Salvaging used electronics.

[mindentropy]

Hi,

  I am interested in salvaging old electronic PCB's like unused set top boxes or DVD players or some old mobile phones. I want to reuse the PCB for other purposes not intended mostly want to flash my code into the microcontrollers or the CPU's. To do this how should I go about flashing assuming the processors are not custom processors or ASIC's but known processors. The JTAG emulators are quite costly for this. Are there any other ways to go about this?

[PedroDaGr8]

Hi,

  I am interested in salvaging old electronic PCB's like unused set top boxes or DVD players or some old mobile phones. I want to reuse the PCB for other purposes not intended mostly want to flash my code into the microcontrollers or the CPU's. To do this how should I go about flashing assuming the processors are not custom processors or ASIC's but known processors. The JTAG emulators are quite costly for this. Are there any other ways to go about this?

This is likely very difficult as best. Quite frankly you are  better off just buying your own uC. First off the board is custom for the application. Giving you all sorts of headaches. Second, many will be write protected. Third most boards don't have connectors for writing to the uC. The uC is preprogrammed abd then soldered into place.

All of these are very difficult tasks, making this not worth your time.

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