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Scrap Boards
Let our failure be your creation. We've got quite a stack of coasters - these are PCBs that were retired because of hardware revisions and board changes. Probably because we never could get the board to work in the first place. So please, use these for any project you can think of - art, solder practice, drink coasters, etc. We look forward to giving them a happy home.
Price per board. Board varies in size and shape from 1x1" to 4x4". It's a grab bag - we can't say for sure what you'll get.
**We cannot accept requests, returns, exchanges, provide documentation, or provide support on any aspect of these boards. **
Scrap Boards Product Help and Resources
New style
These are now packaged in 4x6 bags with several boards in each bag. Individual bags may have similar contents but they will each have a variety of boards in them. The price is now per bag. Not per board.
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Customer Reviews
2.8 out of 5
Based on 4 ratings:
1 of 1 found this helpful:
just ok i guess ordered 100
I ordered 100 hoping for some variety but only got 3 different boards.
1 Freesoc2 board 8 xbee explorer boards and the rest are relay breakout boards
At 25 cents a piece not bad i guess just wanted more variety
1 of 1 found this helpful:
Great Value!
I try to add a few scrap boards to my order just to see what I get haven't tried to use any for projects. This time around I ordered 8 scrap boards. Surprised to receive a few extra, possibly because they are all the same relay board but no complaints here. If nothing else they will serve as great solder practice.
1 of 2 found this helpful:
Order 1 Board
Ordered 50 thinking I might get... not 50 of the same thing. Think again. 50 identical unpopulated boards. I was hoping to get something to look at - something to wonder how works. Don't waste your time.
0 of 1 found this helpful:
Not as in the description
[Edit] I knew it was a gamble, but I didn't expect to receive something so small! "Board varies in size and shape from 1x1" to 4x4"." ... and here I got the DIP to SOIC breakbout... which is not even 1x1", just way smaller... I tought you'd sort out that kind of very small things :(((
Hello!
Sorry to hear about the issues with the ding and dent boards. Have you reached out to our support department @ techsupport@sparkfun.com ? They can probably help fix this problem for you and get you setup with some different scrap boards.
These are now packaged in 4x6 bags with several boards in each bag. Individual bags may have similar contents but they will each have a variety of boards in them. The price is now the price per bag. Not price per board.
Ordered around 70 scrap boards, they're all FreeSoC2. I was at least hoping for some variety or smaller board so that I can get some practice in trying to populate one of them... But, at 25 cent a pop, I guess I can't complain.
This is actually very useful. got something that looked like an arduino shield, so I soldered header pins into it and epoxied it to a 2.5lb metal disk to make a stand for soldering stuff. many of the other boards I use by gluing stuff to them so I have an 'example' board to put in my pocket and test fit without risking my real boards to extra handling
The sucky thing is all the boards you don't want count as ewaste so you can't put the unwanted extra boards in the regular trash.
Ok so today I received my 76 scrap boards. To my disappointment they were all the same phreaking boards! FreeSoC2 dev boards, only its just 76 empty cut boards. No components what so ever. I don't think I will buy again. Very upset that I could be fooled by what was suppose to be a grab bag.
I'm sorry you are disappointed, this product is only bare PCBs, any board with components would be listed under our production builds. As for the variety these are boards we no longer need and therefore can not guarantee what we will have in stock.
It wasn't marked bare pcbs. It was marked as a variety of scrap boards. 76 bare boards all the same type. If I knew this I would never had bought them and payed so much for shipping. No, you ripped people off with this garbage.
It's not a rip off, in order to reproduce that board of the same size, it'll cost around $1-$2. The product image also shows bare boards. If they're 25 cents each, why on earth would you think they would come with components? This isn't a build kit. It's a grab bag of random boards, you can't be mad just because you got something you didn't want, that's the whole point.
Just ordered 76. Shipping may take a while. More on this when I get my bunch!
A tiny chip of thin, double-sided SMD board can be used to measure current usage on standard cylindrical batteries (i.e. AA). Strip off the green insulation (or find a part that has bare metal on both sides) and connect a wire to each side. Slip the board inside the battery case between the + terminal of the battery and the metal tab of the device. Measure the current across the leads. Or, as is often necessary these days, run a small 1-ohm resistor in series and feed the voltage into an oscilloscope to check AC loads on the battery (1 mV / 1 ohm = 1 mA; use a smaller resistor for currents over 50mA or so ? i.e. 1 mV / 0.1 ohm = 10 mA).
Sparkfun should totally have a "grab bag" that's $7.00 and can contain anything from a whole bunch of push buttons or some ATmega's or something....and a few lucky's should get something pretty expensive and awesome!! Good idea right? It seems like it would make a lot of profit for SparkFun!!
