TLDR: Monday I turned the motor I salvaged Saturday into a spinning flower.  I added a dubious choice of cable to be the power cord for my motors-on-a-box project.  I checked to make sure the ATX power supply worked and used it to drive the motors in a half disassembled DVD drive.  

Next time I hope to have a better sense if pilfered composite jacks really are the way to go for the pirate power supply and/or if I should just cut the connectors off.  I am planning on stripping down the DVD drive and add bits of it to the box.

Monday I moved a little slower with a bit more puzzlement about what to do next. It was handy to be able to show off Barb’s glue-stick vibrobot, Horatio our mascot, and the other sundry done-ish projects while I did some less flashy work on the power supply.

Tutorials on how to convert ATX computer power supplies into benchtop power supplies litter the internet:

• How to NOT convert ATX power supply to benchtop or lab power supply youTube video
• The wikiHow version via MAKE
• Zillions the last I counted on Instructables
• Really nice reference imagery on Wikipedia’s ATX article.

I’m struggling with how reusable I want this supply to be or if it should just be dedicated to the boxes & motors project. That is something I should check in with Barb and Jen about. Are they excited to have it as a resources for us all or am I just sort of entertaining myself? Also, all of the listed instruction sets involve buying parts but I’d like to keep our salvage-only as a design exercise. We’ll see.

Things I did today:

1. Desoldered composite input jack from VCR board with the idea that I’ll be using them somehow for the supply.
2. Soldered solid-core wire onto the composite cable just incase I’ll want to plug it onto a breadboard.
3. Tested the supply by checking both the “Stand-by” wire and the “Power-on” wire to make sure they read 5 V ( the purple wire and the green wire respectively ).
4. Shorted the Power-on wire to ground to activate all the other power pins. (* I had a DVD drive as a load to prevent burning out the supply. )
5. Checked one of the 12V wires on the 20 pin connector to make sure shorting the wire worked.
6. Played with mentioned  CD/DVD drive attached to the 4 pin Molex connector.
7. Semi-dismantled drive and played with the eject button and disk tray gears to get ideas about what to do next.
8. Moved on and made a pretty flower.

Tools & Supplies used

• Goes without saying: wire, wire strippers, pliers, snips and various screwdriver tips from the iFixit kit.
• Heat gun to desolder jack
• Soldering iron to attach wires
• Electrical tape to seal up the soldered wires
• Drill and 1/4 inch drill bit to make hole for wire
• Hot Glue to stabilize wire lead out of the side of the box and wires on back of the DVD motor soldered Saturday and made into a flower today
• Multimeter & aligator clips to check power coming from ATX supply