Hardware development work at revamp-it is concentrated around the following efforts:

• To discover new possibilites of decommissioned computer hardware that, due to technical advances, cannot be used anymore for its intended purpose even though it is  otherwise still in perfect working order
• To optimize the use of energy and resources in our usage of computers. To this end we are continously expanding our knowledge in repairs
• Guides for the assembly of open source hardware

Some of the topics we are currently working on:

12 Volt recycling-computers
To be able to use older computers outside of highly industrialized countries, it is important to be able to combine these with sources of renewable energy. We would like to convert traditional 220 Volt power supplies with 12 Volt power supplies which can be powered by solar, wind or pedal power. Our goal is to create a guide for anybody to use to assemble a 12 Volt power supply, with as many recycled components as possible.
We are very interested in exchanging experiences with people who have already work in such ventures or would like to contribute fresh ideas.

Re-use of old EPROMs

We collect chips from old motherboards, expansion cards and printers. These chips can be reprogrammed with EPROM-burners to be inserted into network interface cards to make it possible to boot computers over a network, to be used in LTSP clients.

We are especially interested in chips with these labels:
27C128, 27C256, 27C512

(Often, a sticker needs to be removed from the BIOS chip to be able to see its label)

Repair of computer power supplies
Computer power supplies usually consist of rather large components, making it relatively easy to replace these.
Power supplies are among the components in a computer that most often break down.
Usually only a few components are affected, while all the other parts are still in working order and can be re-used.
Our goal is to be able to conduct such repairs ourselves.

Repair of flat screens
Quite often we receive broken flat screens which usually only have a small defect.
We've already repaired several flat screens and are improving our knowledge in this area.

New uses for SCSI cables and SCSI-interfaces
For a long time, SCSI was used for highly reliable data transfer in servers. For some time now, SCSI has been replaced by newer technologies, leading to the disuse of the robust and stable cabling that SCSI provided. We are interested in finding a new use for this old but reliable interface.