Found laptops on the street fully abused and often smashed to bits. Recently pulled a 160gb SSD out of one. That’s worth keeping, as well as the RAM, often.
TV tuners/media players: they sometimes have internal hard drives. I recently pulled a 320gb 2½″ HDD out of one. Even though that’s likely too small to serve as someone’s laptop system, anything bigger than 120gb is big enough to store a copy of the whole Debian system including all apps (5 blu-rays merged these days).
All DC powered electronics: it’s useful to cannabalize the female barrel connector. There are many universal PSUs with a collection of male tips, but never female tips. The female tips are useful for making your own barrel adapters, instead of cutting and soldering your OEM PSUs.
I recently pulled a color LCD from a vape. I can’t believe ppl throw this stuff in landfill.
However, having trouble driving it in the sense that I have no idea how. I have an esp8266 and started looking at arduino but if you have any advice lmk.
LCD has a FPC 10-pin cable and I know the original MCU that drove it, but thats it
TBH I don’t know that much. If it is a wider ribbon (40-50 pins), it is parallel RGB (5 or 6 bits per color, clock, power, etc). But for 10 pin cable, it probably uses some protocol to communicate.
Since it’s from a vape, it has to be widely available. I would find the model number (even look for similar LCDs on ali or ebay), then find the specs/datasheet/documentation - it should specify which pin is which and what voltages and signals they expect.