Tips on Parts Salvaging:

If you find yourself with some computers or electronics that you are going to toss out here are some tips for salvaging parts:

1. I like to keep on hand a couple of spare hard drives, floppy drives, CD-roms and CD/DVD burners but I don't save them all. If you tinker with computers keep a few on hand.  The rest you could sell on ebay rather than toss.

2. I almost always save computer memory and CPUs, even if they are very old.  They are small and you can throw them in drawer somewhere.  There does not appear to be a great demand for these, but one never knows.  

3. Jumpers, keep all that you can. Those little jumpers on old mother boards or video card, even hard drives come in handy if you lose one or need to create custom jumper settings on your own homebrew projects.

4. Screws. Keep the screws from the drive mounts and back pannel, those come in handy if you ever loose one.   Get a small divided container to store your little screws, you can never have too many.

5. Stand offs.  These little metal or nylon standoffs help support PCBs and most computers don't have them, but if you find them during your electronics tear down, keep them all.  You never know when you might want some and those little suckers are price.

6. Wired connectors. I love to cut out wired connectors of any kind. The small ones that go to the mother board from the front pannel are handy for smaller electronics and the power supply connectors come in hand for larger voltage load connections like DC motors. You can easily and quickly splice in these connectors to your own projects.

7. Switches.  If you can easily save switches those are handy to keep as well.  If I have to spend more than 2 minutes getting a switch out, for me, it's not worth it. 

8. Speakers.  I love saving old computer speakers, they are so easy to add to microcontrollers or robots to give audio feedback or make random R2D2 type beeps. 

There are tons of other parts you could keep, motors and LEDs come to mind; but those are ones I personally do not save often. 

Happy Roboting,
-Justin