Giving Old Electronics a New Life

Photo by makelessnoise via Flickr

Old electronics surround us -- our once shiny iPhones from 2007 are now in the back of a junk drawer, broken projectors, old televisions and computers are all waiting for a new home. More often than not, these items find themselves in landfills. But before you chuck that piece of junk, consider this -- it might have some very valuable components that would be perfect for a new DIY electronics project. What about reusing what you've got?

Here are three resources to help you out:

In Print: If you're wondering what you can salvage, I highly recommend checking out Unscrewed by Ed Sobey. This book is a great starting point to figuring out what's salvageable from your old electronics. Unscrewed will give you a guide reuse that old flatbed scanner, how to create a barbeque supercharger from a Dustbuster impeller and help you create a robot from a stepper motor found in an ink-jet printer.

Online: Two Bay Area companies, Make and Instructables, provide excellent guides and tutorials on hundreds of topics. When I'm not blogging for KQED I head to my day job as Instructables' tech editor, so yes, I am definitely partial to the site and its 40,000 user submitted tutorials. Whether you want to give your Roomba a new life, or build a fan out of computer parts, these websites have you covered.

In person: Gray Area Foundation for the Arts (GAFFTA) is holding a "Frankenstein Electronics" series which aims to teach us all how to find and reuse components. This class is open to electronics novices and basic electronics theory will be discussed. The four part series starts tonight.

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