Recycling parts from other electronics

[CGarrett]

Hi everyone, first time poster on Physics forum here. I'm working on a school project to make a device to read QR code. I'm strapped for cash so I'm trying to figure out if I can recycle some parts from used electronics. Looking for the following parts:

- a graphic LCD display
- an arduino board
- small camera

I found these parts on sparkfun.com that would work for my purposes.

Graphic LCD Display
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/710"

Arduino Board
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/9219"

Camera
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10061"


I could buy them online but I'd rather use the money towards rent. Does anyone have suggestions of common, everyday electronics that I could recycle these parts from? Any help or guidance is appreciated.

 

[Jiggy-Ninja]

I doubt you'll find a microcontroller dev board to salvage from anywhere. That dev board isn't even complete. You still need a power supply and some way to get data on to it.

As for the camera, you could find something similar in a digital camera, webcam, but those would easily set you back the same amount or more.

 

[Dmytry]

I was thinking to hack a digital camera by hooking up serial cable for programming the microcontroller in it (in that particular camera it does accept serial programming), but never really got around with it. That would require a LOT of reverse engineering.
You can in principle reuse small lcd display from anywhere, you need to google up the chips around and find controller chip's datasheet, then wire up your wires to it's inputs.

Arduino Board - you can get just the chip alone (preprogrammed with arduino bootloader even), it's something like 5 euros, and the quartz resonator etc and wire it up to serial port yourself, essentially, make that board on your own.

The camera too, you can salvage it from old digital camera and google up specifications for the cam and it's interface chip (the one that reads the CCD).