Slashdot Mirror
What (non-PC) Hardware Do You Hack?
Lis writes "Mike Langberg at the Merc News interviewed Scott Fullam - Scott wrote the book 'Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks' which includes things like a video periscope for your car, an Internet toaster, Cubicle Intrusion Detection Systems, and talking Furbys. (Instructions for the toaster and coffeemaker are up on the O'Reilly site.) Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do. Ok, you'll probably void your warranty in the process, but you could end up with something even better than the original. Or not. But it's just gotta be interesting. So what have you hacked, and into what?"
...with all the people I've helped move lately, I've become somewhat of an expert on taking apart and putting together beds, desks, entertainment centers, large tables, small tables, etc...
libertarianswag.com
Hey, nothing beats hacking an Xbox or two...
Oh wait....
"A group of words expressing something other than their literal intention. Now that... is... irony!" - Bender
Does 'hacking' into my girlfriend count?
I screwed around with a dialpad and set it up so when the right PIN is punched in, it turns on my computer. (I saw someone do it once with a garage door opener too)...
Business \Busi"ness\, n.;
A scam in which all people involved perceive as beneficial...
I hacked my Sony Aibo into its component parts. Worthless f'n robot.
Its a science in itself, but I am the elite hacker of women.. and luckily none of her parts are detachable!
I performed surgery on my Furby and created a secret stealing super agent. Muhahahaha...
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
3 old dot matrix printers and a dremel become a 3D rapid prototyping machine that can carve a 3D relief into styrofoam (or anything else, if you've got the patience to let it run that slowly...)
Apple II. Nuff said.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
I once painstakingly hacked a rotating fiber-optic Christmas tree and removed the parts that made it rotate. Does that count?
Hexy - a strategy game for iPhone/iPod Touch
I know a distressingly large amount of trivial about what USED to be my 1989 Corvette. Just about the only stock part left is the distributor _shaft_.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Does M$ xbox count? Of course there are a lod of people hacking that
Evolution or ID?
...into a million peices with an ax.
phones: see the above webpage.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Too bad they didn't stick to the O'Reilly tradition of using an animal on the cover of the book. They could use a monkey :P
goats!
RealDolls... but calling it "hacking" is a bit of a stretch..
Trolling is a art,
phone's are my personal favorite, they are easy to do and you don't get shocked too hard... the light up ones and the caller id's are the best to do, changing leds and such. speaking of changing leds, someone will mention the dreamcast or ps2 LED mod
but phones are simple, and don't hold a big charge... although, there's nothing like a good 9 volt zap in the morning to wake you up.
Runnin' On Empty
Is it staring at me?
Does my Pimpbot count as non politically correct hardware?
I was going to build a cracked speedpass from Sixflags but havent gotten to it yet.
How long before somebody hacks the iPod to make it play WMA files?
I haven't done any of these myself, but I've seen people who've attached flashy lights to their TV whenever they turn it on, and equip wheelie chairs with fire extinguishers (rocket chairs).
its non-technical, but i think it counts for a hack.
When i was in high school there was a particular big dumb jock that would pick on me. It was a catholic high school. So I stole some official letterhead paper from the guidance counselor's office and an official envelope with the school info on it.
I proceeded to type up an expulsion letter on the letterhead paper, saying he had been caught masturbating on campus, and as a good catholic school we could not allow that. I made it sound much more official. Had my friend forge the dean's signature, and that if they (his parents) had any questions about it, feel free to call (phone number included).
Then I mailed it.
he never found out it was me that did that, and he did still pick on me... but i'd say I got even.
Put a amplifier in your car.
Now get one of those good old fashion Jason Masks. You know, the ones that glow?
We got bored and hooked a 40 Watt light socket on the dash of my buddies Blazer a few years back and put the Jason Mask in front of it.
Ran the wires through the Amplifier so it would flash with the beat of the music.
Turn off the head lights and watch people spazz as we pull behind them
The truth does not change by our ability to stomach it -Flannery O'Conner
i've been trying to get my motorola dcp-550 working. it's not going as well as i had hoped, though. my cd player gets ripped apart all the time, but not the hack, just to fix.
Personally, I prefer to blame the incomprehensible Michael Spindler, CEO of Red Ink Corps.
To find out why the fucking thing wasn't working this morning. Turns out they still use glass fuses after all these years. Good job oven manufacturers way to keep up with technology. I mean where the hell do you get glass fuses in this day and age?
THe Glorious Technology known as DEE ESS ESS
Long live the HU
I had some cobwebs up in the corner of the tall "cathedral" ceiling of my apartment. I zip-tied my Swiffer to a mop handle, making an extra-long Swiffer.
If you don't think this is a good hack, you have no imagination.
Many routers (wired and wireless) are free or dirt cheap after mail in rebate. I've attempted to hack cheap belkin and US Robotics routers I've picked up - attempting to pick apart the firmware. The only thing is, once you flash it, if you made one mistake the device is as good as ruined. On the belkin router, I made the kernel out to be a Nucleus Plus kernel with strings with "Aurora" in them scattered throughout. I found a large hunk of gzipped data in the file, but I couldn't find any structures deeper than that. Does anyone know about the structures of this type of firmware, and know how I could take it apart, to at the very least see how it works?
People "hack" cars all the time. To make the fast, stronger and "better" than they were before. Like there is a neat little "hack" you can by to make a full size pickup do a quarter mile in like 12 seconds (fast for an a stock engine). It's an engine computer "hack"
Evolution or ID?
People got stuck in a lift. I just switched the mains off and on again, the lift display jumped through 34 and 97 (in 4-floor building) and the lift moved safely to the nearest floor :)
Running solar ignitors to a couple of bottle rockets mounted to the grill of an old Buick Regal, connected to a switch panel in the front?
Ok, maybe not, but it was fun to have bottle rocket launchers in the front of the car.
Once in a while, they actually went where you wanted them to (the rockets, not the car).
Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do.
*eyes electric massagers*
You don't saaaay....
The coolest voice ever.
1) Hold clock up by power cord, against wall
2) Position IC over power cord
3) Apply hammer to IC, driving pins 1-16 into wall.
4) Connect ground, Vcc, and inputs as desired.
--Leo
It's a great system for homebrew stuff - the assembly and c required is fairly easy, the hardware is pretty powerful in its intended way, and all the equipment needed costs less than $150 shipped - a lot less, if you know where to look.
I bow before the uber hackerness of anyone who got the neutred Boba Fett toy's missile to fire.
Does using dishwasher parts in my TIG welder count?
Rick B.
Rock crawling is great fun... I currently have an '85 4runner which has Chevy 63" rears, Jeep Wrangler fronts, Inchworm 5:1 transfer case, 5.29 axles, detroit locker, and 35x15.5 TSL-SX tires, and I'm not done yet!
It's a motorsport most people probably can't understand, but once you get hooked, you're hooked.
This post is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
I've been tweaking the crap out of my bicycle. It's a dual suspension bike, but I wanted a rack on the back to put my bag on.
So, after one afternoon in the machine-shop and a pile of scrap aluminium and spare screws, I managed to get a rack intended for a non-rear suspension bike over my rear wheel in an amazingly sturdy and resilient manner. I even managed to attach extra hardpoints for my rear reflector and light and an under-the-seat attachment for my lock to keep it out of the way while I pedal.
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
Home ownership: the ultimate hackers dream.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
building a Apple Lisa (more or less) from the ground up for a class with nothing but the 68000 reference material, the chips, and wire.
really, but it impresses people. Last year i got a ti-83+ silver edition, clear case with silver glitter in the plastic. Thought what the hell and threw 2 blue leds and a microswitch inside the thing. Turned out brighter than i expected, enough to read by in the dark or enough to catch the attention of the person at the next desk if i turn it on. Also changed the backlight in my old nokia from green to blue(ps surface mount leds are a bitch and a half to solder even with a fine tip). The coolest thing though probably was building a 56k acoustic coupler. Old school phreaking is always cool non pc hardware hacking too... Ah, memories of junior high and beige boxing...
