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Makers and Making: Identifying components?
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npkeith
Oct 29th 2009
II'm new at this, so if the answer is obvious, please don't bite my head off... Beyond the obvious, like band-coded resistors and labled caps, how do I identify parts when I'm cannibalizing some junked electronics? Case in point: I hav a crap multicard reader that died, so I'm stripping it. Most of the board is surface mount, and not much use to me at this point in my game (I'm still working on getting a good bead with lead based solder, let alone dealing with stuff I'd need tweezers for). There is a nice green LED, a couple of diodes that I might be able to work with, and something that looks like a crystal- in an oval can, etched with 12.000H3C. Googling that gives no results (amazing as that is in itself). How do I find out any more about it? I have a multimeter and a crap $15 soldering iron, no acess to a wigglescope. Where do I go from here?
Odin84gk
Oct 30th 2009
It is very hard, if not impossible, to determine surface-mounted components without knowing more about the board.

btw, the crystal is probably a 12MHz crystal. make sure to lift the capacitors that were connected to the crystal and use your multimeter to find the proper capacitance to use with the crystal.

At the end of the day, you will probably need a multimeter, small power supply, and some resistors. Connect a known resistance to the power supply, connect your current sensor (multimeter) in series, and then connect the diodes/LED's/... Use ohms law to figure out the different parameters of the parts.

Scavenging parts works best for larger components. Reusing surface mounted parts can become a pain since you are likely to damage them when removing them from the board.
npkeith
Oct 30th 2009
Thanks for the tip with the capacitor, I never would have known... as for the other stuff, like I said, the surface mount stuff is pretty useless to me, I'm only looking at the through-hole stuff - the crystal, and the LED. The couple of diodes are surface mount, but I think they are big enough that I could solder some wires to them and make them into ghetto through-holes (waste not, want not...) I figured the crystal was 12MHz. Any ideas about the H3C part?
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