I am getting rid of a lot of accumulated junk acquired over the years and found two of my old PC’s. I heard some PC parts could be used for the layout. Does anyone have any ideas before I toss them out?
Doc
The power supplies are probably the most useful things. They are pretty hefty, and put out a good, solid, regulated set of voltages that you can use for accessory lighting, or even to drive a DCC system.
Old pc power supplies make very good power supplies for structure lighting and signalling devices. On my previous layout I used one to light over 50 structures. On my current layout the same pc power supply is pulling nearly 50 bulbs (not LED’s) and isn’t even starting to strain. Try that with an old train power pack.
Power supplies are the main thing. If the computer isn;t TOO ancient, and you have a DCC system that supports a computer interface, it might be useful as the PC to run something like JMRI for decoder programming and CTC.
–Randy
Old floppy drives and CD Roms are good sources for small motors and screws. The case should have small gauge wires and connectors for the LEDs and such. Old devise ribbon looks pretty good as corrugated tin when painted a silver color. Gears and misc. parts can be gondola junk loads when painted a rust color.
[:-^]
Morning Doc,
Try using the puter fan for blowing a small flag in your park or on a building.
The elctrical switches on the front and back are always reuseable.
Good luck recycling,
Johnboy out…
That’s what I’d like to do, but how can I get variable voltage output so I can have a light dimmer? Go easy, I’m electically ignorant.[:)]
The two primary voltages from a pc power supply are 12v and 5v. There are lower voltages but they are in small levels. The best thing to do is to use resistors to reduce the 5v to the level you need for the LED’s.
Indeed as everyone else mentions, keep those power supplies. There are often leds in the front panels, switches, those little connectors can be handy. Motors from drives are useful too.
Lastly, you might want to keep a working one around. You don’t need a lot of speed to run things like decoder pro. A PC with a soundcard can also become a sound system for the layout.
Not sure if this will be much help to the “electrically ignorant”, but here it is all the same. A link to s site with instructions for adding variable control to an ATX power supply.
I have two old rack servers that were put out to pasture that I have recycled and am using to run ATCS Monitor in support of my railfanning. These servers will eventually connect to my Digitrax DCC system run all of the automation programs for the layout. Jamie
EDIT: Even if your PCs are not very powerful, they can probably still run XP which means you can run all of the DCC applications on them (they are not very processor intensive).
Please check my web site under “Hobby Power Supply” it explains how I did just such a conversion on a “ATX” power supply.
Just a note, although I doubt it will affect you unless your layout is the size of an aircraft hanger. You can’t pull both 28 amps from the 3.3 volts AND 38 amps from the 5 volts. Those two rails are usually interconencted in most PC power supplies, and the label on the side should show a maximum combined rating for those two voltages which is somewhat less than just adding the two together. But still more than enough to run all the structure lights and all the signals of even a rather large layout.
And one of the wikihow links associated with that variable option (which I somewhat question since it connects the +12 and -12, the -12 of most PC power supplies being under 1 amp since the ONLY thing it’s even needed for is RS232 serial ports, and then goes on to say with the larger regualtor you can supply up to 3 amps. Umm, no.
–Randy
I guess “old” is relative. Most of my old PCs are 80286s (IBM ATs) with 512K memory (that’s K, not M) and 30 meg hardrives, so XP is out of the question. They gave good service, though. One in my office ran from 9-5, M-F for 20 years without a moments down time. Some are early Pentiums, but I think all the power supplies could be useful. 
Those are actually boat anchors not old PC’s… [(-D]
The power supplies are still good though. [tup]
Very well put. That was my point on a small to mid size layout one pc power supply is more then capable of supplying the power needs of such a layout and more. The unit I used is rated at 500 watts. The amp ratings I used are off of the factory spec. label on the supply unit itself.