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
If you're looking anywhere other than out your windows or at your dashboard while you're driving, there are issues.
And it's nice to know that my dreams of Internet toast have been fulfilled.
Anyone with a little skill/determination (yeah, that's a slash, not an "and") can hack anything; I think a more interesting article would be about maverick hacks that actually turned out to be useful. Like, say someone turned a toaster into a door-to-door salesman irradiation device. That would be amazingly useful.
The coolest voice ever.
I hacked several functioning consumer electronic devices into fully-working doorstops?
sig under development
I once dremeled a PCB from an old power supply into several pieces, then resoldered and glued it back together so that it still worked, and tried to sell it on eBay as modern art. Unfortunately, no one bit. An interesting hack I've seen is something I think a lot of electronics slashdotters out there should note: Cheap oscilloscope using your sound card. The software is available on the web, just get your signals into at +/- 1 or 2V range, and you have a dual channel low frequency scope that plugs into any sound card. Check the voltage range of line-out to get an idea of what's acceptable. I started making an adapter to provide a high impedance input and scaling the signal down, but got distracted and haven't revisited the project in a while.
"No one likes working in a hamster wheel, and your shop smells of cedar shavings from here." - TaleSpinner
an open source flight computer .... feel free to steal the design and/or software
Does anyone know of any low voltage led sequencer designs for driving fiber optic strands in sequence?
I'd like to spice up a Star Destroyer and maybe a few other spaceships!
"Can there be a Klein bottle that is an efficient and effective beer pitcher?"
TiVo of course! Ethernet, e-mail checker, etc, etc... ;)
I should put something clever here. Maybe someday.
Plus on 80/90's GM EFI cars, there's a cruise fuel saving routine that's not enabled from the factory. 29 MPG highway from a 350 CI V8 baybee.
My first big hack was tearing into my radio shack scanning receiver and interfacing the serially programmed PLL tuner IC to the parallel printer port of a PC. Gave my cheapo 8 channel scanner an infinite channel memory and other features.
I've also interfaced a "radio controlled clock" to a PC to automagically set the exact time.
Turned an old CD-ROM drive into a hand-powered LED toy for my son.
Latest interesting project was to convert a box fan motor into a permanent magnet for use in a wind generator... that hasn't worked out too well so far.
i have a vege garden with some cucumbers. i've been trying to grow some square cukes similar to the square watermelons.
so far all my attempts have failed, because these cukes were pretty strong, and they just push through whatever box i can find. maybe i need something completely sealed (from birth/manufactured) to achieve my goal.
I hacked mercurynews.com's photo display window so that the only text it shows for the photo captions is "myText"
You probably shouldn't click this.
Electron Tubes baby!
I was going to Patent my own cubicle intrustion detection system! I could have made millions! Oh, wait. I live in the US. The existance of well documented prior art is no hindrence on these shores!
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Recently I've been studying up on electronics and modifying the electrical components to my basses. If you're a geek and into music this can be a lot of fun. It has the added bonus of helping you as a musician really understand every single part of your signal chain.
There are several reasons why this is cool. The components of a passive pickup system are real simple, allowing you to get started easily. As you build up your base of knowledge you can get involved in much more complex projects, like modifying amplifiers, building your own stomp boxes, etc.
Another reason this is a cool field is that you can approach it from different angles. If you're good with calculus you can design and calculate the frequency response of your filters before you build them and know exactly what you're doing. You can design a whole effect if you want and model it in circuit modelling software. In fact, with some programs I believe you can do that and use a wav file for input to get an idea of how the circuit will sound, although I haven't tried that myself.
If you're a physical experimenter kind of a person you can take existing circuits and see, for example, how a tone knob sounds different when the pot is connected to different values of capacitors. Plus, if your favorite part is building, not designing then there is a huge amount of free schematics for things on the web, kits you can order, etc.
It's loads of fun (pun intended?) and you can really individualize your sound (for better or for worse).
A Weber Grill, old hair dryer (metal barrel), and various compression fittings hack nicely into a turbo-grill. Just attach the dryer to one of the bottom ash-emptying holes (and turn it (the dryer) on, 'natch). Turns out Alton Brown also did this. He is the ultimate kitchen hacker.
That makes it go faster, right???
not quite an electronics hack, and not quite a full modification... more like a hacked add-on accessory...
When the Hasselblad Xpan (makes 24mm x 60 mm panoramic frames on 35mm film) was first marketed, I drooled over the ads, but didnt have the budget for it.
But I did have a medium format Rolleicord TLR (which makes 60mm x 60mm frames on 120 film), and I knew that a 35mm film adapter existed for it, so I shopped around used camera store until I found one that had kits.
Now the full kit prevents you from not using the 35mm mask (to make 24mm x 36mm frames).
Luckily, the store manager had an incomplete kit, which I got at a substantial discount from a complete (collectible priced) kit.
So I used the two parts that serve to hold the 35mm film canister, and used some medical duct tape wound on either end of a 120 film spool to narrow the space for the 35mm film and voila!
Cheap "real panoramic" 35mm photos.
The only downside is that I have to rewind the film in a changebag or in a darkroom.
When I was a child I "overclocked" my lego-train. ;-)
Running is as 110 V when it's 220 V in the wall did wonders to it
"If you keep an open mind people will throw a lot of garbage in it."
Back in college, I used to love synthetic programming in an HP-41C. When it was first discovered, one had to use various evil processes (yanking a memory modules, corrupting a magnetic card). The result was programming instructions that HP never intended. With synthetic programming, one could access hidden memory locations, display strange characters, and emit unusual sounds (just be careful with "STO c"). I spent way to much time exploring all of the tricks and documenting what did what.
My favorite little synthetic program made the machine tick ominously like a Geiger counter.
Thanks for bringing back fond memories from 20 years ago.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I took one of those greeting cards that plays a song and replaced the normally closed switch with an electronics circuit (74LS parts) so that it was triggered once every ten minutes, replaced the little watch battery with a few AA's, and threw it up into the tile ceiling of a classroom. It ran for a couple of days driving the teacher crazy. hee-hee
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
With these chips, a trunk-mount 386, and Perl, I'm in the process of creating a realtime diagnostics readout for my Crown Victoria. It outputs to a small black-and-white LCD I have in my glove box. The next step will be sending spoofed voltages to the PCM to affect engine operation. Who needs an expensive reprogrammable chip? Just lie to the one you have!
And I have a better coffeepot, by the way. I got it at a truck stop. It used to plug into the cigarette lighter. I'm about halfway through reworking its circuitry to run on Firewire. Then I have to write a driver.
REM Old programmers don't die. They just GOSUB without RETURN.
See Reed Ghazala, father of circuit bending.
Escape Pod Films: Sketch Comedy and Web Series
If you are interested in EFI, ( even if you wish to keep your stock computer) check out megasquirt . I have learned more about how EFI works, and I plan to use megaquirt on my 65 barracuda. This type of garage/junkyard technology will keep older vehicles on the road, with better emissions and performance.
A much better tool would have been the age of current pot. I don't care if it's being heated or not when it's 12 hours old. And it's probably still hot if it was brewed 15 minutes ago and relatively full.
They either get a "speaker-ectomy" or at the very least a big peice of tape so they aren't so freakin loud.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
I put the thermistor on a programmable home thermostat on the end of a cable to allow for remote programmable temperature control of reptile cages and aquariums. Half the price of commercial solutions, with more features and higher reliability.
