MacBook Pro Corpse Reanimations

My Macintosh-hording neurosis project has equipped me with various (mostly) 2008-vintage MacBooks. I’m a particular sucker for the 17″ ones. Two of them I paid $20 for, the other two were $34 and $50. Each one of them was sold for scrap as they were tested & reported as totally non-functional.

I tend to take warnings for dares.

Most actually worked fine with nearly zero effort. One needed its RAM reseated. But two of them were really dead, that is to say, I could not get them to POST. As a person who builds the odd thing, when I look at a “broken” device, I think to myself: If I were gonna make one of those from scratch, this one’s like 99% done as-is.

Suffice to say, I got them all working and it was decently hardcore.
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HackADay WebServer Project

So I found this article on HackADay.com that discusses how to build a small computer on a PCB about the size of a business card. So I went ahead and managed to order a PCB for it and all the parts.

It took me awhile to scrounge the stuff together, but eventually it all arrived. Then I spent a very careful 10 hours soldering on all the tiny little surface mount components. I must admit, this was a great introduction to that world. Anyway, here’s a YouTube video I made just showing this thing hooked up to some power. At this point, I don’t have a programmer, so I can’t actually program the board to do anything other than look like a work of art.