harvesting a flatbed scanner

since i haven't read anything about harvesting flatbed scanners i thought i write a little bit about that.

yesterday i found an old fb-scanner in the basement, so i decided to harvest it. took me about ten minutes, and i think it was quite profitable, as there are:

- four fs mirrors (23mm x 222mm, 10mm x 180mm, 10mm x 150mm, 12mm x 80mm)
- one lm7805
- two caps 47uf/35v (going into some ddl drivers...)
- green led with cable and connector
- 22cm white cathode tube with compact inverter, driven by 12v
- stepper motor from the beltdrive
- power supply (lucky for me the owner had lost the original psu, so i have a 3/4,5/6/7,5/9/12v 1250ma now
- glas plate little bigger than letter/a4

the mirrors can easily be cut and used to deflect the beam, mounted on motors for spyros etc.
the lm7805 and the caps are probably not worth the effort of desoldering (actually there were more, but i was too lazy to solder them out at 0.02$ a piece...), but it didn't take me long.

the cathode is not really usable for a laserproject (except maybe light for a scanner case or something) but they are nice to play with. (had one in my car once, below the dashboard it looks like when in movies people are filmed in cars, when there is the bright glow shining on their faces from below.)

don't know what to do with the stepper exactly.

a switchable power supply is always good2have, and the glasplate can come in handy when soldering on the good wooden table for example. i have my laptop sitting on one of these glas plates whenever i use it on my bed or sofa, so it doesn't suck up so much dust and the air vent won't be blocked by the soft underground. might be worth a try as a scanner window, i'm not sure wether it is ar or not. should be though, since it is used in a reflexion-critical environment.

just wanted to tip you off here, IMO the fs mirrors are the most interesting part. i am going to cut them down to squares and stick them to my walls, so i can bounce the beam around my room...

has anybody else harvested a flatbed scanner? any tipps?

//edited for typos

I looked at the mirrors in mine, and they don't look FS. But I don't know, I'll rip it apart more later/

pretty sure they are, that was about the third scanner i slaughtered

btw i found a diffraction lens in a cdrom sled, makes a line of dots with my cheapo 1mw.

I ripped it apart, and yeah they are FS. They are double sided so I was confused... mine are smaller than yours though

i was actually surprised to find that many mirrors with these great usable sizes. i had expected two, one large one small. forgot to rip out the lense though...

I don't think there is a lens in it, it is just the ccd moving back and forth to capture the image. That mirror is really big, my biggest one was the size of the long skinny one...

there was one in mine, i don't know if it is in every flatbed, but i would think so. somewhere in this forum somebody wrote about using it to manipulate a beam. if the search wasn't so crappy i would be able to find it...

The FS mirrors just reflect without major distortions/ internal reflections, which makes them good for laser applications, like liquid sky, Spirograph