hardware library - luv-main

18 May 2014

Here is a list of some things that I think would be good for the hardware 
library, if you have something that matches which you don't need then please 
bring it to a LUV meeting to donate it.  Also just bring random stuff that's 
small and light.

DDR2 and DDR3 RAM - I think there is plenty of older RAM in the library 
already.

Laptop RAM.  Not many people want it but those who do want it badly.  It also 
works in lots of modern printers.

USB Flash storage.  While most of us get enough freebies from trade shows I'm 
sure that some people need more.  It's small and light so I don't mind 
carrying them around.

64bit PCs.  I'm not planning to carry spare machines to regular meetings, but 
I'm happy to store a few in case someone needs one and bring them to a meeting 
on demand.  Post to the list first if you plan to bring a PC to the meeting.

ATI PCIe video cards.  NVidia has driver issues (either a lack of features or 
non-free depending on which driver you choose).

Small Ethernet switches that are quiet.  Even a 10baseT switch is very handy 
if it's small and light.

USB mice.

Micro-USB cables suitable for connecting Android devices (and many other 
things) to PCs.

USB power supply as used for phones and tablets.

Android devices.  Even devices that run Android 2.1 can be useful if they 
aren't broken.  More recent Android devices can be useful even if they are a 
bit broken (EG a cracked screen still leaves an Android device as a portable 
computer with a camera).

Accessories for phones (please clearly label which phone they belong to).  
There are multiple standards for things like external microphones for phones, 
some old phones are unreasonably expensive to buy parts for.  Batteries are 
useful if they can take at least 50% original charge, please wrap batteries in 
plastic to avoid the risk of short-circuiting.

Here are some things that I personally need:

A US style extension cable that goes from a PC PSU to a monitor.  It's not a 
very important thing for me but would be nice to have.  As few PCs have the 
socket for such a cable nowadays there should be a few unused out there.

A quad-core PC with 4*DDR2 sockets that can take full height PCIe cards.

SATA disks with many bad sectors.  The ideal would be to have about 0.1% of 
reads fail.  I'm doing some research into error recovery.  Please clearly 
write "BAD" on such disks to avoid unfortunate mistakes.  Note that when I am 
finished experimenting with such disks I will use a hammer to make them 
unreadable - just in case the disk problems made it impossible to delete some 
of your data.

USB keyboards.

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