I recently hacked the old farm house's wiring. It has been added on to in the last 50 years so there is NO heat upstairs(forced air). Every night around 7pm(offpeak charging) my old man would climb up the stairs to turn on the space heater. While visiting a friend I seen him with a wireless remote control outlet, and quickly gave him five bucks.
I took an old remote control car's motor and put it inot a model car to construct my own pulley system to make the car hop up and down just like the real cars on the road with hydraulic suspension setups.
So I took the motor and attached it inside the car (thank you hot glue gun and glue sticks) and hooked up a "T-model" suspension so that when the motor turns it would wind a string up which pulls the suspension "up" towards the car, thus making the car hop.
Then I took my mothers rice cooker power plug and spliced into it to attach it to the motor. Little did I know at that time in my life (9 years old), the value of toggle switches as well as 120v on a motor that was built to handle no more than a 9v battery. Needless to say, instantaneously after plugging in the rice-cooker plug the car hopped once and then the motor sparked like hell (exploded actually), caught on fire, and melted a hole through the floorpan of my model 1968 Impala.
So in the end my mother slapped me for ruining her power cord, I was out a motor and model car, and my room smelled like burning plastic/metal for 3 days. How I miss my innocent days of playing with electricity.
PIC microcontrollers are a blast. They're used in dang near everything and are cheap cheap cheap. If you're into robotics or motor controlls, these are must have skills.
x ?m id=&treeid=1&wdid=132&gdir=1010
http://asp.microchip.com/wwwParamChart/Tree.asp
Get some free samples!
--
You sure got a purty mouth...
Jesus, the amount of things you can do with a hacked Xbox are insane.
You can turn it into a baby Linux box - Thank God Linux doesn't need much hardware to run well.
You can turn it into a media center - Home brew applications allow for a/v playback of any codec you can think of. Now it even supports HD.
You can turn it into a portable Xbox (Instead of lugging around your games, just put 'em on a HDD)
You can turn it into a homebrew gaming system, with support for stuff like Stepmania (DDR simulator)
You can turn it into an arcade with emulation support for any gaming system that isn't current generation (sans maybe the Sega Saturn).
Well, you get the point. $200 Xbox + $50 mod chip + $100 HDD = $5,000 worth of entertainment equipment
once put stereo input output mini-jacks into a phone-set for plugging in to my PC so I could play sound effects and record crank calls. I was doing that before the Jerky Boys were cool (if they ever were.)
"This above all, to thine own self be true"
my dad used to have a small logging operation before the evil democrats shut that down
oh wait not that kind of hacking... ok hacked the chainsaws to hack the trees down... just change this little wire here for more power AR RAR AR (Obligatory Tim the Tool Man Taylor Laugh... copyright ABC (I think))
When I was an engineering student, we had supersoaker fights on our floor of the dorm. Some buddies of mine decided the pressure of the supersoaker wasn't "devastating" enough. So they proceeded to replace the regular pump with a small basketball/football/soccerball/dodgeball pump.
It failed miserably, come to think of it maybe it was a good thing they failed out of engineering. I'd hate to be driving across a bridge these two worked on.
It was my first electric motor. I was about 9 years old and had extracted my first electric motor from some doomed toy, and figured out how to attach wires manually to the brush leads and a battery and make it run. Unfortunately, as with most things I played around with at that age, I didn't know much about cause and effect.
I believe the motor was originally driven by two 1.5 V AA batteries, and I was using a 9V. (Hey, it's easier to connect!) My plan was to use it as a climbing winch, enabling Snake Eyes (tm) to sneak up on the evil Destro(tm)'s clifftop lair. I tied one end of a 3 foot piece of sewing thread to the motor shaft, and the other to Snake Eyes' left hand. I wedged the motor under a book and connected the battery to winch him to the top!
Little did Snake Eyes know what kind of evil Destro had in store for him. Little also did I know - it happened so fast that I am still fuzzy on some details. At some point, Snake Eyes stopped standing on the ground at the base of my dresser and entered into a state where he was spinning at insane velocities about the motor, attached by a tangled 6 inch piece of thread. I have no memory of a transition between these two states.
The moral of the story - if an evil overlord leaves an electric motor conveniently located for you to winch your way up the cliff face to his mountain fortress, don't use it!
who are those slashdot people? they swept over like Mongol-Tartars.
I...err I mean someone I don't know...hacked a Jeep's ignition to disble the Rube Goldberg emissions control crap. The funny thing is that, in addition to an extra 8 mpg and a pretty big HP increase, the thing passed emissions cleaner than when the computer controlled the mix.
The best hack I did personally, was to recode the eprom on a Tranz-330 Credit Card terminal. Was able to get the terminal to constantly display the following lines:
Answers: $1.00
Answers w/thought: $2.00
Correct Answers: $4.00
Dumb Answers still free
Visa/MC Accepted...
Sold it on ebay a few months later for like $80.00.
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Not quite non-pc, but anyway, I've embedded some of the guts of a 9 button USB mouse (5 button + 2 scrollwheels) into the IBM ultranav keyboard. Using a CMOS 4066 analog switch and a 2 wire touch sensor, I've put a scroll button where the touchpad was. Then I set up XF86 to emulate wheel on the 4th button. So I now have a 3 button trackpoint, with a scroll button too. Neat! In other words, by removing the synaptics touchpad (ugh!) and adding an extra button, I've managed to revert IBM's new daft mouse button layout to something effectively the same as the original trackpoint layout. (The new layout is daft, because the 3 buttons are in a line, rather than one underneath the other 2. This means that you can't emulate the 3rd button by pressing 1+3, leaving the middle button purely for scrolling.)
I'm using the 65 degrees hack to get free music.
Within weeks he had his unit all wearing beards.
He arrested a senior member of the army who came back to the base too late after a night out.
And the best bit: In the army one's transport to and from home each weekend is paid for. He lives the other side of Europe from Italy, so they offered to fly him. But no - the rules state that it had to be by train (which takes what, a day? a day and a half?) so he ended up spending just a couple of days a week in Italy...
They sent him home soon afterwards. Nicely. Permanently.
Give this guy a system (of whatever kind) and he'll do scary scary things...
The oil line for my furnace got air in it after the serviceman improperly installed a new fitting. It was 8 degrees F at the time, and I was at work.
I had been purging it daily until I could get it fixed, but this time it got ahead of me.
Told the wife to hit the reset button, but after a couple tries, it stopped cycling.
It turns out Beckett/Honeywell oil burner controllers have a 3 strikes you're out feature on the relight button. (thanks, Google)
This is a safety feature. If you keep shooting oil into the furnace and it doesn't light, it is going to need a cleaning, and is a potential fire hazard. It didn't apply this time, because the problem was a lack of oil, not a lack of ignition.
In lockout, the green LED will blink every 1/2 second.
To unlock the controller, hold the red button for 30 seconds. The LED will blink twice and the controller will now reset.
Once I reset the controller I was able to purge the air out of the fuel line and we were back in business.
The serviceman showed up 2 hours later and repaired the fitting.
I don't have any interesting non-PC hacking projects of my own, but a friend once hacked a MIDI connection into an accordion. Seems to work pretty good too.
I've hacked hardware all across the country :)
Some more noteable exploits have been:
-Changing your parents VCR's so they revert back to blinking 12:00 24 hours after thier time has been set.
-Breaking tips of pens of people who regularly place them in thier shirt pockets.
-Altering automatic coffee makers around the world to turn back on after you turn them off in the morning.
-Modifying geometries of glasses from circular to oval so as to increase dribble.
-Abusing multi-line phone systems to induce irony. (Pizza hut and Dominos both on the same line, and both believe the other called them. Multiple departments in Kinko's are just as interesting.)
