Harvesting components!

Last night I had my first go at harvesting electrical components from junk PCBs I had lying around my room.
I found what used to be an optical mouse. But was now just sitting on a pile of junk and cables

I was hoping to find a 0.1microFarad capacitor to perform a mod on a USB to serial adapter I have for programming my arduino mini pro clones, to add auto reset.
While I’m getting pretty damn good at releasing the reset button at the right time, I would prefer to just hit upload!

So I looked all over this little PCB and was in luck! I found a 104 capacitor!
(I had looked over an old PCI fax modem before this and no luck)

So how I went about it was by holding components upright with needle nose pliers,
Then heating / melting the solder on their connections, until the weight of the PCB pulls the components through.
This kept the legs pretty free from excess solder too. 🙂

I got some switches, an LED, some resistors and some capacitors!
I’ll put a photo on this post showing my haul.

It was easier than I expected and makes me want to just… Collect old junk, to harvest what I want so I don’t keep buying a cap here, a diode there, etc.

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