5mo ago

Found inside the case of an old enterprise editing computer

More photos in the comments. Is it supposed to be connected to the motherboard? I found it in the case. It wasn't connected. I think that the backside is some sort of thermal patch. I can tell that it's not a camera but I'm very confused and the connection reminds me of more of a laptop or phone connection not something you would see in a PC. The data matrix contains the same text as the white sticker.

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That is a six-pin flex PCB connector. Nothing more. Nothing less.
What did it connect? Dunno. It could connect any number of things that needed six pins for communication.
My wild guess: A floppy drive motor.
I'm going to buck the trend here and propose that this is probably a component off of a hard drive. It's very common to find that type of flat film cable linking the driver board(s) to various components or the spindle motor on those, and since they have to fit within a defined footprint for a 3.5"/2.5" drive body they often use tiddly little laptop-eque ZIF connectors and so forth. The "thermal pad" on the back is most likely a piece of double sided adhesive foam tape that was mounting it to whatever it originally went with.
The dingus it terminates in definitely looks like it ought to be a mic or a piezo speaker. There's obviously no call for a microphone on a hard drive, but having a little speaker on an industrial/enterprise drive or its controller board definitely makes sense, for the purposes of screaming at the operator if the drive is in an error state. It was probably unplugged by the previous owner to make it shut up, and it's likely that the drive is no longer in that computer because the reason it was screaming at them was because it had failed.
- My favorite theory so far, sounds very likely
- I thought so too but I looked at about a dozen 3.5inch HDDs and they all use 3 or 4 wire ffcs with much thicker traces.
  I'm sure 2.5 inch hdds can use thinner traces for their motors but I can't see why they would need more than 4.
- Unfortunately whatever it is, it is indeed broken off, which makes it harder to identify. The numbers on the flex don't lead to any hits.
  It's not a connector, too shallow for pins to seat anything. I doubt it's a speaker. My guess is some kind of sensor, but for what is hard to tell.
  It's possible that whatever this is fell into the PC from some other equipment, and isn't related to it. Likely something portable, as desktop PCs don't use that type of connector on the other end
  
  I declare you the likely winner. After looking all over inside of the computer, I couldn't find anything that seems like it's broken or missing a part. I suspect that it really did just fall into the case at some point.
- I'm guessing a noise maker, buzzer, beeper, or speaker.
  
  Too many pins for that. Those would all only require two.
- The QR code and part numbers might lead you to an actual page of info on the part
Looks like a connector for an industrial camera. Considering you mentioned they do editing.
It would allow the camera to directly be plugged in to the motherboard (assuming the other end is SATA, but hard to tell) so data can be transferred
- It's way smaller, the black circle is about 5mm in diameter
Any more info about the computer it came out of? Laptop or tower? Approximate age/brand/model? What kind of drives in it? 5.25"/3.5" floppy? Optical disk drives? SATA/PATA?
Initial thought is that the 6-pin end kinda looks like a vacuum tube socket, but I don't know if FFC type cables were a thing in the tube era, and you've only told us "old," not how old.
- About a decade old, it has GTX TITAN X so not crazy old and it is a tower
  
  what about CPU and motherboard models?
How old of a computerd did you find it in? Definitely looks like mobile technology like you said, not desktop. Looks like some sort of sensor or transmitter/receiver. Thermal imager? Wireless something or other? Something obviously higher powered that needs cooling with the thermal pads you mentioned and not just a basic sensor with the 24 pin connector.
- About a decade old, it has GTX TITAN X so not crazy old
Maybe part of an case intrusion detector?
Temp sensor?
- Maybe? But why would it look so complicated? If it is a temperature sensor, I would think it's like an IR one. In which case, why would I have an IR temperature sensor inside a PC case?
Hard to tell but is it broken? The end with the holes looks like it’s either broken off something or missing a piece- hard to tell with fuzzy pic.
- Honestly, we have 50MP phones, with stabilization and AI filters and all that, and still we get Bigfoot quality photos.
- Doesn't look broken irl
  
  This is wild. It almost looks like a tiny speaker, but the cable is strange for that. I don’t think it’s a thermocouple, - cable looks like it has at least 4 wires in it?
From Reverse Image Search
Looks like a LiDAR mount connector. Any chance this is the item?
- Not impossible but seems different

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