-Reflashing firmware in cell phones to slowly increase ringger volume over the period of a week to the point it can crack plaster.
-Disabeling the left turn signal indicators in cars and rewiring the bar to be in the left turn position by default.
-Altering the speed of clothes dryer tumblers so as to be the most efficient at both inverting socks and assuring any metalic snaps on jeans slam against the outside wall on every rotation.
-Using an epoxy weld to alter the natural curve and velocity of drinking fountain streams.
-Abuseing power window buttons while in the back seat of a car at night to make the driver believe there is something wrong with his electrical system.
-Placing white-out on fax machine mirrors.
-Changing keymaps from US to French and waiting for the user to just swap thier g and j keys.
-Replacing the ferrite cores on monitor cables with magnets.
Ahh... the joys of hacking.
Karma: SELECT `karma` FROM `users` WHERE `userid`=138474;
Design Report circa June '03 here
I bumbled the second URL in my earlier post. The URL works but it should read "convert a box fan motor into a permanent magnet alternator"
For carving styrofoam a small soldering iron, with temperature control, would do. Less noise, less dust, probably lasts longer.
Took a broken laserdisc player, used R and L stereo channels to control the X and Y axis of the laser.... Instant light show :)
When I was in college, my friend and I mounted the nozzle from a squirt gun into the grill of his honda civic. We attached that to the windshield wiper supply line and installed a valve under the dash to swithc from windshield wiper mode to soak unsuspecting pedestrian mode. Not very difficult, but man was that good for days of stupid fun.
After a tragic accident while chasing the X-prize, I had the capability to become the world's first bionic man. When I upgraded myself to the 2.6 kernel and added the ability to address more than 4 GB of memory, I became better, faster, stronger. Unfortunately, there are no open source drivers available for my robotic penis. Maybe sourceforge or freshmeat can help me out.
I also reply below your current threshold.
I saw a keyboard combined with an Atari game system, once, but I don't have the link. However, here's a great link for gear mods:
http://billtmiller.com/circuitbending/
Standing on the shoulders of giants.
One of my classrooms at school was about 4 or 5 meters high. A real relic that hadn't gotten around to being converted into a two-story classroom.
Anyway, at the end of my last school year, I taped 4 meter rules together, and with the help of a desk to stand on, taped several bits of the teachers stationary to the roof, and a poster. Sadly I got caught attempting to tape an orange to the ceiling, but he had a good sense of humor, after I got them all down again.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
.. my this car was a P.O.S.
... good times.
One time it overheated and blew a head gasket. I took it to the mechanice and he showed me this little thermostat that turned the electric fan on when it got too hot "this thing blows out all the time, 'yer lucky it didn't warp the cheap head!"
so I go to the radio shack, run some wiring to the battery straight to the fan and ran it to a little toggle switch under mounted under the dash. Best part was manual temperature control. I could leave the fan off when it was cold to let the engine heat up real quick, then kick it on.
Eventually ( after leaving the switch on too many times and killing the battery, or forgetting to turn it on and then noticiing the "engine temperature" light), I just wired it permanently to a hot ignition wire so it was always on when the car was started.
DO NOT DISTURB THE SE
Ever notice how it's so difficult sometimes to wake up when it's dark outside? It seems that I'm at higher risk for getting up late when it's overcast or stormy outside. It seems that the light level triggers how awake you are. If I have to wake up early, I'll usually leave a light on in the room; it helps a lot. But it's not the best solution, and I'd love to smooth out the roughly torn edge between sleep and consciousness when the buzzer screams at you.
I'm building a clock that includes a wall socket. You plug a lamp into the socket, and half an hour before your set wakeup time, the lamp begins glowing. It increases brightness gradually over a half hour so that by the time you need to wake up, you already are. It's not really a new idea, but it's fun. It uses a realtime clock chip, a microcontroller, and a triac for power control. Maybe not so much hacking...I guess it does "hack" a desk lamp into a wakeup alarm notification device.
Most of my other hacks are computer related; for example hacking a Sandisk 6-in-1 memory card reader to work with ALL CompactFlash cards, instead of only the new ones, with a single wire. I hacked a Nintendo R.O.B. into an internet-controlled pan/tilt webcam mount in an hour or two. Also ran a small server in college which used fetchmail to check for new messages, and would flash one LED over my desk and one in the door's peephole, so I knew I had mail just by looking down the hall from a friend's room. Lots of random stuff like that. My most recent major project was a small CNC machine, the computer, power supply, and driver electronics housed inside the case of an old Yokogawa data analyzer.
...
I've hacked the hell out of my TiVo. There's nothing like surfing the web browser on your TiVo for the first time! And, no.. XBOX doesn't count. it's PC hardware :)
----
AFK Games
BNT.AFKGAMES.COM - Black Nova Traders
LOTGD.AFKGAMES.COM - Legend of the Green Dragon
All Free!
my brother and neighbor and i put a 5 horsepower snowblower engine on a lightened lawnmower frame. no blade, lowered steering wheel, plastic student desk chair for a seet, go-kart throttle, but there aren't any brakes yet. also added an sla battery for the lightbulb in the front. 30mph
I'm about to start hacking my car*: JWT Pop-charger, grounding kit, coilovers, new lightbulbs for the turn signals (silver instead of amber), shorter antenna.
Does that count?
* '04 350ZR
Based on the subject of your post, I thought you went and put "R" stickers and huge wings on model cars.
Your story proved to be more interesting than that.
PIC processors can be insanely useful for this sort of thing and very cheap (most around $10) and easy to get, and once you've got the basics down (which can seem a bit daunting at first) they are very easy to learn and program to do pretty much whatever you want. The playstation mod chips are cheap miniture 8-pin PICs usually - just to give you an idea of what they can do, and some of the more advanced models have RS232 (i think) builtin so you can directly interface it with your PC. Add to that some cheap easy to use wireless modules (they just take a power supply and you stick the on/off binary signal in and thats all you need, takes 2 minutes) you can do some nifty remote controlled things. Basically anything from just switching something on and off or blinking some leds (which can be programmed in minutes) to full fledged computing can be done with these babys. They have loads of extras too - analog-digital converters, eeprom memory, high-current switching and more.
;)
Remote key-loggers anyone?
The PIC makers
More stuff
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
The first thing that came to mind was modding the PS2 to play DVD-R games. Nothing better than hackin' up the PS2 to be able to own all games for $50 (chip) + $1/game for media
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
I put freaking lasers on their freaking heads.
When I was in middle school I came across an old cheapo 9.6v R/C truck. I took the wires off of the motor and wired it to a homebuilt relay that I made out of a small motor and some aluminum foil (motor comes on, foil on the arm spins and makes contact to more foil, completing the circut. Reverse to stop). Through the relay I connected 2 more 9.6v batteries directly to the motor.
Holy shit that thing was fast. It didn't last very long, was not wired to go backwards, and couldn't turn without flipping over, and took 3 battery packs, but it was fast!
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
"Automotive" nitrous oxide has sulfur dioxide added, to prevent substance abuse. Therefore, for your nose hair clippers, one would recommend using "medical" N2O, which can be substance-abused at will.
Last weekend I hacked up a bunch of mesquite logs and created a nice smoked beef brisket.
In Soviet Russia, Chuck Norris will still kick your ass.
This was sometime in 3rd or 4th grade when we were taught how electic magnets are made. So I came home took a wire, wound it around a nail and then connected two ends of the wire to the power outlet. Poof. We lost current in the whole building (we were in the second floor of an apartment complex, the owners lived downstairs and there was only one fuse for both the floors).
