Computer's aren't limited to just circuit boards and hard drives, there are vacuum tubes, LCDs, and so much more. Below you will find these other components of computers.
Vacuum tubes were what started computers, and is no surprise that they are included on our list of things microwaved.
Vacuum tube video
As you can see from the video, the vacuum tube created a very interesting effect, something unique to itself. Kristiaan sent me an email regarding vacuum tubes mentioning that they sometimes give off X-Rays. Needless to say, we will not be microwaving vacuum tubes again until we get some money for better protection.
Cell phones were the very first "interesting" things we ever microwaved. We had two different phones which we put in two different ways.
The first one we put in was mike's old cell phone. Unfortunately that was a spur of the moment kind of thing, and we don't have a photo of it. The cell phone was disassembled when we got it and in almost no working order. We placed just the LCD portion of the phone into the microwave:
Mike's cell phone video
The next phone is Dan's old "construction worker" phone. We put that phone in the microwave just as is, the only thing missing was the battery and the duct tape holding it on.
Dan's cell phone video
Dan's video was kind of boring, compared to Mike's with the fire, but the smoke out of the antenna of Dan's phone more then made up for it.
We got this old 15 inch LCD Dell monitor with a broken back light. Mike attempted to wire some LEDs to it to make it work again, but in the process shorted something out. Since we got it for free anyway, we didn't care, and decided to microwave it.
15 inch LCD monitor
We also microwaved the backlight that no longer worked. That was very, very bright, I tried to dim the light alittle, but I'm just not that good with Final Cut Studio.
Backlight raw
Backlight edited
The FFCs in that connect the LCD to the circuit board caught fire, and spread to the glass of the screen, which started to burn also. The glass melted, and there were some cosmetic damages to the LCD screen but they were hard to photograph. Also, needless to say, it won't work anymore.
Our friend scott recently upgraded his computer because his old motherboard broke. He was kind enough to leave it for us to microwave. It provided some very interesting effects, particularly the capacitors, and the heat sink metal brackets:
ASUS motherboard
The metal braces holding the heat sink down burst into flame, causing a devilish glow to come up, I thought it was cool. Other things that happened was the battery made a huge pop, and bounced around. Some capacitors exploded also, and the usual fire happened.
We had a Linksys router which accidentally got bricked, and, we decided to microwave it. It was useless to us in its current state, and this was much more fun.
Linksys router
The RJ-45 ports on the back of the router burst into flame almost instantly. Otherwise, it was a pretty so so experiment.