That is basically what the sparkfun dumpster dive is. https://www.sparkfun.com/products/12012
Yeah I know--I commented this much before the dumpster dive existed!
These make great key chains
These might be some of the coolest things I've ever bought from SparkFun. I ordered 24 boards and got 24 Arduino Pro boards, 8 Package Tracker boards, 8 Propeller P8X32A Breakout boards, 20 WiFly boards (Arduino-compatible with a built in wifly module...can't find it on the website!), 48 little AT42QT1012 capacitive touch sensor breakout boards (also not on the website), 5 Spartan 3E breakout and development boards, and 3 through-hole Christmas tree boards.
Most of the boards are actually multiple smaller boards which snap apart, meaning you might get a lot more than you expect. I was originally planning on chopping all of these up and making jewelry, but I think I'm going to try to populate some of these -- at least the easy Christmas tree ones, anyway. The capacitive touch sensor boards are so tiny, I can just stick the earring hooks through the VCC holes and have instant earrings anyway! They're adorable. The Spartan boards will make amazing coasters. Love it!
Glad to hear you were so happy with them! If you get any cool shots of anything you make, send us a picture on social media-we'd love to post it!
These scrap boards are great for surface mount soldering practice!
I ordered 4 with my last order... I got 4 panels of BlueSMiRF boards,12 boards on each panel=48 BlueSMiRF boards! They look fine upon cursory visual inspection so I think I might try to populate one of them. And if that fails? What's a more interesting project box than one made of PCBs?
Wow, there must be a serious glut of FTDI Basic boards. Out of 25 boards I ordered, 18 of them were FTDI Basic panels with 6 boards each. Not complaining (you can't have too many of these), especially since one of the other 7 is for a ProtoSnap MiniBot.
Just got 4 of these as a last minute thought on my purchase, got 4 Xilix Prog boards, turns out they are just on overstock right now. But you get what you get right? it was only a quarter each so you can't complain, right?
I ordered 13 of these little surprises, expecting to get junk. I received IOIO, Uber Tracker, UDB4's, Open Servos--WIN!. I bought them to let the kids practice soldering, but I think I'll "practice" some by building these out.
BTW, there's a price break at 10. Order 10 or more to get an even better deal.
I recently got a scrap IOIO and a Uber Tracker board too! Have you looked at the boards yet to see if anything about them are wrong?
Dang 7 were in today now they are gone... I want at least 12!! I'd settle for 8... Make some mistakes!!!
They are back in stock now. 4,400 last time I checked
:O AMAZING LEGENDARY PRODUCT SWEETNESS FROM BROKEN MISTAKES ABOVE!!! (thanks for the heads up! :) )
Kind of disappointing. I ordered 23 hoping to get some kind of variety and got all the same 1"x 1" boards. They are so small and light they could have been shipped a lot cheaper then $7.
I bought 23 of them (this is my second time buying these) and I actually got quite a variety! I got an e-paper breakout, a simon surface mount board, 4 panels of the Sd/MMC break out (4 boards in a panel), 7 panels of the older FTDI Basic boards, 5v (6 boards to a panel), and 2 older FTDI basic, 3v, 1 of the older JPEG trigger (2 per panel), an ipod serial to usb board (2 per panel), 2 sd sniffers (2 per panel), a BR-SC30N Breakout (1 board), an I mic panel (4 boards per panel), A GE864 Breakout (1 board), a GE865 Breakout (1 board), and one other green board which i'm not sure what it is. I got such a bargain!!
Same here; got 30 1" boards that were all the same. Oh well, i'm not complaining, they're only a quarter each.
Very cool. Will use for soldering practice as well as miscellaneous art projects. A+ would buy again.
I made a blogpost, what I got from 55 boards :) http://electronics.janhenrik.org/postbag-from-sparkfun-ding-and-dents-pcbs/
Wow, good grab bag! Thanks for sharing with folks :)
Awesome! They are finally back :D
On stock again :)) The last time I bought this and I got 4 ardupilot mega pcb's. One of them was marked with a cross. So does this mean that the other 3 are working ok ?
Our boards are panelized, its possible what you saw was where someone X'd it out, but it would have been the entire panel was X'd out. While its not guaranteed if you get more than one of a PCB they are probably all the same.
It varies as to the reason the boards got scrapped. It may have been a silk error, or something internally wrong on the board (missing traces, shorts, etc.) It could also potentially be a fab house screw up, or a board that got ordered as a 2-layer instead of 4-layer.
TL;DR: You'll need to test them yourself to find out :)
We're going to create a frame out of the boards for an electronics themed embroidery sampler. Been waiting for a while for the scrap boards to come in so we ordered a bunch and we'll see how we can fit together a frame.
