Is there any "market" for old electronics, even for free?

The freecycle here is dying away. Get far fewer emails from them than 5 years ago. Though someone did take my gas lawnmower on Monday, and I got a small stack of Handyman magazines yesterday.

But those are exceptions.

Ebay reaches more people. Those here who read Freecycle, or NextDoor, or a community webpage I could use, don't know how to fiddle with any of my old stuff.

Shadow mask.

If you have ADSL... I still have 3M DSL from the telco... I bought my older used modem on eBay a couple years ago.

ill due to very minor failures combined, the rarity of good repair options,

This goes to a post I made some years ago when a British gentleman asked ab out initiating a 'repair cafe. I have been doing this along in the vintage electronics hobby for well over 20 years now - so my 'rules' are as follow s:

I participate in the occasional radio-club related repair clinic, and give one twice a year in Kutztown, teaching basic diagnostic and repair techniqu es for vintage radios and electronics from the 1920s to approximately the 1

990s. There are some basic rules for the protection of the clinician and th e 'customer'.

a) Do not take money. Do not imply Fee-for-Service. The moment money is tak en, there is an expectation of professionalism and expertise that conveys a level of liability.

b) Make it clear that you are doing this as a hobby, and that you are demon strating technique and skills that may be useful to the customer in their f uture endeavors along the same hobby-related lines.

c) If parts are to be replaced, those parts *must* be obtained and supplied by the customer. Pointing to possible sources is OK, as long as you are ab le to point to more than one.

d) If power must be applied to an item during the process, the source must be isolated, and you must explain to the customer the reasons for it, and a dvise him/her why this is so.

e) Kluge repairs left in place are not acceptable, full stop. For instance, if one jumps out a damaged 'fuse resistor' to determine whether replacing it is worthwhile and the customer does not have the actual replacement - yo u may go as far as to suggest that the item is repairable - but not here, a nd not without the proper parts. Remove the jumper.

Whether or not an organization has "insurance cover', should there be an un fortunate event, the individual tech involved will remain involved whether liable for actual damages or not. And whereas most individuals are sincere and mean no harm, a fire, shock or other occurrence will change even the mo st gentle person.

I will teach technique, and I will show individuals how to make their own b asic repairs such as re-capping, cleaning and similar. I will point them to books, manuals and sources. But in a situation where one is dealing with t he *GENERAL PUBLIC*, I will take nothing for granted.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

-/153433002888

in the states, you may want to check with your municipal waste company that services your area. There are some that will collect electronics, includ ing devices with CRT, paints, and some 'hazardous wastes' on a per call ba sis. They do this because it is part of their service agreement. I recent ly got rid of 4, 19" crt monitors and about 10 partially full 1-gal paint c ans.

In some municipalities, there are 'dump sites' where people can take thei r trash. In these sites there is usually a room with tables where people c an donate their electronics, books, games, etc. for anyone to pick up if th ey have a use. While visiting a relative in Lincoln, MA, I visited one of these places and picked up a nice apple 27" all in one. Assuming it did n ot work, and suspecting that it had suffered from the defective capacitor p roblem for units of that era, I got it, replaced the caps and had a nice sy stem.

Some older devices like MBs have life on ebay. Certain FAX modems have a g ood afterlife - only for the FAX capability. There are a few that implemen t the fax protocol correctly and are useful in fax servers. Well, as long as faxes continue to exist but their usage is declining. j

Only in a very few outlying areas.

I'm trying to set up video surveillance - testing some USB cameras, might go for IP cameras over an ethernet cable. But WiFi is nowhere near fast enough for several 4K video streams.

I only use tech that I need or want, you use it for the sake of it.

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Silly way of looking at it. When I buy I look at the whole price. Item= + postage, or item + fuel for me to drive there. If something is worth= =A310 to Mr Smith, but it costs =A38 to get it to him, you can only ext= ract =A32 from Mr Smith.

Maybe they do over there, but here Gumtree and Freecycle work best. I w= ent on a Facebook group and it had about 20 times less stuff. I put a c= ooker on Gumtree and was phoned in 2 minutes.

People with enough space that just want a crappy screen for a Linux serv= er do.

I've never found anyone on Ebay to come and collect. Ebay buyers seem to expect postage. Gumtree works best here for come get it stuff that's too big to post. Freecycle is fairly good too.

Commander Kinsey wrote

That's not true.

Plenty fast enough for the one for each camera.

But what you need or want is stupid with smartphones.

Wrong, I use tech that I need or want.

Commander Kinsey wrote

Yours is.

So does everyone else with a clue.

Silly way of looking at it.

Bullshit.

The technical term for that is 'pathetically inadequate sample'

There are far fewer of those than there are old CRT tvs or monitors.

Plenty do that with the bigger stuff in big citys and with cars, boats, houses etc etc etc.

Plenty don't with the bigger stuff in big citys and with cars, boats, houses etc etc etc.

Bullshit.

Facebook local buy swap sell groups work much better.

Excellent.

Understood. I have often done the same for friends of friends (who may not already know 'the deal'). Best endeavours, no guarantees and no liability accepted etc.

Check.

Makes sense. A mate used to work that way in his car garage. Mainstream new parts from manufacturer or factor or parts supplied by the customer (where no liability for any consequences relating from a failure of such excepted).

Are we talking auto/isolation-transformers here?

