What to do?

I have a plea to all the engineers of the world. I have a box full of forgotten electronics that are gathering dust. I’m looking for some summer projects and I’m wondering if you have any ideas about what I could do with any of these things??

So we have a top of the line (for 2004, haha) Sony 5-megapixel camera and a beautiful, black MacBook that has something wrong with the logic board where it won’t charge batteries but will run when plugged in. On the next row we have from L-R, a broadband USB, a broken iPhone 3g, a broken iPhone 3gs, an old iPod, a wifi hotspot and two cheap prepaid cellphones.

I feel like there has to be a good project somewhere in there, I have to be able to do *something* with all this. I just can’t come up with any projects to hack together or modify or strip for parts or whatever.

Help?!?

2 Replies to “What to do?”

  1. Well if it were me …

    Donate the two cheap phones to the womens shelters http://www.cellphonesforlife.org/
    Sell the Apple and Iphones on eBay for parts.
    Take the eBay money and build a time-lapse rig for the still camera. 🙂
    Listen to the iPod while your time lapse stuff clicks away.

    That last two ..well … sometimes junk is just junk.

  2. Broken things are broken because the sum of their parts doesn’t add up. But they still contain components that are useful and sometimes difficult to source if/when you need them. Disassemble the broken stuff and you’ll find very cool stuff. The last broken laptop I took apart had a faulty motherboard. I kept the screen (now a video screen for a security cam), Bluetooth and wifi modules (connect them with a ucontroller and you can rxtx with your smartphone).

    The smartphones: what’s broken exactly? If the one on the left only has a broken screen then remove all the casing and you’ll have a very cheap and compact development board with wifi, bluetooth, camera, storage,…

    The two prepaid cellphones are old tech and there’s not much to do with them, they’re not built in a modular way.

    Wifi hotspot: check if you can mod it with openWRT.

    Digital camera: remove the built-in filter (google it) and take IR or UV photographs.

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