Around this time last year, I made a post about helping the environment through a service called “Earth911″ (See that post here).  This post isn’t about the environment, nor is it about woodworking, electronics, weather, or any of the other weird stuff you’ve come to expect from my writings.  This is about helping the thing we all hold most dear in this life: ourselves.  Readers in my audience who are on the techie side of things will likely have already known about this for years, but I also know I have others in my audience who are not.

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As we continue through Woodworkers Safety Week, many resources that were previously unknown to me have surfaced.  A new one, is Earth 911.com.  This was brought to my attention by The Woodwhisperer Woodworking Video podcast, Episode 88 - Safety Q&A.  (Before I forget, keep voting for Marc in the BHG contest.   He’s still in second place and hanging strong, so don’t stop voting now!)

Anyway, Earth911 is a search engine you can use to find locations for hazardous materials disposal.  As a woodworker, you could use this to dispose of old, or dirty varnish, or any other material so it doesn’t end up in the landfill.  If you are a DiY tinkerer like I am, the search engine is of GREAT use.  One thing that comes to mind is circuit board disposal (Or any E-Waste) where they can recycle the silver and gold, but also reclaim the lead.  If you don’t know my stance on this issue, you should read this article from last year.

The absolute first thing that I used this site for was car battery disposal.  I have been accumulating these in the garage for some reason…mainly because I didn’t know of a safe way to dispose of them.  Lo and behold, the search engine turned up an unexpected result: Wal Mart.  I was a little skeptical, so I called to verify, and sure enough, they do take car batteries to recycle!

I’m gonna use this website a LOT, and I invite you to do the same.

Like everyone else, I have been roped into looking at Circuit City’s liquidation deals (or the lack thereof).  I walked in there with a basic need of finding a good deal on a Canon Rebel XSi for the upcoming storm chasing year.  Even with 30 percent off, it’s still what I can get it for online.  Oh well.  Those who know me will definitely remember that I am always looking for the deals and hardly ever pay close to retail for anything.  What can I say, if I wore corduroy pants I would start a fire.

What I did come across that made the trip worthwhile was their “fixture” table.  This is where they were selling off bags of screws, hardware, and the likewise from their car audio installation shop, and other general odds and ends from around the office.  For a total of ten dollars, I bought roughly a 500 count of screws in a bag used for mounting speakers in boxes ($4), a bag of 4 speaker terminals ($5, maybe that was a little high in retrospect), and an HP Jetdirect 175x with no power supply for $1.

Immediately after returning home, I opened the bag containing the print server.  To much dismay, there was a special DC input that none of the 100’s of power supply bricks in my designated cardboard box would fit.  Perhaps I would have to break down and buy a replacement…..

All prices for replacements were in the neighborhood of $27 dollars after price and shipping.  Still better than a brand new unit at $129, but you all know I wasn’t about to go out like that either!  I remembered the Jetdirect print server I took out of service a few years ago (I don’t throw anything away, and don’t think I payed one red cent for this print server, either).  It worked well, but I no longer had printers with parallel ports so it ceased to be of use.  Whatdya know….years of production apart, and a quick Google search confirms the power supply part numbers match!  Only I could be so lucky……

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Now I have a functioning USB print server, for $1.

By the way, for those of you looking to eventually take advantage of Circuit City’s liquidation prices, they change them every Thursday morning.  I’m not sure whether they make them higher or lower at this point, but I thought I would relay that piece of knowledge nonetheless.

Since Ike has me stuck in the house today, it gives me a chance to get to some badly neglected projects. I ripped these two circuit boards out of a couple of dead UPS (Uninteruptable Power Supply) units that my friend Barry gave me to salvage. The batteries are currently being used in a fox hunting transmitter unit. Here’s the before shot before I started doing the recovery:

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You may look at this and think it is total junk. In our modern day ecosystem, the techno-trash our species has produced is causing an overwhelming impact on our landfills, and everything downstream of them. The toxic lead runoff from a circuit board can seep into our water supplies and can have negative consequences on many other things. No, I have not become a hippy, and I’m not encouraging you to go lead a life of poverty just to give back to the environment. What I am saying is, please be careful about what you throw away. If at all possible, recycle it. Be mindful of where that trash is going to go.

