I stepped out of my apartment this morning to discover a box of computer motherboards on my doorstep.

Literally!


Five new boards have been contributed to the cause by someone I have never met, who had a few boards that he was going to toss out if no one took them. Well, I happened to want them, so they wound up with me. Free!
The board on top in the picture was acquired earlier in the week, but the four beneath are new, plus one more off-camera.

A couple of the boards had CPUs in them. There was a Pentium 150 MHz CPU on one of the boards. It turns out that was the only board (that I could test) that worked. But there is no heat sink or fan. All I need now is a Socket 7 heat sink and fan and I'll be all set. Seems like there are a lot of Socket 7 boards around. Anyway, two of the five "new" boards had sockets I hadn't seen before, and no CPUs. One was a Socket 462 and the other was a PGA370 - whatever that is. They were also ATX boards and I haven't figured out how to get the power to turn on, yet, for ATX boards on my bench test setup. But it was moot since I had no CPUs for those boards. So, they are officially in the artwork pool.

One of the CPUs that was on one of the remaining three boards was a Pentium MMX 233 MHz - exactly like one I got on another board last week. And, just like the other one, it was missing the cable that plugs into the fan (the heat sink and fan is built-in on that CPU). In fact, it is the same CPU that is on the board that I am now using to burn BIOSes. So, now I have a direct drop-in replacement CPU for that board if, for some reason, the CPU dies. I also found another 32 MB of RAM that works, so the BIOS burning board is populated with 48 MB of RAM, now. Not that it needs it. But at least I know where to find the RAM if I need it on another board.

The board with the PGA370 CPU socket would be great as a BIOS burner, because it is a very small board (relatively). It only has one ISA slot and one PCI slot...and it has the 32-pin flash ROM socket for the BIOS. It has a very unusual slot on the board with some kind of support brackets. I have never seen this before. Look!



Very strange. It might be for some kind of riser board, or possibly a bus extender (I have one somewhere I should dig out - it was one of my recent acquisitions). I have three other CPUs that I acquired earlier in the week as well that I have yet to identify (i.e. look at) or research to see if one would plug into this PGA370 socket. That would be great if I have something that will work.

In the end, however, I think most of these boards are officially part of the artwork pool to draw upon for non-functional applications. I already scavanged two BIOS flash ROM chips to add to my available flash memory pool. One of them is a 256K chip (all the others so far have been 128K). I'm anxious to see if I can come up with a PIC project that I could use them in.

I also dug through some other stuff under my bench where I already have a big case of printed circuit boards that have been waiting for an art project for some time. Chris is jazzed about making some kind of art piece out of them, so we are really trying to clean out all of our unwanted JUNK to make space where we can actually work on something. Anyway, I came across some speakers. The new computer that is going to my friend Dave requires powered speakers, and Dave's old computer does not have powered speakers. The speakers I found were given to me as part of a big box of stuff that came with a Mac that someone gave me a couple years ago. I just need to find a 6V DC power adapter and they're good to go. Those will go to Dave, since I don't need them.



They're the bigger speakers in the picture. The little ones don't work so well. They'll either become part of a testing station or will go to the thrift center.

I also rediscovered some rather large computer speakers that Chris bought a long time ago, but were missing a power adapter (and any info regarding voltage requirements). I decided to take a stab at getting them to work, and discovered they will work at 9V. So, now we can hook those up to our new audio/video system and have some (hopefully) good sound. Or at least good enough for coming straight out of the computer...until we plug it into a real sound system.

Things have been good. I just opened my mail and found a rebate check for a DVD player that we bought a few months ago.

Well, that's about it for today. Oh, yeah - I also picked up a 351 MB laptop hard disk to use with one of my embedded computers. Just something to play with...eventually.