I was gifted an Mp3 player that came from China. Unfortunately, it also came with Chinese instructions (though the unit had English on the display and buttons) and a 200-240V adaptor (5V 600mA output).
This was a fairly sensitive unit, so I wanted to be careful about the voltage. A decent step-up transformer for 110-220V is around $70 here. It's also not as easy as one things to find a decent priced 5V/600mA adaptor (most are about 300mA, and not all that "stable").
I eventually came to the bright conclusion that computer power leads have a 5V connector, so I made an adaptor for the front of my PC. I then removed the original 200V adaptor and simply connected the power lead to a plug that fits in the PC. Viola, my MP3 player now charges nicely and plays tunes while I'm on the go.
I had a broken alarm clock and a broken Macintosh SE. Now I have a Macintosh Alarm clock. I cut a piece of Plexiglas to fit where the monitor was and the buttons just poke through the lower floppy drive whole. It looks great and I did not damage the original case.
What happened to my robot, I was promised a robot.
This isn't really what you're after but:
I played the MMORPG "Dark Ages of Camelot" for a while. One of my characters practiced fletching (arrow making). Practising this would involve buying raw materials, then clicking an icon to make a bunch of arrows. It would take about 7 to 20 seconds to make a bunch of arrows (depending on the type I was making.) Then you click the icon again, repeat until you run out of raw materials.
This was, of course, tremendously tedious - so I used my Lego Mindstorms to make a little device to click my mouse button every X seconds. I'd buy my materials, position the mouse over the icon, and start it up. Then I'd have a shower or whatever, come back 10 minutes later and sell the arrows and buy new raw materials.
(I expect by now, and possibly even back then, there are software hacks to achieve this with more convenience and flexibility.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Does this version of the protocol support RFC 2423, the HTCPCP (Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol)?
Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, dass er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. --Nietzsche
This doesn't exactly qualify as a hack, but I figured it might be of intersest to the same crowd... I managed to crash a gas pump at a Stinker Station once.
It was a fairly new self serve gas pump and I had selected the type of gas that I wanted, but then realized that their labelling was confusing and that I really wanted a different type of gas.
Naturally, I applied my problem solving skills to the situation, deviated from the process shown in the illustrated instuctions printed on the side and attempted to re-select the type of gas that I wanted. There was no response! In fact, ALL of the pumps at the station stopped and the operator's terminal inside of the store locked up too!
They had to reboot the system to get everything working again. They told me that nothing like that had ever happened before and we were all just lucky that the manager, who knew how to restart the sytem, was on duty at the time.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
After hours, the desk attendant is replaced by a rent-a-cop. These rent-a-cops, to make things convinient for themselves, are in the practice of comandering one of the elevators so that it only moves when they put their key in.
Similarly, the cleaning people, when moving from floor to floor, leave their wheeled carts on the elevator and disable the movement of the elevator to save them the trouble of waiting on an elevator and moving their carts out of the elevator.
This has, at times, annoyed me. So I figured out that if I enter the elevator and [b]hold down[/b] the floor button, the elevator door will close and I will move to my floor.
This mischief of mine is mostly directed at the rent-a-cops because when I enter the building it is easist for me to just grab their elevator and ride it up, leaving them thinking that they didn't set it right.
However, the bigger impact is on the cleaning people, for when I take their elevator, I'm also taking their wheeled carts, and it must be a pain in the butt to try get back that elevator (one of three). I mean, they push a return elevator button, and it's 1:3 chance that it will be the right one.... every time! Because of this, I'm much less likely to hax0rz their elevator.
My Alarm clock...that "soundscape" crap drives me nuts...replaced it with Filter's "hey man, nice shot"...I now can actually get to sleep using my clocks feature....tranquil bells my shiny bottom..
My stereo reciever..I added a few nice features, like a switch to turn on an integrated Zobel network I added in, and also swapped out the bare wire binding posts for 5-way posts. Also added an IEC socket so I could detatch the power cord easily.
Sooner or later my answering machine will be next...the though of making it ask the person to verify that their message is correct kinda puts a grin on my face.
Ok, so it ended up connected to a PC, but I took one of these and turned it into a StepMania machine.
;)
Basically, it was just a matter of getting a 50-pin scsi cable and hacking it apart, connecting it to the already-present centronix connector for the pads, and sitting with a multimeter to figure out which wire went with which sensor (9 pads x 4 sensors x 2 players = a buttload of wires to test). Then, taking the wires, attaching them to a terminal strip, where the other end got soldered to torn-apart playstation controllers.
Then, run the PS controllers through your basic Boom PS->USB converter to the PC, and voila! Actual, real arcade dance pads for SM. Luckily, the monitor was a standard VGA and the sound just two stereo 1/8" jacks, so that was all that needed doing. The rumor is that SM is going to add a lights driver, so it's possible I'll even be able to get the stage and machine lights to work at some point, too.
The PC behind the scenes is a Shuttle XPC with an Athlon XP 2600+ in it. When running SM, you'd be hard pressed to know it's not a regular DDR machine, except for the over 1k songs that it has on it. Oh, and that it's a Korean knockoff version's cabinet, but that's minor, really.
Though, I do have to giggle every time I see the arcade machine boot up a Windows XP screen.
That green slime had it coming.
I hacked a dildo and turned it into a toilet paper holder... I am writing a white paper on it which will be published shortly.
~Turd
A foot pedal for time crisis 1 on the playstation :) then I placed the insides of a joypad inside it, and made sure when pressure was applied the circle button was pressed, Bit of masking tape, Some carpet tile on the bottom to stop it sliding around. Plugged it into port two and I had a nice little foot pedal.
This consisted of a video case cut into two (aladdin I think it was
For people in digital camera circles this is likely old news, but my latest hack was last night. I removed the 4GB Microdrive that came in my MuVo2 (total was $198 including taxes and shipping), formatted it appropriately, and shoved it into my 10D. Now I've got room for 588 RAW images on a single card.
The other half of the hack was to get my old 1GB microdrive working in the MuVo. It required a reformat of the drive, and a re-flash of the firmware to get the magic files back on the drive.
Well d*mn... I went through the trouble of designing and building an Internet (ethernet) enabled coffee maker two years ago, using the very same Siteplayer module they use in the book.
:)
Mine's much better though as it's fully contained (powersupply and all) within the free space inside... and no tethering of the decanter. It's a "sleeper".
I used silly putty to create "timers" for instance to turn off a light switch. By dragging a wire through a blob of silly putty, using gravity or a rubber band, you can trigger lots of things. Silly putty by its nature makes for a relatively constant rate of travel and you can pretty accurately time things.
-- Senior Software Engineer, Attorney appearance services, locallawyerapp.com.
Fix it (cat proof!) in a southern window and you get a large rainbow that sweeps across the room on sunny days. Very nice for improving the mood. (You could buy one, but it wouldn't be a hack.) Great for bugging anal managers at the office.
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Possibly, though it seems you might need a bigger tool for this job, or so I've heard...
An easy way to implement robots, plotters, cnc, you name it...
...
Take one old xt or 286 with 5 1/4" floppy drives. Use the stepper motors plus the drive boards plus the computer's power supply. The connector on the drive board has two signals of interest (plus ground). One pin is direction (fwd. rev.) the other pin steps the motor once for every pulse.
Connect these signal pins to the parallel port of another old computer. Write a simple program in qbasic to control four of these stepper motors with no extra electronics at all.
Feedback is with micro-switches also connected to the parallel port (there are five input lines on the old version).
Easy, easy, easy
Um...
Why was that modded funny? I *acutally* do this.
Come to think of it, this would make a good /. reader poll...
