skholinn

This is an insanely useful work!! What is the fastest way a research lab in that domain can start contributing?

We want to get the data on that. The more boards we process the better we know the failure rates. Do you have an intuition of what exactly degrades?

thats guy sounds very interesting, Unreal engine is fun

the way we see it is that with robotics and coding agents we can offer much comprehensive and traceable tests. anyone can send any hardware they have, we help understand what is reusable, how to verify it and ship the parts back.

curious—what specific failure modes or uncertainties would you want eliminated before you'd consider using recovered parts, even just in production?

exactly!! we aim to have comprehensive and transparent protocols of testing after the extraction which is exactly what is hard without general purpose robotics. if you have any pointers on how to make that happed or any pain points from your experience please send me a note to [email protected] !

thanks! how often do you have to do it by hand and how long does it take it?

thats right! thats to let the trapped air out and preheat before a manipulator heats the target up further and unsolders it.

Totally! please follow up with me on [email protected]

thanks! do you have any ICs to send over?:)

exactly, + we preheat the board before to let the trapped air out. would love to hear more about your experience doing this by hand and where you see automations for this applicable

that's true, but we've only seen either highly specialized hardware that forces you to lock in or a methods (tumbling / rotary shredding) that destroy the components. we want to leverage general purpose policies more to make the cost of setting up "hardware reuse" nodes less and thus the whole supply chain more distributed and robust.

thank you for all the support so far! We've got a lot of inbound and started processing it. there are a lot of interesting questions on this thread and i'll address them soon.

USA and UK!

We’re building a robotics system that recovers reusable electronic components from retired hardware. To run experiments we’re looking to buy electronics that are *retired or obsolete but still contain valuable components*.

Examples:

* servers, networking gear, routers, switches * laptops / workstations * telecom / industrial / embedded boards * lab equipment electronics * obsolete or end-of-life hardware with populated PCBs

We’re especially interested in hardware that *is no longer useful as a system but still has valuable chips or components on the boards*.

Typical pricing depends on the hardware, but we often pay *$20–$200+ per unit* for things like servers, networking gear, or laptops depending on what’s inside. Happy to buy bulk lots.

Based in the Bay Area; we can arrange pickup locally or pallet shipping within the US.

If you run ITAD, recycling, refurbishment, repair, or have retired hardware sitting around, email:

[email protected]

Even rough descriptions like “a pallet of old switches” are helpful.