TL;DR Barb came by to finish working on her wonderful Christmas tree. Since she was willing to stick around we worked together to harvest parts from some of the circuit boards we have lying around.

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The day started with a little bit of organizing and going through some of the new e-waste. There were some handy hard drive enclosures that were super dirty but have two fans and a controller board.

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Before I could get super serious about VCR hacking Barb showed up to keep making her seriously awesome tree. It is 6 pieces of circuit board cut into half-profiles of an evergreen tree. She threaded them together with some of the green wire that Jen brought in.

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Tunisha joined in, hot glueing colorful components onto the tree to give the impression of holiday ornaments.

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As much as I love the tree, and I really really do, it actually made me kind of sad to clip off all these perfectly useable components.  Resistors gotta resist. Capacitors should capace? They are beautiful in their function… well… anyway… So I convinced Barb that learning how to desolder parts with a heat gun was really what she had to do with her afternoon.

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It was pretty successful. (I mistakenly mixed in some of the transformers she had clipped, so you’ll see couple of those in this pile. )

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We rescued a huge pile of parts.  Many of them are in a set called components with descriptions.