more old miscellaneous tech items for free. I got another old PoE switch, a UPS, an ancient server, and an ATX power supply (those are universally useful). I also got a broken robotic tape library. A robotic tape library is a thing that holds 50+ LTO tapes. It is basically a robot hand designed to pick up tapes and put them in tape drives.   LTO tapes are like a hard drive and a VHS tape combined. So yeah, the tapes are ways of storing files. The only difference is that they can hold insane amounts of files. Each tape is about 8 TB. Sadly there is a big downside. It takes a very long time to write to LTO tapes making them only useful for computer backups and archiving. I will post more updates about the salvaged components from the tape drive, the “new” server, and will post updates about the PoE switches once those darn fans are delivered.

The back of the tape library.
The UPS backup
The ATX power supply.
The PoE switch (top) and the server (bottom).
Well… I don’t have room for anymore projects.
The front of the tape library.

Recent Estate Sale Treasures

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I recently went to an estate sale and got 3 vacuum tubes, (RCA 24LQ6/24JE6A, RCA Radiotron R-CC 5, and Sylvania 3GK5) A nice metal pump (in cardboard box), and a tube handbook that might have been a waste of money because it is just a replacement handbook. I was able to find the pinout of the large 24LQ6 tube, but I’m still searching for the others. I also got a box of wires at that sale, but I did not show it in this picture since I already sorted through them and decided what I wanted to keep. Everything I mentioned only cost me 6 US Dollars.

The “Tube Substitution Handbook” .
Tubes in-box.
The pump out of it’s box.
All the tubes out of their boxes.

PoE Switches

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I got two old power over Ethernet (PoE) switches for free not too long ago. I have a small  16 -port switch, and a large 24-port switch. The problem with both of them is after running nonstop for 15 years the fans stopped working. An easy fix, just it’s a real pain waiting for new fans to ship from China. The large one basically has the same problem, but I heard that it had problems with the actual Ethernet switch part. If it’s not something the reset button can fix it might have to go in the salvage bin. I will give you an update once the fans come and I put then in the switch. In case you were wondering they are not gigabit switches, but they should be fast enough for me.

The top of the switches
The top of the battery backup.
This is the inside of the switches, in case you wanted to see it.
I also got a battery backup out of the deal.

Welcome!

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This is my first blog post. I just wanted to say hello and thanks for visiting! I will post something else after this, I just thought it would be appropriate to put up a first post unrelated to anything.

-Owen