I recently bought ~220 Ding and Dent items - and I couldn't be happier! If your curious and what to see what I got --- check out my blog here :). I posted photos and all. Totally excited!! Thanks SparkFun.
http://www.filearchivehaven.com/2014/03/07/dings-and-dents-from-sparkfun/
Wow. I ordered 11 boards. All turned out to be protoboards, full size. Very cool thanks guys
Wow... So glad I bought 40 of these so I could get 5 "Ogg Vorbis Player" boards and 35 fricking "Pi Wedge" boards. What an incredible variety.
My order came with a bunch of boards for a complete music player based on the VS1000 Ogg Vorbis chip. Looks neat, too bad it never went into production. Anybody else receive this board? I wonder if anybody ever got one of these working.
I got five of these boards with my order. I wouldn't bother populating it for an ogg vorbis player, but these will be awesome for SMD soldering practice!
I also got a bunch of the Pi Wedge boards. Anyone have info on this? It obviously breaks out the GPIO header on the Raspberry Pi, though beyond adding a couple LEDs, power connections, and a header for something on the right side, the functionality it adds escapes me. As to what's wrong with the board, not sure. Perhaps a mis-route? Was it supposed to connect pointing outward not inward? Who knows. These things look neat, I will find something cool to make from them.
Edit: Two of the broken out ground pins are hanging out on their own little ground plane that doesn't connect to the rest of the board. Maybe that wasn't suppose to be?
I got some of the Ogg Vorbis Player boards too, but I'm not sure if I'll ever get around to populating them. Also, this board did go into production (https://www.sparkfun.com/products/retired/8849), but has since been retired.
The schematic can be found here: https://www.sparkfun.com/datasheets/BreakoutBoards/VS1000_v13.pdf As well as the Eagle files here: http://dlnmh9ip6v2uc.cloudfront.net/datasheets/BreakoutBoards/VS1000_v14.zip
I got some ProtoSnap MiniBot boards! Also got some other boards. Many of the same, but fine with me. I was looking to practice learning some surface mount soldering. Now, maybe I can figure out an repopulate some of these! I'm having so much fun just figuring out what some of these were and what I would do if I could make them work. Now I have to get back online and order parts!
My order just came in! I used the boards to pad out my order to get the shipping. Now I am looking, I wish there were parts kits I could get to populate some of these to try. Not looking for support, just a convenient collection of parts that would match the ding and dent boards with the same rules as the boards for support and such. I am very excited at the selection I received, Looking forward to learning how to do some SMT!
This kind of thing is the reason I love sparkfun. Where on digikey could you find something like this? Among my booty, I received a couple Protosnap MiniBot boards, one of which I used to make my first Arduino shield for programming ATtiny85's.
Got 10 in today. All of them were danger shield PCBs. Was very happy that I got some bigger boards.
Eagerly awaiting these to be back in stock!
This was an excellent purchase! I have a number of Christmas tree boards which once I get the components will make an excellent project for the boy scout electronics merit badge.
Thanks! -Dan
i know people are sometimes interested when others share what they got so I will go ahead and do so: 3 SD sniffer boards 45 Nintendo DS Touch Screen Connector Breakout boards im not really sure what can be done with these but im thinking one of the SD Sniffer boards will make a neat flashlight keychain or something.
Even though there's like 2,000 of these now they won't last too long...
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand there gone.
Hoping these are back soon!
Are any of these populated?
No, they are all unpopulated.
Grab bag sounds interesting!!!
Holy Simon boards... I ended up getting 22 of them in my order of fifty, plus 10 SD sniffers. All in all a great buy, especially considering i had no guarantee of anything. Also 6 panels of FTDI basic boards and an iPod breakout. along with some strange green boards that are unlabeled, and I can't find them anywhere on the site.
It is almost guaranteed that you will get an FTDI basic (not just 3.3v, also the 5v ones too!) probably functional, but the older version where the female headers stick out past the board. I ordered 4 of these, and I got two panels of those--each panel of FTDI has 6 boards. I got two other gps breakout boards, but I tried searching for them on Sparkfun and got no results at all. I googled them and they came up...not really sure the real use or if they're even still around...
I just got mine. I only ordered 4. I got a Spartan 3E breakout v1, a screen key breakout, a CF breakout, and a panelized board of 6 FTDI Basics.
I got a bunch of the Simon boards....... Now what to do with them?
Build 'em!
does anyone know how many boards will we get if i just buy one of this?
no. you will get a panel, and it can contain a single or numerous boards. there's no way to tell.
Biggest ripoff ever. I know I wasn't guaranteed to get larger boards... but they guarantee at least 1" x 1" dimensions. I ordered 150 and got:
96@ 1.375" x .375"
30 @ 1.0625" x .59"
24 @ .5" x .5"
... just wanted these for an art project. Would've been better buying a few old vcr's at a yardsale and pulling the boards.
