Loads o’ Random Stuff
Yesterday I found an interesting advertisement. A Berkeley student was moving out of the area, and was selling his entire collection of electronics and robotics parts for $50. Of course I had to pick it up, so I’m now the proud owner of more random electronics stuff than you can imagine! Click the photos below to see larger versions.
Some of the more notable parts of the collection:
- An AIRat2 maze-solving robot. This apparently sells for $400 new! But this one is missing its LCD panel, and I don’t have the software for it. Still, I bet I can get it doing something interesting.
- A second half-built robot, with a couple of geared motors.
- A servo and a stepper motor (I think).
- Assorted robot tires.
- Two sonar rangefinders.
- A Sharp rangefinder (IR based?)
- A Xilinx CPLD development board.
- Some kind of camera and interface board.
- Four 11 volt lithium-polymer battery packs, and a LiPo charger.
- Tons of NiMH and NiCd rechargables.
- A 12 volt, 1 amp power supply.
- A solar panel.
- Lots of protoboards.
- Four LCD text displays.
- Assorted ICs: op-amps, voltage regulators, 555 timers, and more.
- A pile of IR and visible LEDs.
- A “helping hands” tool.
- A very nice wire cutter/stripper tool.
- A zillion feet of wire of various gauges and types.
- A lifetime supply of resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, relays, pots, switches, headers, etc.
That’s a ton of stuff! Hopefully I’ll get a chance to use it all well. Some of the parts like the batteries, CPLD, and passive components I can definitely use, but others like the robot or the sonar rangefinder will require a decent investment of time to investigate.
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Holy crap man! Nice find 😀 Yeah, the Sharp Rangefinders are normally IR. The ones that output a distance are normally analogue, though I am pretty sure they make serial binary ones, but I’m not positive. If it is not a rangefinder, it will output 0 for detection, and 1 for no detection, normally. Be glad I am not in that area, I might have been fighting you for all this cool stuff ;P
Looks like most of that was geared towards robotics, but $50 to bolster up an electronics collection? Very good deal!
WOW! That collection is a real wowszer.
Amazing. So where do you go from here? I suspect that there’s an item in there to make your BMOW much better.
Great collection of junk! As the saying goes: to invent, you need imagination and a pile of junk. Was that a quote by Edison? Anyway, I’ve just had a go with this:
http://www.tgimboej.org/
The Great Internet Migratory Box Of Electronics Junk! The first UK box arrived here a few days ago, and I now need to get on with photographing and sorting the contents. Then, I’ll take a few parts (the 6502 CPU board for one), add a few parts, and send it on its way.
Very cool, I’ve read about the migrating box of junk before, but didn’t know anyone who’d ever received it until now. Have you posted an inventory anywhere?
I haven’t done a proper write-up at my end yet, but the sender posted this photo on Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/aperrott/2745769259/
A friend of mine also shot some video of unpacking the box, and I expect he’ll post that soon.
The maze solving robot was from an IEEE article dated in the late 70’s. The name is MicroMouse. It is design to solve a 16×16 maze with the center being the goal. If you can get to the center with the shortest time you win! The Japanese is really big on this particular competition. There are many different type of robotic competition and this is one of many. In fact, the first world Micromouse competition was held in 1985 at the Japan World Fair in Tsukuba. It’s quite a fun project and a national competition is held each year at APEC in US.