That being said, if you are still here, I will continue.

One of my hobbies to keep all of that techno-waste from hitting the landfill is to recover parts that may be of use to future projects of mine. I’ve been stockpiling the circuit boards in boxes, with the intent of taking them to a recycler to reclaim the hazardous materials on them. If anyone knows of such a place in Dallas, let me know. Here is what I reclaimed in about an hour off of the above boards:

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A great bag of loot from this one! About 8 LED’s (light emitting diode), a few LM317 voltage regulators, some N-Channel MOSFET(Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistor) power transistors (60V 10A, AWESOME!), a few 30 amp fuses, transformers, bridge rectifiers, 5 watt resistors, and so on. These parts would probably be about 25 to 30 dollars total if you bought them new. I know your time is worth something, and maybe I came out a little under in that regard. The way I see it though, I am keeping my junk box stocked up for future projects, and keeping a little bit of volume out of the landfill. If it’s your thing to help the environment and have a little fun in the process, this may be something you want to do as well.

This also reminds me of the scrounging I did when I was in school for things. It’s no secret that a lot of students aren’t rich, and a lot of times, this was the only way I could afford the things I needed for projects!

Tonight I was watching videos of different lathe operations, thinking of when I would finally get to use my lathe. I happened upon two terms I had not heard in a long time: Curie point [temperature], and Austinizing. Not the usual drivel you find on Youtube, I know, but onward we go…..

Quickly, Curie point is the temperature at which magnetic material loses it’s magnetic properties.

Austenizing is merely a process where the metal is heated to a solid solution and cooled rapidly in either oil, water (or air, as it were). This makes the steel hard, but brittle. To overcome the brittle properties of the metal, it is then usually tempered at a very controlled (hot) temperature for a controlled time to make it a little more ductile (bendable, less likely to fracture). Usually, I just hear “heat treated“.

Anyway, the actual usage of the two terms was because of confusion between them. One commenter was using the terms interchangeably. This is often the case, because a lot of steel alloys have a very close Curie point and Austenite transformation. In some cases, this is not so. M2 tool grade steel, for instance, (the stuff they make wrenches out of) is one such example.

Not really a big to do about anything, but it brought up some interesting subjects that I used to know a lot more about (as you can see, I barely regurgitated the definitions), and must put on my to do list to relearn.

Good stuff!

For some reason, when they built a lot of the buildings in the early to mid 90’s, they decided it would be a good idea to wire the entire building with Fiber Optics to every desktop, thinking technology would catch up. Enter Present day: Apparently technology has caught up in every regard except for the cost efficiency of a fiber card in every PC and laptop in the building (Have you ever tried to order a laptop with a fiber optic network interface?). Fiber to Ethernet converter boxes are what a lot of I.T. shops are using to get around that nuance. There is one inherent problem: They don’t last very long. Here is a picture of the circuit boards that came out of a bunch I am in the process of salvaging:

Note the white circles and arrows. Each of these has a 25 MHz crystal oscillator running the clock. Something I have not determined is whether this is an ordinary crystal oscillator or a TCXO (Temperature Controlled Crystal Oscillator). Anyone who is not familiar with the difference between an oscillator and a TCXO need not be afraid. Crystals, by nature, are affected by temperature. The resonant frequency can change (sometimes drastically) with the addition or subtraction of heat. TCXO’s resolve this fundamental problem by providing corrections to the shift in frequency using analog sampling of the output and compensating accordingly.

The challenge with identifying it correctly is that there is virtually no data on the internet for this part, and both types of oscillators can look exactly alike! (For those interested, they are all MMD MB050HA) If anyone knows, please inform me.

Either way, these are all getting reclaimed and thrown in the junk box for a future project! 25 MHz is not ideal for any microcontroller clock, but with a little convincing I could probably turn it into something on one of the HF ham radio bands. Happy circuit bending!