Subject says it all.
Thanks,
Ivan Vegvary
Why ask?
If you're going to toss it out anyway, or find one lying on the sidewalk,
you might as well take it apart. You're likely to get some parts, just
like from any electronic device, and yes, depending on how they are
designed, there may be something nifty in there related to converting
weight to voltage. Open it up and see. If it does convert weight to
voltage (I suppose there are other ways), it might mean a digital meter of
some sort. It really depends on what's in there.
Keep in mind that sometimes it's best not to strip down the parts. In
some devices, the parts will be very dedicated, and so that IC or this IC
may not have much use except as originally used in the device. Once that
happens, the parts around it wll be the parts you need to use the IC
later, so you might as well keep it intact. For that matter, if the IC is
obscure, the peripheral parts may show you how to hook it up.
So if you keep it intact rather than as a source of small parts and maybe
that exotic IC, once you find a use for it, you can either use the whole
board intact (or cut out the pertinent part of the board) or at the very
least trace out the circuit, remove the parts and then build it up again
on a smaller circuit board.
That goes for everything. If there's a switching supply, keep it intact
(sometimes noting where it came from helps to provide information about
the output voltages and currents), because it may be most useful as a
switching supply. There may be a time when the parts become more valuable
than the full supply, but until that day, keep such things intact and get
the ceramic capacitors and generic small signal transistors off something
else, like a tv set or VCR.
Michael
