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We’re building a robotics system that recovers reusable electronic components from retired hardware. To run experiments we’re looking to buy electronics that are *retired or obsolete but still contain valuable components*.

Examples:

* servers, networking gear, routers, switches * laptops / workstations * telecom / industrial / embedded boards * lab equipment electronics * obsolete or end-of-life hardware with populated PCBs

We’re especially interested in hardware that *is no longer useful as a system but still has valuable chips or components on the boards*.

Typical pricing depends on the hardware, but we often pay *$20–$200+ per unit* for things like servers, networking gear, or laptops depending on what’s inside. Happy to buy bulk lots.

Based in the Bay Area; we can arrange pickup locally or pallet shipping within the US.

If you run ITAD, recycling, refurbishment, repair, or have retired hardware sitting around, email:

sava@dayworkx.com

Even rough descriptions like “a pallet of old switches” are helpful.

This is very very cool :)

And is _way_ better than when I'm forced to do this by hand, I'll say that much haha

thanks! how often do you have to do it by hand and how long does it take it?
This is really cool. In the demo, how do they just yank the chip off the board? I'd have assumed it would be somehow soldered on or something.
Looks like a hot-air rework setup. I've swapped chips by hand that way, once the solder is molten they'll fall right off the board. The hard part is lifting them away without accidentally dislodging anything else.
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China has been doing this sort of recycling for literally decades, at a massive scale.
Have any more information or sources? Would like to learn more
that's true, but we've only seen either highly specialized hardware that forces you to lock in or a methods (tumbling / rotary shredding) that destroy the components. we want to leverage general purpose policies more to make the cost of setting up "hardware reuse" nodes less and thus the whole supply chain more distributed and robust.
So I send in massive 60 drive jbod pcbs and you pay me more than 55c/lb? That's current clean pcb rate at any recycler. Boards are ~8lbs ea. Usually just tossing them unstripped to a muncher that pays 35c/lb for the whole 55lb jbod works out way better for time labor.
thank you for all the support so far! We've got a lot of inbound and started processing it. there are a lot of interesting questions on this thread and i'll address them soon.
I guess the prime target for this would be USB-C controllers? Ubiquitous and expensive enough to justify building a machine and yet versatile enough that you could find a second hand market for them.