I ordered one of these and got a new version of the ProtoSnap board that must be still in the works! It has an FTDI Basic, Arduino Pro Mini, Dual motor driver, and a few other little bits. Nothing is populated, but still, how can you beat that for $0.25? Off to Mouser I go...
Looks like the only problem with it is some inverted silkscreen on the SparkFun logo.
Just got mine today, and got the same as you. Have you tried populating them to see if they work?
Have you made any progress with this? I've bought the USB connector off of Sparkfun, about to order the other parts tonight from Mouser.
I haven't had a chance to think about it yet, I have spend the last week and an half trying to replace my camera/laptop etc. after some theiving i***t broke into my house and stole a load of stuff :@
I have had a look at the board and the only thing wrong with it i can see is some of the silkscreen appears to be wrong. Other than that there seems to be nothing wrong. I plan at some point to get a multimeter out and compare the PCB with the schematic. Will let you know.
Update: Got all the parts in (about a $15 order on Mouser, including shipping). I probably over-spec'd a few of the components, so if you wanted to you probably could get some parts for cheaper. I also got extras of everything except the FTDI chip (since I have a habit of losing tiny 603 LEDs).
I'm looking forward to putting it together this weekend. I'll let you know how it goes! If everything works, I can send you a link to my shopping list.
I look forward to hearing if it works. Don't worry about the parts list, I will get all the bits from Farnell (I live 5 miles from their UK trade counter :D), and I am sure I can figure out what to get.
Farnell? Very jealous. Here in the U.S., I have nothing remotely close (quality or location).
Its rally useful as they sponser the electronics department at the Uni I go to, so I get a 19% discount too. America gets all the TV shows first, the UK gets Farnell - I think that balances out nicely!
Thanks to my crappy soldering iron, I borked a few pads on the board, so I just gave up on it :(. Hopefully you will have better luck. By the way, did you see the post a few days ago about what the board actually is? pretty cool
Hope you get your stuff back :(
Right, the silkscreen was what I noticed; the logos are inverted. I would think that this would be enough for them to scrap the boards. Hopefully I can assemble the board this weekend or next. I'll post my progress here :).
Unfortunately not. I still have to order all the parts. Looks like i'm going to get the ftdi chip and USB connector from sparkfun, the rest from mouser. I'll post my progress if I make any.
Don't order A LOT. You will get all the same board. I made 3 orders of those and I receive 4 different board for a total to 150 boards.
Wait you ordered 3 for $0.25 and got 150 boards? You paid 75 Cents for 150 boards?
I think he means he made 3 orders which each contained many boards
Ahh--anyone know if these will ever come back?
They are back in stock now
Now there gone. Again.
bought 20 of them and none of them had any components so basically a blank PCB
yeah but cool blank pcbs!
hey Kaboose97 and EvilGenius121 were any of these boards panelized and varying? I want to get a panelized board to test out my pick and place and would like different kinds of boards not just 20 of the same board
I got 18 inline power controls which are retired and 2 boards i dont know what it is called but it is small something for a gps .
Aww these could be used to make Quadcopter motor mounts or center plates too. "SWEET"
Too bad it's sold out. Wanted to get some more to use as decorations for my confirmation (nothing fancy, just 2 LEDs, a switch and a battery, but for the guests that's probably cool enough). Guess I'll try to cut the bigger ones I already got. You can see pictures of my prototype here
I got a bunch of these with my last order. I figured I'd be getting individual boards, but most of 'em were panelized -- that is, many of the boards were actually multiple copies of smaller boards! One "board" was a string of four Arduino Pro Mini boards, which are lovely little things.
neat little things,
great for practice soldering, however, totally junk if you want to use it in any project.
the ones i got anyway
We use these as raw stock to cut PCB holders for SMT soldering. Cheaper than making our own mistakes! http://www.flickr.com/photos/spiffed/sets/72157623131209791/
Man, I can't believe my luck. I saw on Jan 6th (the day b4 free day) that there were 33 of these puppies, so I went ahead and bought up 30 of them , because I figured everyone and their monkey would try to buy all of these on free day. So...HA to all of you that actually got fre stuff, you could use some dissappointment like the thousand or so that were todey
Any chance of these coming back in stock soon? :(
Bought these, managed to get a batch all the same which is nice. Warning though: THEY MAY NOT BE GREEN as pictured. They don't say the color varies, but mine are red, even though I had hoped for green boards.
This is rather late but in 2 years later almost all sfe boards are red now...
Many of these scraps still work fine. I received many lillypad boards in red instead of purple that still work. Killer price.
Does sparkfun make these or is it outsourced to china or an other pcb manufacture?
They use Gold Phoenix in China: http://www.goldphoenixpcb.com/