Comment by rnewme
16 days ago
You would be surprised how much trash there is in the city around us, that you suddenly start noticing when you have a diy project. Let me share you some moments of my own with you.
I was leaving university campus with my buddies, talking about building magnetic card reader to check contents of my campus library card. Just as I was explaining magnetic heads to one of the guys I see a random cassette player few meters from us, in pile of illegaly dumped trash. Mid sentence I stop, grab and smash the radio open on the curb, pull out the magnetic head and continue talking about the said magnetic head. Guys were bewildered.
At other time I was watching a video about TV fresnel lens based lighting fixture, waiting for my date. After the date while taking the girl to the car I spotted a flat TV next to a dumpster box. Car was right across the street so I took the TV home. She quickly learned I'm no stranger to dumpster adventures. I had the light don't by the morning.
Almost 2 years before that I needed a short (30cm max) ac plug with wire to fix something in the workshop, and I remembered seeing a broken electric tea pot behind our local dumpster while taking out the trash, it was exactly the right length of wire, and awh better than I needed.
Recently, I was renovating something with my wife, and I needed a vacuum cleaner for the drywall sanding and other dust and spills related to that. Just few days after settingy eyes on karcher vacuum I find one in the dumpster as we were walking from the cinema back home. I opened it up next day and realized previous owner had thrown away brand new vacuum cleaner. They had not unpacked and set the filter, hair and piece of cloth got into the air sucking fins and got it stuck. I pulled the trash out, set the filter and voila!
Over the last 10 years I had many more situations like that :)
A million years ago, I spent two cold nights standing on my head in the driver's side footwell of my E36 BMW, installing an inexpensive Wal-Mart-sourced CodeAlarm remote starter to make my then-wife happy.
It worked great. It could even operate the door locks and roll the windows up with the fob (none of which sounds very special for a modern vehicle, but my car was not equipped with remote-anything from the factory so all of this was very nice).
Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident. I was bummed. Replacements were available to purchase and I hemmed and hawed about buying one, or maybe upgrading to a fancier system, or just getting over it and continuing to use the key in the lock cylinder (like some commoner!) to lock and unlock the doors.
And then I was walking down the street in Bexley, Ohio, and I saw a broken laundry basket full of discarded things ("illegally dumped" things) on the curb. It appeared to have all manner of random household trash.
But on the top of that basket of stuff was a plastic clamshell. And inside that clamshell was an identical remote starter kit -- exactly the same as the one I'd bought forever ago.
It was unopened.
A few careful slashes with my pocket knife later, and I had a new remote. Even the ancient tiny little 12V (A23) alkaline battery still worked -- and kept working for months. (I left the rest of the trash where it was.)
Sometimes the universe does provide for those who keep their eyes open.
(Pairing the new remote was interesting because it involved operating the brake pedal switch while the car was turned off, and the E36 turns off the brake light circuit completely when the car is turned off... But those are just BMW problems. I got it sorted.)
I loved this because last year we spent days redoing electrical and wiring new engine (2.8) into friends E36, including radio code and remote install, some vintage god knows how old setup ge found in local Craigslist equivalent, perhaps even the same kit as you had. Love the simplicity of older cars like e36, but I still prefer my E34's - except for window raisers and few other details, surprisingly little electronics to maintain.
> Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident.
I kind of feel you dropped the lede here. Need to hear this story as well.
>> Over a decade later, the fob got destroyed in an unfortunate boating incident.
> Need to hear this story as well.
I bet it's "dropped her keys into the lake." Perhaps after awkwardly balancing them a place that, in hindsight, should not have been used.
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I am more suprised that the BMW outlasted the remote starter!
Old bimmers are surprisingly durable. Esp 30/34/36, although, they're getting a bit rare..
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Unfortunately, some of use are not so lucky, at least I am not, haha.
I got the idea to tinker with satellite dishes to make a simple radio telescope. I remember riding around and constantly seeing old DirectTV satellite dishes constantly on the side of the road for trash. Before this idea. So I figured, oh, I can easily get my hands on one. As soon as I committed to that project, I never saw a single satellite dish sitting by the street as I rode around.
If it makes you feel better you probably would not have been able to just pick up the dishes and use them without buying extra parts. I had DirectTV and when I cancelled they came and took the feed horn off the satellite dish but left the rest of the dish. I’m not sure how much a feed horn would cost but at least the dish wouldn’t have been immediately usable. I also was interested in making a radio telescope but gave up when I realized DirectTV took that part of the dish
Back when wardriving was a more popular pastime (and before the ISM bands got clogged completely up with everything), I wanted to play around more with long-range 802.11b/g signals.
I scored an old Primestar dish and LNBF. This was the easy part: I just talked to one of the guys at a small local company that dealt with things like consumer satellite, and asked nice. He was curious what I wanted to use it for (Primestar was dead by that point), so I told him, and he thought that was a fun idea so he gave me one or two that he had kicking around in the shop.