*snickers*
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
This is a little project we have been working on for a while...hacking a vending machine to make it networked...aka vend a drink from anywhere in the world. Big Drink
I am in the process of transforming an excersize machine into an electric mast raising system for my 25 foot sailboat. When finished it will allow me to raise the 30ft mast with the push of a button. I have decided to avoid as much physical labor as possible.
Telecommuting! What about socialization?
I hacked a cheap Radio Shack answering machine that used standard cassette tapes to never rewind the outgoing message tape. I could then put multiple outgoing messages on the tape that would play a different message to each caller. Gave my friends some variety and me an easy way to tell how many calls where received while I was out.
Until the night when I got someone who just kept redialing the phone to hear all the outgoing messages. (Back in the day when telemarketers did their own dialing, would note interesting answering machines, and then call them up again outside work hours and share them with friends.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
When I was in high school, I rewired a string of christmas tree lights from series to parallel so that I could run them off of some D-cell batteries. A little switch turned them on automatically when I opened my locker. It was about a decade before you could buy this sort of thing in stores.
HIV Crosses Species Barrier... into Muppets
www.guitarnuts.com seems to have lots of electric guitar hacks. Anybody know how to get more output out of crappy pickups?
Remember Teddy Ruxpin? He makes a pretty good mp3 player. Especially if you play Black Sabbath through him. Great fun for a 5-year-old, or a 35-year-old for that matter.
It would be cooler to reuse his electronics, but if anyone else wants to put Teddy under the knife they'll discover 1> his guts are almost all discrete components and 2> a good chunk of that is under a blob of epoxy.
In the end it was easier just to gut him and start over.
As a chemist in a fully equiped lab, I've been able to find *interesting* applications around the home for anything that can fit in a pocket...
A lot can be found by google search.
The traditional applications still stand -- dry ice bombs, sodium thrown in water or on ice (potassium can make some nice explosions), and liquid nitrogen experiments.
Liquid nitrogen can be poured on hydrocarbon based compounds, and as it condenses liquid oxygen the hydrocarbons are oxidized. When everything evaporates, you have a small amount of primary explosive. Liquid oxygen makes fire interesting all by itself, too.
There are less violent chemical hacks. Nothing's better than playing poker with "gold" pennies. Just cook some copper pennies up in a sodium hydroxide solution with zinc, then amalgamate 'em with a blowtorch. Viola, brass plated pennies.
Also, nothing gets rid of hard water deposits like a 50% nitric acid solution. (Hydrochloric acid solutions work, too, and don't eat copper; then again, they don't produce nice red smoke, either.)
Nothing cleans grease like hexanes (often mixed with isopropanol or toluene), so bike chains, etc. become much easier to clean.
As long as you're careful, you can usually get better results than commercial products.
a dark room, a mic, a preamp, a silicon controlled rectifier, and a photo flash leads to high-speed sound activated photography: m.i.l.k.d.r.o.p. scene photos and diagram included.
SIGUSR1
...which is more than I can say for my /. karma...
This tagline brought to you by 1500 monkeys in just under 17 years.
I'd love to make a push-button cover for my license plate so I could run video-policed red lights when it is late and no one is coming anyway.
We just started getting video surveillance at traffic lights in my town, and sometimes they really piss me off.
I'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult. Just a push button switch up front wired to an electric motor in the back, some rotors, and a sliding cover. I suppose I'd have to cut through my trunk... that would suck. Or I could mount it on my trunk I guess... hmmm. Any suggestions?
I had one of the original Speak & Spells with the raised-button letters (unlike the later models that were completely flat). On all Speak & Spells there is a "Code" mode where up to 8 letters can by typed and transposed into a code that only people with other Speak & Spells could decipher (ROT13, or something else very weak). One day I grew bored with this mode and leaned on all of the buttons at once. This caused the multi-directional character LEDs to all light up like 8 little boxes. I then started pressing the apostrophe key. Each box would turn into an apostrophe. Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop...
As I pressed the apostrophe key one more time to erase the last malformed chaacter, I awakened the demon within the Speak & Spell. All of a sudden the Speak & Spell went into the "Say It" mode where it would teach particular words. Normally, it would show a word like "OCEAN" and the speaker would state, "Say it... OCEAN." But in this crazy mode I had put it into, the speaker would shout incoherently. "Say it...HUGAXCKHUAAAHRETA!!!" It would keep on doing this, screaming incoherently until the enter key was pressed, at which time it would pick a random word and shout it out. "MOTHER!"
It definitely made my parents laugh, and the same Speak & Spell works to this day with the same bug. Keep in mind that the Voyager space probe also had less memory than a Speak & Spell, too...
--Chag
Harddisk magnets.. is it a sin to use them to build a generator that will be attached to a home made windmill? :)
I once hacked a nuclear reactor with a paper clip, my shoe laces and a piece of gum
Angus Macgyver
In Soviet Russia Slashdot cliches use you
no wait...that was silent bob. damn.
01100111 01100101 01110100 00100000 01101111 01110101 01110100 00100000 01101101 01101111 01110010 01100101 00101110
I had a 900Mhz wireless headphones by Recoton, i took apart the headphones, built a box around the components and hooked the audio outs into a battery operated headphone amp, so now i can use my own headphones in place of their inept ones. i can also plug into my stereo line-ins with a 1/8>RCA cable which is across the room. pretty useful
- my userid is lower than yours
I managed to hack an old cdrom drive back into silicon dust!
There are alot of people that buy DirectTv units then use a pentium computer to hack the broadcast. If you are scared of the FBI tracking you down for it, you can always just hack a Canadian satellite instead. Since no one in america would pay for canadian tv, its about as legit as you can get...for stealing something. Anyone out there hear about modifying a TiVo so it can record rented dvd's instead of tv??
"Cowardice in a race, as in an individual, is the unpardonable sin." --Teddy Roosevelt
A work in progress.
Slowed down recently due to house-hunting, but nearing completion. The hardware is ready to go, just need to write the drivers & integration software.
What were you expecting?
I'm the king! I modded my cordless phone. I removed the piezzo. It rocks! no more phone to disturb me!!!
At this place I worked at, there was this head of programming guy, a hippy who was very high-strung, stressed out. One day he was standing next to this monitor, about 30 feet from me. I forget the OS it was running, maybe AIX. From my desk, I remotely turned X on, on that monitor he was standing next to. I might've been rlog'd in, I don't recall. Then I would turn it on. Then back off again, etc, etc. After a while, he looked at it, and slapped it really hard, like it was a monitor on the fritz!!!!! What a goober.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
going to assemble my own binaryclock very soon (like the one from thinkgeek..).
All I have to say is that we have a networked vending machine. You telnet into it and tell it to drop a drink in x amount of seconds. Then you simply walk down there and get your nice cold caffeinated beverage. Eventually a robot will bring it to us (not joking about that btw) What will they think of next. Big Drink's Website
Nullum magnum ingenium sine mixtura dementia (There is no great genius without a mixture of madness) - Aristotle
There's 6 pins on the back of some remote controls called the JP1 and with a build-it-or-buy-it cable, you can hack your remote to do all sorts of cool shit it couldn't do before.
g inners_Rev 1.1.htm
Here's a good starter:
http://www.lucindrea.com/jp1/JP1_For_Be
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jp1/
i just got one, haven't made the lead to
declaw it yet, but maybe I will.
I stick a wad of paper into the latch on the washing machine so I can watch it fill up with the door open.
I have done a few "less interesting" hacks - back in the day...
* Hacked into the school PA system on the last day of my senior yearof high school. Took an old Peavey 400 amplifier, tied it directly into the 70v speaker line for the schools PA system (having unquestioned access to the theatre at school really helped). 5 minutes before the end of first period, weird noises start coming out the school PA system. Best part was the school principal approaching me later that day and asking HOW I did it, not IF I did it! THAT was fun!
