Deconstructing a Laptop To Make A Bunch Of Things - Episode 0: Teardown

I enjoy going to surplus stores. Sometimes you can find something really neat in the endless boxes of stuff. That happened the last time I went to my local store. I got a graphics card for my friend's RGB Windows XP build, a cool PCI audio interface card, and a Samsung NP300V5A-A0GUS laptop. It comes complete with a second generation Intel i7, so I figured I'd take this $10 computer and turn it into something. But what if we could turn it into multiple things? We could deconstruct it and make a bunch of things out of it. Sound cool? I think so. And guess what! It's another multi-part post!

The computer wasn't in too bad of cosmetic condition, but it wasn't great either. I didn't have a power cable for it and something was rattling around in it. I wanted to make sure the insides of the computer were intact before I tried to power it on. So I took it apart. The rattling turned out to be the fan being destroyed.

But, the computer was otherwise intact. These never come with hard drives, but I was surprised when it didn't come with RAM. It's DDR3 though, so I had some on hand.

Just to see if it turned on, I soldered wires to the power socket and hot-glued them in place. I put them into a 19V power supply and switched it on. The "plugged in" light came on which was a great sign. I pressed the power button and it turned on! I didn't get a picture of it because of the weird angle I had everything at (to accommodate the new power connector). Now that I had confirmed the booting of the machine, I got my hands on a real charging cable. It remains to be seen if this will stay intact too.

The way I see it, there are several principal components that all warrant their own project. Since we're doing this piecemeal, let's go over them now.

1. The Motherboard will be extracted and better cooled. I might try to manufacture a custom case for this, but I've never been too good at that, so that remains to be seen. And what exactly it will do is still open for discussion.
2. The Keyboard will still be a keyboard, obviously, but this will require reverse engineering since we want it to work externally from the computer itself.
3. The Trackpad will also still be a track pad, and I suspect that this will be harder to reverse engineer than the keyboard.
4. The Screen will require I buy a controller board from Ebay. These usually only cost $30 and just magically work, so I'm not sure what I'll be doing with that yet.
5. The DVD Drive in all honesty is pretty useless to me. I think I might try to sell this or take it for parts.
6. The Webcam is probably just USB, so if I solder a connector to it, it will probably just work as a regular webcam. That's just a guess though.

So we have our plan. There are several tricky bits to this (parts and soldering, primarily), but it's totally doable. I hope that it's as easy as I always think it is but then it never is. Is this a project that will actually get finished? Who knows? I don't! Stay tuned to find out!