Slashdot Mirror
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?"
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.
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!
I remember fingering the coke machine back in 1990 or so.
Must... withstand... urge... to make... smartass... remark...
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at about midnight or so, this would replace a lame "information channel" text marquee (which was always several weeks out of date and advertising events whose deadlines had come and gone), that was currently occupying a perfectly good cable channel.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.
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.