* Probably doesn't count under the PC limitation, but I also hacked TRSDOS on an old TRS-80 Model 1. I discovered an undocumented command in the Disk Basic Interpreter (CMD"#"# if you wanted to know). Not being content with this - and TRSDOS Disk Basic had no way to pull a directory of a disk drive, I took the disk directory command from the TRSDOS system library and grafted it onto the code for the above found command. Result, I had a version of TRSDOS Disk Basic that could do something that Tandy/Radio Shack said was impossible to do - I could call a disk directory from BASIC without exiting the BASIC interpreter.
That was back in the day - truely fun times!
Ron Gage - Westland, MI
Besides hardware and software (of course) -- the main two other things I find myself hacking would be my phone and... well.. people.
;)
I don't want to disclose what I do to my phone.. but let's just say that it makes it easier to non-PC hack #2 (Social Engineering)
Hacking people is fun though. They will believe anything...
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher
I hacked two bokken (curved japanese wooden swords) into a D&D-style double sword using duct tape, screws and crazy glue.
I also made something that tosses up beanbag balls as moving targets. Base components:
Blender, slingshot, springs from an old BB gun and a length of p-cord.
an old launch pad (boy, the anchor bolt refurb on that UT was a BASTARD, nevermind any of the rest of it), into a fairly useful facility, but the new new rocket was a piece of shit and they finally decided to just blow the whole damned facility to hell and be done with it, but we sure had some fun there with it for a while.
Is it fascism yet?
The pentium flaw could be "fixed" by disabling the FPU in software.
This is akin to getting her drunk to suppress those pesky frontal lobe messages that counter the "I'm horny" feelings with "He's ugly and he reads Slashdot" reasoning.
Actually, this is a bad analogy. The Pentium FPU was disabled because it was giving faulty results. The girl-frontal-lobes are functioning perfectly when they report that you're (*) an ugly geek.
Even hard drive sizes used to be "hacked" bigger by using compression software.
The girl-equivalent being the wonderbra that makes the important things appear larger where it matters (i.e. where you can see them). Unfortunately, like the compression software, you'll eventually see that neither of these methods actually give you more.
(*) No, not you (the parent poster) specifically.... why do people say "you" instead of "one" in English...?
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Do Consoles APply? I mod xboxes, PS2s, PS1s, Neo Geos, Dreamcasts, Any dam console that is hackable I do.
There's no Freedom like UFP-dom
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I hack Gibsons
Duh!
About 20 years ago I 'hacked' a car LED clock module by wiring some ribbon cable to the relevant parts of the PCB and mounting the unit with a 12V transformer+PSU, programming switches and a 10A mains relay in a small case - the end result was a unit into which I could plug my coffee percolator and have it 'brew-up' at the pre-set time in the morning! Because it also had a 59min count down timer, I could also set the coffee brewing at other times knowing that the timer wouldn't let the percolator boil dry!
My most recent hack was to make up a short lead that runs from a universal (90-250v) multi-voltage 2A DC power supply. On the 'output' side of the lead is a 12V car 'cigar lighter' socket into which I can plug a Belkin 12V 'car' to 5V USB socket adaptor - now with the relevant leads I can charge my phone or PDA or use anything else that normally takes power from a USB port - this means I only have to take one power unit with me on holiday or on business rather than one PSU for phone, another for PDA, another for digital camera, NiMh battery charger etc.
AT&ROFLMAO
When I was growing up, we had a microwave oven in our kitchen whose clock could be set by punching in the time on the number keypad, and hitting the "Clock Set" button. Pretty standard, realy.
So one night, with more free time than is strictly healthy, my friend Steve Roche and I were sitting around microwaving things, when one of us decided to set the time on the clock to "6:66", just to see what would happen.
Fortunately for us, the programmers of the firmware didn't include any validation code, because it let us set the time to 6:66. We sat there for a minute, debating what would happen next. Would it change to 7:07? 6:67? 6:07? 6:67 it was. What would happen, then, after 6:69? Again we debated -- would it go to 6:70? By that time we sort of assumed it would.
Well, it fooled us but good -- after 6:69, it invented a new number . The display read "6:6^", or something like that. We watched with fascination as it made up five more brand new digits, before changing to 6:70.
Damned if it wasn't using hexadecimal.
Then we microwaved some wormy flour, which stunk up the house in some awful, indescribable way, and ended the microwave experiments for the evening.
Now THAT is a sweet ass hack...
Is it considered hacking reality to try to convince people in forums that you actually have a girl friend?
I am working on building a Microwave Ray gun using an old working magnetron. If the Neighbors dog barks again i am gonna blow it up with microwaves!!!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Clearly this guy has done an excellent job of it, but since plumbing materials were never intended for this purpose my guess is that this qualifies as a hack.
Wow. Heloise could totally own this thread.
is anyone else disturbed by the seemingly huge amount of misogyny in the Slashdot readership? Reading through the comments to this story reveals a lot of "jokes" about "hacking up women." Sure, it's mostly AC trolls, but it's kind of scary. Just because you can't get a girlfriend, guys, doesn't mean we need to kill women.
+++ATH0
The phone both there would be alot cooler if it actually worked as a phone....and didn't tell you the damd code to enter after picking up the handset.
Linux Works
I took a perfectly useless windows XP desktop and made it functional using a hard disk erasing utility and a cd with SuSE on it.
"Would you, could you, with a goat?" Dr Seuss
Once made a wireless trigger/shutter release for my Nikon SLR camera with a hacked wireless doorbell.
I try not to bring it in carry-on baggage on airplanes. I think they might not like a remote control device with a weird wire leading out of it.
Never cook a hot dog using copper wires pushed into the ends connected to 120 VAC. First there is the arcing when enough copper sulfate condenses, and then, again becasue of the copper sulfate, it doesn't taste too good. Always use stainless steal.
Back when I was in high school, I had a friend who always left his old 1970's Mercury Capri parked at his place of work unlocked with the keys in it. He had just installed a new stereo, but didn't complete the job, so there were all sorts of loose wires hanging from under his dash board. One day when I drove past his place of work, I saw his car there and remembered I had an old ahoooooogah horn sitting in my trunk. I decide to stop by and see what kind of evil things I could do to him. I worked for about 20 minutes sticking the horn under the drivers seat, grounding it to a seat bolt, and connecting the positive lead to a switched terminal on his fuse box. When he got out of work that night and started his car, things got pretty amusing. At first he couldn't figure out what was going on, then once he realized what was happening, he started banging around on the horn to shut it off. He finally managed to get the horn to shut off by knocking the ground wire loose, unfortunately, since power was still running to it, it went off everytime he hit a bump. He drove about 5 miles home with that horn going off under his seat, needless to say, he didn't think it was nearly as funny as I did.
"'I really wanted to get my hands dirty again,' he said Wednesday, sitting in his garage..."
"After working as a toy designer in New York -- where he helped create 'Teen Talk Barbie' -- he came to Silicon Valley in 1992 to join Apple's research staff."
I see.
I "hacked" my 1997 Acura Integra LS...
:)
There are a few electrical mods here and there... a power antenna control switch, and lots of security (hacked the power lock module to keep the doors locked, even if the thief has a key). Those damn Fast & Furious kids are always eyeing the thing like they want to steal it, but they wouldn't get far.
I take this car racing a lot (SCCA stuff), and it was a good car to begin with, but now there are many performance "hacks". I have added a turbo and to "overclock" the engine from 140hp/126tq to 220hp/209tq (which is a lot in a 2600lb FWD car with short gearing), upgraded the cooling system, swapped in some stiffer springs, adjustable shocks, sticky tires, a bunch of other stuff, and I'll be installing a custom-built race transmission in a day or two.
