Re-purposing Old Electronics To Inspire New Designs

Exploded View of a Kindle

We love seeing how things work. Exploded views are like mechanical eye-candy to most engineers, so when [Chris’] Kindle Touch died, he decided to give it new life… on his wall.

Inspired by others, he decided to mount all the components of his Kindle onto a piece of plastic that he could hang up on his wall. As an electronics design engineer, he’s always looking for new ideas and ways to design and build circuits — what better way to inspire creativity than to see a real product blown apart? Does anyone remember reading [Stephen Biesty’s] Incredible Cross Sections or Incredible Explosions as a child?

The construction is quite simple, relying on mounting holes where possible to screw parts directly to the board, or by using heavy duty double-sided tape. After finishing the Kindle, [Chris] found an old iPod of his and decided to give it the same ritual.

For some more in-depth exploded physical models, take a look Bolt.io’s office art we covered last year!

15 thoughts on “Re-purposing Old Electronics To Inspire New Designs

    1. I did this at the tech college I taught at with an old computer and flatscreen monitor Even put a plexi cover on the hard drive so people could see it spin/read while a powerpoint presentation ran.

    2. A long time ago I saw a PC mounted on a wall like that in a computer store. It was fully functional, but I don’t recall what they were doing with it. Having the wires reach kind of dictated the layout, obviously with the motherboard in the middle.

  1. Seeing its final image still there, forever frozen in the e-ink, is kind of eerie.

    I used to do this with old motherboards. Some looked really cool when backlit. Probably wouldn’t look right with this one though, since it’s not a solid plane.

  2. I recall, in tech school during the 70s, that we had a very large superhet AM radio schematic laid out on a bread board, with all the parts actually present. It actually worked. I wonder if I can find a picture of that somewhere.

      1. I’ve found some teaching aids that are much smaller, like a 14″ wide by a foot tall…solid state. As I recall this unit, it was something like a four foot wide by three foot tall vacuum tube AA5 AM radio, laid out on a board. The wiring was all on the back for HV protection. I originally said 70s, but it was actually late-60s.

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