So many circuit boards!

Hey all, going to be a short one this week because I've been finishing up the laptop teardowns and I left the newsletter to the last minute 😂 Let's jump right in:

Lots of Laptops

We finally finished tearing down all the laptops from the WLACAC electronics day back in May! There ended up being about 40 of them total. We've still got all of the CD drives, keyboards, and screens to break down, but it's nice to be done with most of the hard parts. As we've been doing the teardowns, we've been throwing all the circuit boards into one big box, so today I went through and sorted them all as well as I could.

Laptops don't have graphics or expansion cards the way desktops do, so most of the bulk in the circuit board box this time around came from the laptop motherboards. For non-technical folks, think of a motherboard like a bustling downtown neighborhood. It connects up all the major components that make the computer work. The CPU, or Central Processing Unit, does most of the general-purpose calculation. In this analogy, it's where the data goes to work. The RAM holds the data that the computer is currently working with. We can think of it like a big data apartment building where the data hangs out when it's not at work. Most motherboards try to put the CPU socket and the RAM slots as close as possible, so that the data has the shortest possible commute time.

But the motherboard also needs to connect the data up to lots of other stuff. There's the graphics processor, which has specialized circuits that are good at the kind of matrix multiplication it takes to display 3D graphics. It's another workplace, but instead of making all kinds of stuff pretty well, it makes triangles really quickly. There are a bunch of specialized integrated circuits that no one but electrical engineers understand, like all those little hobby shops and niche fitness studios that don't make sense to outsiders.

Sometimes the data needs to head to an external port and hop on a train to a USB drive or an external monitor. If the CPU's not going to need it for a while, it goes on vacation/semi-retirement down to the hard drive. A tiny fraction of the data even gets bundled into spaceships/TCP packets and launched into the internet by the WiFi card 😂 The motherboard handles the routing between all of these different components and makes sure that the data gets where it needs to go. Every motherboard is going to solve those challenges a little bit differently, just like every city is going to have a different downtown, and it's fun having a bunch of them together to compare and contrast the solutions that different engineering teams have come up with.

The other category of boards that showed up in every laptop were these touchpad boards. They sit right up against the plastic surface of the touchpad, and they tend to be attached with fairly strong double-sided adhesive. I got pretty good at prying them off, but I also lost several layers of skin on the tips of my fingers. Whatever else I do in the next week, I'm really hoping I can avoid touching anything sticky.

Then there were all of the tiny miscellaneous boards. These were tricky. They were different in just about every laptop, and I'm not well-versed enough in grading miscellaneous boards to sort them into high and medium grades with any confidence.

So instead, I did my best to sort them into types. Boards with external connectors, boards with buttons, etc. I'll put the categories into separate baggies when I send them to Boardsort so that if I'm wrong about how to grade SD slot controllers, it's easy for the Boardsort folks to re-grade them all at once.

There were also a few low-grade boards hanging around in the bin, two from desktop power supplies, and one from a projector. These sorts of boards have decent amount of copper and aluminum, but they don't have any of the precious metals that make the computer boards valuable, so they'll get recycled through Padnos.

Next week, I think I'm going to tackle the CD/DVD drives, so if you have any uses for stepper motors or plastic gear wheels, now's the time to let me know.

Recommendation Corner

I had a lot of fun this week with Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series. It's hard to explain why it's good without giving spoilers, so I'll just say that if you're interested in animal cognition, ecological design, social evolution, or flawed characters figuring out their sh*t, you might want to give it a try.

This Week's Nails

I forgot to take a picture of my nails this week until after I'd gone through a few laptops and gotten a few chips in the polish, but I liked the ways that the blue and purple flaky polishes complemented each other. I might repeat this combo in the future when I'm not going to immediately waste it trying to pry up a bracket 😂

Enjoy the nice weather this weekend! Come hang out with us at the Artisan Market if you get a chance. If I don't see you around town, I'll see you back here next week.

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