Mark Stosberg said:
What we are passing on here is either tested to be not-working or incredibly obsolete.
Ah, but like most people, you probably aren't quite of the same repurposing mentality that I am.
Even broken things can be reused for other purposes; I have taken dead harddisks apart (even old 5.25" full-height units!) and found many things inside I could reuse in various projects. On the oldest ones, there are even discrete thru-hole components that I can use, sometimes including motor-control circuits or amplifiers, hall sensors, transistors, resistors, etc.
My 2QD brushed motor controller was built (except for the PCB) entirely of components salvaged from various computer, printer, UPS, copier, and monitor electronics boards.
Plastic casings can even be reused, or parts of them. The little windscreen/readout-sunshade on CrazyBike2 used to be an Epson inkjet's paper tray extender.
DayGLo Avenger has a lot of stuff reused on it, too, from ancient rackmount equipment.
Can't even remember all the sci-fi props and models I've built out of such things, and either sold or given away, though I think the ~12-foot one made of old toner cartridges probably is the biggest, with a much smaller Borg cube being the next biggest (though the next heaviest is a big ugly-gun).
Even old phones can be useful, as "drop ships":
Toner cartridges also make good hand props:
On the other hand, there are some things, like inkjet printers. We get loads of donations of working printers, so we are more liberal about we declare as "dead". If we kept everything that could possibly be fixed, our storage space would fill-up, no more donations of any sort could be accepted to be picked over, and the operation would grind to a halt.
That's true.
I have this problem at my house, and I do periodically have to recycle or toss out some of the bulkier bits like plastic casings and whatnot, and steel internal frameworks, PCBs I've taken all or most of the parts off of, etc.
If you are interested in the idea of this kind of re-use operation, Free Geek has a page on
getting started. We got started before we realized that Free Geek existed. Our start was a simple: A spare room at a church, a few volunteers, and a lot of the seat-of-the-pants navigation.
If I had the time I would definitely start one of my own, but I will at least see if there is already one here.