The idea was to toss the LNBF and put a biquad antenna made from wire at just the right spot where the parabola focused. It seemed easy enough, but my fabrication skills 20 years ago were lacking, and I didn't have any measurement gear beyond a multimeter and a tape measure, so the project never went anywhere.
But nowadays, with modern accessible CAD and 3D printing and sendcutsend and JLC and SDR dongles and Harbor Freight and everything else? With the RF gear I either own these days, or have access to? Yeah, I'd probably be able to make it work. I might even be able to turn a new feedhorn on my buddy's lathe to increase efficiency. FFS, there's probably already parametric models out there for OpenSCAD that just do this thing.
It seems much, much more do-able with today's resources than it was back then.
Except, also these days: If I wanted a big parabolic wifi antenna, I'd probably just buy one that was made in a factory...and use it. :)
We need to deal with some important issues you raised.
> After the date... She quickly learned I'm no stranger to dumpster adventures.
Ah, was there another date?
> Recently, I was renovating something with my wife
Any relationship to dumpster adventuress?
There were more dates, including illegal aquirement of shopping cart on her side for me (she drove it in public transport across half of the city during night), stop sign from me to her (new, unpacked, found on a construction site, NOT removed from street!) and broken fire extinguisher from her again (saw a pile behind a local stadium and somehow got through the fence).
My wife is not the same lady, she prefers store bought items, however she does appreciate my resourcedulness. As a well paid professional and somewhat functional member of society I have minimizedy trash utilization activities (I lack space in our new town).
Ok that was a fun answer, thank you!
I don’t mean to boast but I’m kind of a big deal—I was able to get 3 shopping carts off the free section of Craigslist when a local food bank discarded them. One awesome part about living here in the Seattle suburbs is excellent free stuff that doesn’t even require larceny to obtain.
My wife is tolerant of these activities too but prefers I stay out of dumpsters. How dare she ;)
Yes, according to a llm. He had a particularly touching moment repairing a broken drone he found with his son. Shortly after the story took a dark turn with the cancer diagnosis. As the condition worsened, he made an effort to document his projects, scavenging 3D printers, partly as a manual and partly as a diary. "The knowledge that my kids would have these memories and skills to carry forward, and perhaps pass on to their children, made the days feel meaningful."
Not what I was expecting. Perhaps the model was not a reliable source.
I must disappoint, it is a daughter and she's too small to catch the neighbors kid drones. No cancer either thankfully, but I am writing a sort of life manual/family journal for her. I think it's pretty common thing today. Wife is doing the set up email. For child and mail her thing. No 3D printers harmed yet, but I did ruin one light show galvos to make a plotter, hehe.
Are the girl from the flat TV date and your wife the same person though? :)
Luckily/sadly no.
This is becoming less common among electro-trash as SMD rules the day instead of larger, more discrete, more easy-to-separate components. For example, try pulling anything useful - camera lens, buttons, memory, ICs, anything - from any mobile phone tossed away.
Yea, most of tech is not human size anymore. Still, some things can be repurposed in high tech workshop with a lot of skill. For example Optical Pickup Unit from Blu ray for laser scanning microscope.
Exactly this, one has to keep their eyes open and give luck a chance to happen.
My personal favourite save is a Bosch dishwasher that was kerbside. The drain motor was stuck, had melted plastic around the impeller. I have it in my workshop but it’s better than the one in the house.
Mine was pretty easy to fix - I was surprised how simple it was. IIRC, there's an inlet valve, a circulating/heater pump, and an exhaust pump.
Dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, threadmills, all have common issues and fairly simple fixes, if spare parts are available. I'm actually surprised there aren't general purpose boards, electric motors, heaters pumps etc out there that could be just swapped in. As long as the enclosure is in presentable state, that is
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The Bosch dishwasher has a kind of a plastic brain on one side as well, a labyrinth of water that sets off certain things in the washing cycle. It's neat!
Someone had abandoned a vacuum cleaner identical to my own (10+ year old) model from a not so common make in the ground floor lobby of my apartment block. It was surreal walking past it for months, just sitting there alone in the corner.
My own vacuum cleaner was missing an attachment, but I never touched the abandoned one because I wasn't sure whether it was truly abandoned.
A few weeks later I found the same cleaner had gone missing, checked the dumpster - yep, there it was. Fished it out and now I have a complete set of attachments again.
They do the same in the buildings here, I started leaving note on things "I'll take this in 10 days if you don't needed it, my num is:xxxxxx". No complaints so far
> Mid sentence I stop, grab and smash the radio open on the curb, pull out the magnetic head and continue talking about the said magnetic head. Guys were bewildered.
In what world is this acceptable to take some trash and make the trash situation worse by bashing it apart in the street?
Wasn't much worse though, I cracked it open in two main parts (front face fell off, exposing cassette decks), and put it back on pile. You couldn't tell a difference. I would not make a bigger mess than it already is.
Unfortunately, where I live, people bring their trash to the dumpster. And it's illegal to take stuff out of it…
Is the girl from the date with the TV now the wife?
Nope, but wife has seen worse!