There’s nothing I enjoy quite like tearing into an old printer or VCR to find some new crap for my parts box. Harvesting stepper motors, gears, belts and other mechanical bits is easy (and fun), but I’ve never really considered going after the electronics.

The folks over at uC Hobby have a cool writeup of all the parts they scrounged from an old UPS unit. I was surprised at how many nice parts they found, including a couple of lead-acid gel cells and a serious transformer that could be really useful in your next alternative energy project. And since they’re from a device that’s meant to handle lots of power, the parts are all pretty beefy.

Read “Scrounging a UPS”

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Maker Nation is a blog for and about people who aren’t content to leave well enough alone. A blog focused on taking control of your stuff and making it your own. This is a place for tinkerers, inventors, hackers and geeks.

We’ll give equal time to the absurd and the practical. We’ll customize everything. We’ll break some stuff. We’ll probably push it to the limit or something, and in so doing we’ll probably go too far. But we’ll have a good time and hopefully learn a little.

So if you thrive on making crazy crap or tearing things apart and “improving” them, then I invite you to join us in making technology personal again.

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