E-Waste To The Rescue
Before We Go Further - My thoughts on E-waste
It appalls me how many perfectly good computers, gadgets and other items- items I'm not able to afford new or second hand, get thrown away. Many of the sources of these items are the usual suspects; greedy corporates who would rather throw it away then let any of their low paid staff have a computer, all the way down to rich kids who change their gadgets like yesterday's news.
First and foremost, this is not good for the planet. Not by any stretch. It's neither carbon neutral, nor any of these feel-good buzzwords the politicians and greedy CEOs like to throw around in the boardrooms to wow investors. It's just bad. Secondly, I have struggled most of my life to afford anything decent, to quote a line from a track on Sparks' album, The Seduction of Ingmar Bergman:
I have struggled all my life for money for my films. And the one thing these people have is money - Ingmar Bergman
The one big reason why perfectly powerful and capable computers are being tossed is because of TPM2.0, which is in my book, was Microsoft's attempt around COVID to invigorate a flagging and slow computer market. "Force the sheeple to buy new computers by enforcing TPM2.0 and certain CPU models for Windows 11" they thought they would get rich all over again. Just like the current age verification thing in the UK, it's absolutely bugger-all to do with security and definitely not "for the children". The CEOs need to feast along with the shareholders. Fuck 'em!!!
The other leading reason I find very expensive gear in the trash is due to good old stupidity- the leading cause is botched firmware upgrades, or bricking! People, I have noticed lately, are incredibly impatient and do not understand what "DO NOT POWER DOWN" means!
And finally, companies and their tax wranglings/write-offs see a lot of perfectly serviceable equipments being put through the metal shredder. But enough of that ranting... let's continue...
From the E-Waste Depot: The ASRock Mini ITX Board
My good friend Manie, in Polokwane, North West Province has access to an e-waste facility there. Although I could bore you with all the stories of the
technological treasures that are to be found at that place, it's important to keep it relevant to this project.
Manie offered me the motherboard (pictured above) around the 5th of December 2025. Of course I took it - it's the smallest motherboard that I ever saw.
Around this time I was trying to make the Lenovo ThinkCentre work as my router, which as you have read by now was a waste of time, Manie also offered me a network card which I am really glad I took. It is a proprietary Riverbed Systems 4 port Ethernet card, which, in stock configuration only works in the equipment it came out of. Fortunately a good round of hacking resolved that problem. More detail on that later...
When an Ethernet adapter uses 4x PCIe lanes and has a heatsink then you know it's a serious piece of kit. That's for sure!
Above pictured is the Riverbed Quad-Port i350 "bypass" NIC
December 2025
So over the holidays the idea of me building my own router gained traction, and the intial idea was to try and package the whole thing as per this photo taken below:
The obvious problem is that using a standard PC power supply leaves precious little space, it obscures one of the PCI slots and also raises concerns about heat. So Manie and I discussed it and I've gotta say, he is very resourceful. At this point he told me he had these Powerex power supplies from a Point of Sale/Electronic Cash Register. Brilliant!!
January-February 2026
At this point the design becomes imminent, and I decide to start creating three-dimensional models. What I do often with Manie is wait until a certain amount
of e-waste has accumulated for me then have it shipped in one go, so during January and February while that was going on the design work could begin.
My design approach, again, like everything else I do, is based in self-taught knowledge and learned skills. I didn't have a design in mind at this point
but I knew that I was going to 3D print an enclosure for this project, in order to do that I'd need all the parts to be 3D modeled and an assembly made including
all of them.
Early Draft - ASRock H61M-VS3 Motherboard with CPU cooler and RAM