Recycle Your Printers!
Here in Polybots, we’ve always been big on recycling. One of our favorite items is the common inkjet printer, a common sight in many office junk bins. These printers are an excellent source of parts for electronics projects. You’ll usually find two or more DC or stepper motors:
DC motors have just 2 wires coming out of them, where steppers typically have four or more. Stepper motors have excellent precision but can be a hassle to control, so check out some nice online tutorials like this one here , and here. Both these sites show how to use the Arduino, which we will featuring in our upcoming workshop series.
Printers also have great sensors, wires, switches, and LEDs too. Grab everything you can, they’re sure to come in handy, especially these little “U” shaped gates which are used as optical encoders.
I don’t know about you, but just disassembling electronics is where most of the fun is, it’s very relaxing after all the stress of work and classes. Here’s an example of how we carefully extract components from some junk printers during the midterm season:
We called Tech-Support right after to help us out.
Polybots is always hungry for new components, so if you have a defunct printer, scanner, or any old electronic toy and appliance, drop it off at Polybots. It could be the primary part of our next robotics project, and besides Recycling is good for the environment!
-Widget Out.
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