Hacking Major Appliances For Fun And Profit?

waynelorentz asks: "I've finally reached a point in my life where my time with my family is more important than my money, so I've given in to my wife's persistent urging and bought a Roomba robotic vacuum. While I'm waiting for delivery, I googled for additional information about it and found there is a fledgling community of Roomba hackers outfitting their Roombas with cameras and other equipment. So, it got me wondering - what other appliances have Slashdot-types hacked? I remember when the Internet was young, there were coffee and soda machines you could ping, and the fabled Jellyjet toaster. Anything else?"

Comments

I wired my chainsaw...

[Anonymous Coward]

I no longer have a hand, but I now can turn that thing on from any internet connected computer. Just don't make the mistake I did... firewall it.

When the internet was young..

[Nathan Ramella]

There was no DNS and people passed around a text file full of FTP sites and nobody had come up with the idea of a URI or a URL.

Wired soda machines and all that brain-candy didn't come along until about 10 years ago..

The internet's mid-life crisis perhaps?

-n

Re:When the internet was young..

[Bishop923]

I remember fingering the coke machine back in 1990 or so.

Must... withstand... urge... to make... smartass... remark...

Are you and your wife really that lazy?

[DAldredge]

Are you two so lazy you can vacuum your own home? Damn, it's not that hard.

what goes on top?

[rsfpc]

What would you mount on it? Like maybe PEZ dispensers? I mean, come on! a camera at that level is only good for one thing... up skirts!

Drink machine at RIT

[BeatdownGeek]

The CS House at the Rochester Institute of Technology has hacked a drink machine that can dispense drinks via the internet.

Demo modes on appliances

[Bob Cat - NYMPHS]

Most with an LED display have them. Usually it scrolls some 'buy me, I can do blahblahblah' msg, and a clued store will set it on. But you can do it to your friend's new microwave oven if you want to annoy them. The manual will tell you how to do it.
But your friend is too stupid to RTFM, right?

blackbird

[Dragoon]

I wired in a wireless camera to a model of a blackbird that I have, it has a gas engine, and kicks some serious speed ass.

Full streaming at 20fps.. a little lag, but hey, i'm still working on it :)

Also I have thought of mounting a pellet gun to the end, and possibly trargeting it via the quick cam.. but thats just getting crazy :)

Retro hacking

[YrWrstNtmr]

Not a hack, but something to do with old appliances.

Upon the demise of my last dryer (once you let the magic smoke out...), I said "well...let's take it apart. Maybe we can reuse some of the parts." (motor for a future Battlebot, maybe?)

Strip it down...take the drum out.

You know that drawer you have, full of odd socks that you wife is always yelling at you about?

Well..the dryer actually does eat them. I pulled a double handful of odd socks, and about $4 in change and bills out of the bottom.

Forget the fancy hack, and just hack it apart.

Re:Retro hacking

[anubi]

hehe.. lemme tell you the washing machine eats socks and lingerie too.

They will do one of two things: wedge themselves between the tub and basket, so that agitation is labored and the spin is piss-poor - and you would swear its a loose belt, or they will go wedge themselves in the water pump impeller and bring the whole show to a screeching halt.

Its a little aggravating to try to recycle a washer motor. They are about 1/2 horsepower, the one I recycled was capacitor-start, reversible, and had two speeds. Problem is that its some sort of induction motor, and it didn't take well to SCR / TRIAC type speed controls. It worked, but not well. It might work a little better if I worked out some scheme to replace the capacitor and centrifugal starting switch with a little microprocessor to time the energy and phase angles delivered to the old motor's start and run windings, but for one old Frigidaire washer motor I recovered, it's just not quite worth the research effort for me to do so. But it does look do-able.

I did recover one helluva nice 1 inch hardened-steel shaft from the machine ( agitator drive shaft ), pulleys, water valves, and assorted mounting hardware. The switches are so special-purpose that they are darned near useless, and I suppose you could rewire the timer so that it would cycle endlessly, doing something like turning lights on and off in a room to give the illusion someone's home. Rube Goldbergian, but at least the price is right.

Don't overlook the old steel frame. Just turn it around, take the back completely off ( or saw it off with one of those metal-cutting skilsaw blades ) and you have a very sturdy steel workbench. Just make a nice wood top for it and it makes a nice addition to the workshop. Hint: put it on casters so you can roll it around to the job. The one I had was really made to take being jostled around - all I had to do was mount shelves in it and it really came out nice.

For now, I will be quite content to hold the motor in the attic as replacement in the event my table-saw, grinder/buffer, attic fan, or drill press motor fails.

Put a VCR on the internet

[BillX]

Well, it looks like this topic will be overrun by second-rate jokesters cracking wise about the Roomba's name, laziness, etc. In blatant disregard for the Slashdot community, here is something actually relevant to the topic.

In my college years, I had the position of running an underground student newspaper. An issue was released 'every few weeks' when its dedicated editors were free/bored enough to put one together, but one thing everyone thought would be nice would be to commandeer the University (dorm) cable system after-hours for a student-run movie and wierd footage channel. Starting at about midnight or so, this would replace a lame "information channel" text marquee (which was always several weeks out of date and advertising events whose deadlines had come and gone), that was currently occupying a perfectly good cable channel.

We had obtained keys to the main hub room (also the cable feed room), so inserting the signal was not a problem. The student TV footage was intended to begin late at night, when university officials were guaranteed not to be watching, and would be pre-recorded. This presented a minor problem, however: everyone on the 'staff' had early classes and poor memories, and could not be counted on to get into the hub closet after hours to insert the day's programming and press 'play'. Also, while some students (volunteering for the Computer center) did legitimately have access to these areas, students going in and out of there after hours would arouse unnecessary suspicion from campus security.

It was decided that the best solution was to equip the VCR with a 'remote control' of sorts that would allow it to be controlled over the dorm network via the abundant Ethernet connections available in the room. This would allow for automated starting and stopping as well as manual intervention as necessary; footage could then be loaded during the daytime hours at the convenience of those involved.

Making a VCR Internet-ready is not has hard as it sounds. I simply built a board with eight simple Darlington transistor circuits (corresponding to 8 data pins on a parallel port) to drive the important VCR function buttons via this port. A simple Web server (disposable '386) running a perl-based CGI interface allowed Web-based control of the parallel port bits, which in turn operated the disposable VCR with wires soldered into the appropriate front-panel switches.

The tricky part then became finding controversial/interesting/non-stupid, but legal, student-produced content worth displaying, but that's another story.