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How to Salvage Components from Old Circuit Boards

How to Salvage Components from Old Circuit Boards

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Are you among the one who dump electronic appliances once it becomes non functional or insignificant? Think again before doing this next time. Do you know that you can improve your component inventory and reduce E-wastes if you master the art of salvaging. In fact you can obtain tons of handy components if you know where to look, what to look and how to salvage it. Treat this article as a beginners guide to teach you the art of salvaging the old circuit boards.Let’s seek answer for the three important questions What, how and why to salvage from old circuit boards.

WHY SHOULD YOU SALVAGE:

  1. Salvaging helps you to enrich your component inventory, in fact you could find components which will be a hard catch in the market.
  2. Salvaging will help you to save money.
  3. Through salvaging you can reduce the E-waste by reusing stuffs you find.
  4. You can get your hardware skills honed through Salvaging.

WHAT YOU CAN SALVAGE:

There are endless stuffs you can salvage from circuit boards. But below are the given things which are worth to look for.

MOTORS: Stepper, Servo, DC are some of the motor types you will find while salvaging.

TRANSFORMERS:  You will find Step down transformer in almost all Electronic appliances. Step up transformers are pretty rare still handy if you found one.

SPEAKERS & BUZZERS: Found in all audio gadgets and appliances. You might find some top notch quality speakers if you attempt to salvage TV, Old Audio units etc.

SWITCHES AND BUTTONS: This part will be the most reliable one you could find while salvaging. Besides you will find various types of switches in different shapes and sizes, comes in handy always.

LCD AND LED SCREENS: Do not miss these at any cost since its worth quite a money. You could always search for its part number and use it along with your MCU.



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MEMORY CHIPS: If you have the chance of salvaging a computer or computing gadgets then smile its your lucky day. RAMs, Hard Drives, Cooler Fans, CPU and GPU units (If they are worth salvaging). These parts generally cost quite a fortune and you don’t want to miss these out.

CONNECTORS: Simple yet very effective salvage pick you could find in many circuit boards. Find it, take it, categorize it and you are good to use.

IC’s : This is probably a tricky thing to salvage but if you do it right you might get a worthy piece for your inventory. Don’t let the looks fool you, some IC’s are really worth good money.

CAPACITORS: You will find this in all the circuits, i would suggest you to be selective than salvaging all capacitors. Large electrolytic capacitors are the ones you should really look for as it costs more and will be handy when building and repairing stuffs. But be careful, always use a multimeter to measure for its voltage before salvaging. Some capacitors might hold charge and delivers shock if mishandled.

TRANSISTORS: Having a large number of different transistors in your inventory is always a great advantage while building projects. MOSFETS ,BJT’s everything is worth going into your inventory.

RESISTORS AND OTHER DISCRETE COMPONENTS: You will find discrete components such as resistors, diodes, small caps, LEDs etc in every circuits. I won’t say it will be your best catch since you can buy these kinda components in bulk for cheap. But it won’t hurt to salvage these if you got some time to kill.

Now you know what to Salvage from the circuit boards, Let’s move into the “HOW” part of this article. Let us see how you could possibly take these components out a rigid PCB boards without damaging it.

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How to Salvage

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