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Though they have cut down on trans fats which is good.
Though they have cut down on trans fats which is good.
It’s a lot of work. At the end of the day, I spent about $1k to get about $100 worth of gold, so it’s really not lucrative. I just wanted a fun story behind an engagement ring.
I actually mined the gold from electronics and those gold plated Pokémon cards they sold at Burget King for Pokémon the Motion Picture, but that’s another process.
Here’s how it goes:
Clean up your electronics. You ideally want just circuit board contacts. Like the strip of contacts on a stick of ram. Cut/break those off and dispose of the rest.
Soak in copper chloride. Use Hydrochloric acid (sold as concrete cleaner) and hydrogen peroxide. It’ll start eating at the copper on the circuit boards. 2HCl + H2O2 + 2Cu -> 2CuCl + 2H2O
Keep dissolving. This part takes a while. It helps to use a stir bar and bubbler to keep the fluid moving. CuCl will eat more copper and produce CuCl2, but you can “recharge it” by adding more HCl and bubbling in oxygen (or use hydrogen peroxide, but that’s more expensive).
Now you should have a bunch of flakes of gold that was plated onto the copper as well as the bare circuit boards floating around in a dark green solution of copper chloride. Pour through a coffee filter and wash with water to remove all the copper chloride.
To recycle the copper chloride, mix with sulfuric acid (sold as battery acid). CuCl + H2SO4 -> HCl + CuSO4. Boil off and condense the HCl to re-use. You won’t be able to get “fuming” 30% stuff like you buy at the store because the azeotrope of HCl is 20%. Then you can plate out the copper from the copper sulfate and reuse the resulting sulfuric acid. Copper sulfate is a super pretty blue by the way.
You do copper sulfate because plating copper out of CuCl2 will release HCl gas which is nasty.
Filter through another coffee filter and distill resulting solution to recover HCl and H2SO4.
Dry the filter paper, ball it up, and toss it in a heated crucible (I used a blow torch) with some borax to act as a flux. Eventually the paper burns away and you’re left with a tiny bead of gold.
So yeah, you can reuse the copper, Hydrochloric acid, and sulfuric acid, and the other byproducts are harmless salts and gases.
As someone who has personally mined 2.5g of gold from old electronics, I can confirm that while messy, there are no toxic byproducts.
In my setup, the only waste was hydrogen gas, CO2, and NaCl.
Of course I preprocessed my electronics to remove any solder or components, and you’re still left with the bare fiberglass circuit boards, so it may be different on an industrial scale.
Zero grams sugar? That is not Sunny D
Something something book by its title.
I don’t understand! Where do you think the train is going to go? They don’t exactly come out of nowhere.
Though it also has the potential to flash boil. https://youtu.be/0JOxuS0SBHc?si=BnKVZWw5xcjalQy_
So be careful out there.
Sure, but if everyone drinks a half gallon a day (still a lot for a normal person), that’s still 95% revenue which will absorb the installation cost quickly, and maintenance is minuscule on something like this.
Not to mention that since its subscription based, a broken dispenser is actually more profitable in the short term.
Alibaba is talking directly to the manufacturer. At least in my experience. Haven’t heard of trade wheel.
I might. I already emailed them for another project asking what model screen they were using, and they refused to share that info, so I don’t think they’re too open to hardware hobbyists.
The other project was adding a light. There is a vendor that offers a front-light for that model, but it’s like $60 and the result is too thick to fit in the stock Playdate.
https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=(specific+heat+of+water)*12.8K*(1+gallon+*+water+density)
200kjoules of heat must be removed from a gallon of water to cool from 55F to 32F (out of the ground down to pleasant drinking temperature).
Assuming a COP of 2 for your compressor (conservative), that’s 100kjoules or 1/36 of a kWh.
High price for a kWh of electricity is $0.25 in the US. So for your $2 subscription, you can pay for 8kWh per month or enough to cool 288 gallons of water or roughly 9 gallons per day. More than anybody would rightly use.
What a fucking ripoff.
Even if it was free, opening an app to get water is bullshit.
Edit: Let the record show, I was referring to the chilled water.
Yeah, I hit up a few on Alibaba. Even one who can apply the black border on the glass. No responses so far and it’s been a few weeks.
Haven’t done that yet, but it’s pin 236 on DDR3 240 pin ram which I believe is a power rail, so low risk of issues.
Hybrid Integrated™
The pin was crushed by the previous owner. I was able to remove enough plastic to expose the conductor. Then I used my 0.1mm soldering tip to solder a small jumper from the crushed pin directly to the stick of ram.
Yeah, they were tssop, so not hard. It was only necessary because the parts shortage crunch had the vendor shipping them without the chips installed.
It’s possible the connector to the screen is just loose. As a last-ditch effort, you could try to repair it. See if ifixit has a guide to taking your kindle apart. It should be easier than a phone since there’s no waterproof sealing.
The connector probably looks like this:![](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/9ae95d11-3589-44b0-917c-7a46b124afac.jpeg)
Just reseating it could fix your screen. Just make sure to be careful with whatever little black tab locks the ribbon cable in place. Some flip up while others slide out and they are notoriously delicate if you pull them the wrong way.
If that doesn’t work, plenty of eBay sellers offer replacement screens. I know this because my job had a bunch of left over e-ink displays from a product we were developing. They happened to be the ones used in the Kindle XL and I hocked them on eBay to a repair shop.