Good example. A Freecycle Colour Laser printer I picked up had two (identical?) thermal switches in series in the fuser heater supply, presumably so that there could be a 'failsafe' switch in case the one became locked shut. I 'temporarily' shorted out the faulty one (and applied a notice on the body of the printer to that effect) and it remains so, but I never left the printer on and it's currently unused in any case. I wouldn't have left it like that if it was going out of my hands.

Agreed. A neighbour asked me if I could show him how he could service the brakes on his own motorbike and because I was aware of his complete lack of wrenching skills (and tools, experience, interest, patience), I declined.

Wise words.

I often have to remind myself that some people don't have the same range of skills as me (/us?). I'm only a 'Jack of all trades' (when that is mostly anything practical that doesn't require lots of training, (expensive) specialist tools or a specific mindset, like plastering or coding) but was born into an era when 'make do and mend' was still just about current and whilst I was always looked after by my parents when it came to important stuff (school equipment etc), I was generally left to sort out my own stuff, like bicycles, mopeds, motorcycles and cars.

I also had an interest in 'things' from an early age and would regularly open stuff up or take faulty things to bits to learn how they worked.

Along those lines I was also often given old electrical stuff, radios and record players by friends and family (mostly faulty at some level) and would often repair them. A broken drive belt, a broken wire, blown fuse or even a transistor shorted to the (earthed) can. ;-)

So I often assume everone else can learn to do the same range of things (if I can, so can they ...) but that isn't always the case (it seems).

A mate is also running Home Assistant home automation software to mostly do things around his fish tanks and recently I dropped off all the parts for him to assemble such a project (a CO2 controller [1]) and had overseen him configuring / programming the ESP32 board and Home Assistant integration remotely over Teamviewer.

I setup the same thing here, tested it and sent him a picture.

His tasks. Solder some header pins onto a uUSB board (1x5, it breaks out a uUSB connector), solder some header pins onto an ESP32 (2 x 19), jumper 2 wires between uUSB board and 4ch opto isolator board (2 wires), jumper the output of the opto to the ESP32 (3 wires).

I'd provided him the circuit diagram for the opto board, the pinout of the ESP32 and plenty of verbal guidance as to the goals.

Phone call the next day:

'I'm getting not 5V out of the uSB boards' (I had given him two boards in case he screwed one up). I took him though various steps and it turned out to be a dirty connection on his DMM.

Then it was a misconnection between uUSB board and input to the opto (Gnd > Gnd, 5V to 'NC'!, 5V wire then moved to Input1).

Then there was a misconnection between opto and ESP32 (Gnd from opto connected to a data pin next to Gnd pin on ESP32).

Once they were all resolved, it all worked as planned. ;-)

He actually added a Dallas '1 wire' temperature sensor himself and to the right pins but it didn't work, turned out to *need* the / a pullup resistor (sometimes doesn't, I was trying to keep it simple for him). ;-)

My point was that I thought he 'understood' what I was telling him but it may well have been that he didn't, knew there was no point in asking as he still wouldn't understand or remember and so let it wash over him knowing I was at the end of the line for guidance, as / when he needed it.

Cheers, T i m

[1] He has an expensive CO2 controller that monitors the CO2 level in a fish tank and then turns on a mains powered solenoid to allow Co2 to bubble though the water for the plants during the day. He didn't want to waste CO2 gas during the night. I didn't want him playing with 240V or tampering with the existing controller so he powered the solenoid from a TP-Link WiFi smart socket controlled by Home Assistant and we used a basic phone charger plug to supply 5V to the ESP32 input as a binary trigger to indicate the CO2 controller was calling for CO2, but HA would inhibit that via a condition in an automation between the hours of 22:00 and 08:00.

In my case, I use a Heathkit IP-5220 Isolated Variac - so, yes.

Peter Wieck Melrose Park, PA

It is in the UK. We even got fibre to the home at 18% a year ago. Pretty much everyone has fibre to the cabinet, which is usually 40-80Mbit.

What is that in English? What I meant was Wifi is shared is it not? Between all the cameras.

Bollocks, what am I not using that would benefit me?

Most of what you have are gimmics.

Commander Kinsey wrote

Nope.

Not to all but a very few outlying areas you didn't.

That's VDSL2+

Mine will do 130Mb but I only pay for 50Mb.

All of our new ones and plenty of existing houses are fiber to the home and that will do 1Gb

There is one wifi stream to each camera.

Not.

Google maps to get to where you want to go with real time turn by turn directions and traffic etc when you are going somewhere you havent been before for a gumtree or freecycle pickup etc.

Wrong.

I was reading a sailing magazine that mentioned using an autotransformer in the context of isolation. I felt impelled to write and point out that because an autotransformer has part of the winding shared between primary and secondary, isolation is one thing it definitely does not do!

Ah yes, thanks (didn't even need to look at the link but did ) just dragging stuff up from the past in my mind. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. Do you sail and if so what OOI? Dinghy sailor and son of a Shell Tanker Capt here. ;-)

2020 is the first year since 1974 that I have not been able to go on a sailing holiday somewhere warm in the Summer! But it is decades since I owned a sailing dinghy and have never owned any other boat. You certainly know about the extremes! "OOI"?

Shame. ;-(

So you rent / charter something and if so what sort of thing?

;-)

Sorry, 'Out Of Interest'.

Cheers, T i m