I don't even want to add up how much money I've put into this, but it is a lot of fun to drive around a race track... It's pretty satisfying to pass Porsche 911s, and other highly respected sports cars, when they have it to the floor.
Solution: replace the sound ROM with an EPROM with my own sounds in it.
It had a 28-pin masked ROM with its code and samples. So I carefully desoldered the ROM and pulled it from the board. I discovered that the pinout of this ROM wasn't quite the same as the EPROM I wanted to use, so I built a "bridge" hack out of two wire-wrap sockets that re-routed some of the pins to make the ROM look like an EPROM to my EPROM reader.
Then I slurped all the code and sounds off the masked ROM, spent some time looking at the ROM tables, and found the sound offsets/lengths/names. I then built a new sound set from TR-808 and TR-909 sounds along with some other favorites (12-bit offset samples). I head to write some code to prepare those and write out this weird text format that the EPROM reader would read.
I burned my replacement EPROM, then built another bridge hack to map the EPROM pins back to the ROM pinout. Finally I mounted my EPROM, bridge-hack and all, onto the drum machine's circuit board.
I successfully converted a out-of-style drum machine into a slightly-less-out-of-style drum machine! It wasn't really worth it but it was a fun adventure. And yes, I know, all you EE /.ers out there are laughing at me, but hey, I'm a CS guy, so fuck you ;-)
I turned a manual typewriter into a computer keyboard.
I'm currently working on turning some old intercom units from an abandoned hospital into a wireless intercom system by hacking them together with FRS radios.
*******
"What good is science if no one gets hurt?!" - Professor Chromedome
Originally, I wanted to make an aquarium in one of the old macs, but I couldn't find one. Then at the goodwill store, I found an old fashioned 19" TV and decided to use that (I had to argue with the owner to let me buy it - the TV was broken and he couldn't figure out why I wanted it). Anyways, I removed everything but the shell, dremmelled out parts of the inside frame, measured and purchased 5 pieces of 1/4" glass which I glued together to form a custom sized aquarium. I bought a ballast and wired up a pair of flourescent bulbs, and viola! Custom TV Aquarium! The glass fits inside so nicely that if you keep the water filled it looks perfect! I even have all the nobs!
when I attended university, i needed a new version of java sdk for finishing a project i was working on... I asked the system administrator for an upgrade many times, without success... after a week spent waiting for that upgrade, i hacked the solaris server that hosted alla application via nfs, and i did myself the upgrade. after a week the system admin asked me who gave me the root password... And he was really surprised when i said I didnt know the root password at all. it was 1991 so security was not an actual topic of conversation. During my java upgrade i made fun killing random irc sessions from x terminals, some students went away complaying for system stability.
All right... I know I'm probably going to be giving my web server a Slashdot-class load test by doing this, but whattahey... If it crashes, I know I didn't build it right to begin with.
;-)
In short: The page is one I wrote up detailing the efforts I've put in, over the last three or so years, to "hack" our minivan into a heavy-duty comms vehicle. Can you tell I take my amateur radio hobby pretty seriously?
It also has an onboard computer with GPS and mapping software, which has saved me from getting hopelessly lost in new territory more times than I can count.
Yes, I have been "first responder" in a couple of traffic incidents. This is why I keep a trauma kit in the back. Haven't had to dig into it seriously yet, and I pray I never really have to, but it's nice to know it's there.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
In the '80s, I was involved with multi-image slide shows, where you sync multiple slide projectors to a sound track. Despite the superior image quality and cheaper equipment, this has been supplanted by digitial video projectors. I have several old shows I'd like to save for posterity.
The projector controllers (called dissolve units) daisy chain off a spare audio track that runs along side the sound track. This control track sounds like a modem or old cassette storage device. It turns out the encoding can easily be deciphered with a modern PC, so I set out to reverse engineer the protocol. It's a pretty sophisticated protocol for what it is. When not sending commands, it contains status refresh messages so controllers can get back in sync when things go wrong.
I've cracked most of the MATETRAC protocol which is used by the (pre-Ektapro) Kodak controllers as well as Arion and a few others. Next I have to do the same for AVL Procall protocol. MATETRAC devices are still around, but AVL (which was the industry champion) is long gone. I had to buy an old 286 on Ebay that had the dedicated AVL Genesis hardware card for creating the audio signal.
I also found I can create this audio signal in software to control the dissolve units, making it possible to have interactive slide shows or to fix-up old tapes which have deteriorated. Slide projectors are also a cool way to do special effects for theatres, Halloween displays, etc., so having a simple PC control makes for a fun hack.
It's a pretty non-invasive hack, but I'm not that much of a hardware guy.
I retrofit flashlights with high-powered Luxeon LEDs. There is a fairly good-sized community of flashlight modders, and the work ranges from simple drop-in mods for cheap Minimags all the way to complete retrofits of $400 military-grade Surefire spec-ops flashlights, and some guys even fabricate entire flashlights in their garage.
Some examples:
McGizmo
Mr Bulk
candlepower forums
Many people change their truck A/C to work as a standard air compressor (usually a pressure tank is added as well) to use pnuematic tools while away from home. I often wondered if you could use this as a limited supercharger. You'd have to remember to only switch on the compressor to recharge the tank while not needing the extra power (idle, decellerating, etc.). It would probably work better if triggered like nitrous than just an on-all-the-time system. An added bonus would be that the expanding air would be much cooler than ambient... should produce more HP than a typical supercharger operating at the same pressure.
(The only downside I can think of is how to cotrol the pressure so it only goes in the engine and not out the air intake. One way valve on the intake, maybe?)
chainsaw1
I once borrowed some cartridges for my Atari 1600XL from a friend. One time I started the computer up while holding down some of the silver buttons and it began to copy one of the cartridge based games to tape. My friend's Atari games were more fun than the two I had, so I was happy to be able to "keep" one. I could never make that happen again :(
I once turned a dead Super Nintendo in to a tissue holder. I have also ripped out the guts of a telephone and put them inside a model car, lift the hood, pick up a call. I put an Afterburner in my GBA before the SP came out. I put a mod-chip in my own Playstation (for playing those imports! Hooray for Rockman 3!), and swapped the boring gray case for a clear one. I soldered a capacitor back on to my GeForce 3 (a week after the manufacturer, Visiontek, went out of business). I know that was PC related, but I felt it warranted a mention. I think it is just in the geek's very nature to hack everything around him (or her). I mean, what problem can not be solved with either duct tape or zip ties?
I hate sigs.
the idea came with the need. Connected battery leads of an APC UPS to the car's battery, and powered 2 PCs with it for ~8h. The only trick is to NOT try starting the engine with the starter when battery begins to die, PCs die too. Pushing is OK.
One of the easiest, and more rewarding, hacks I have done was with my Xbox. I do not use it to play copied Box games (Nor do I own any Box games for that matter), but I do use it to play games less than or equal to 64 bit.
Super Nintendo runs very well on the Box. My only gripe is the size of the hdd can not fit a high amount of games. This can easily be solved with buying a larger hdd and using a modchip that allows you to use it. Also, arcade games, such as Neogeo and Mame, run really well on the system with minimal to no slow down. Also, the new N64 emulator, Surreal64, runs games such as Paper Mario and Mario Tennis very well. Not perfect like the every other emulator, but enough.
Almost every other emulator available offers a streaming service so that you may keep all of your rom (Sega Genesis, Turbo Graphics 16, Gameboy, etc.) or ISOs (Sega CD) files on your computer. Most commonly used are Relax and SMB, though many will agree that SMB is a pain in the arse to set up.
All Emulators feature up to four player support (if the original system had that available), lightgun, mouse (with the USB hack), and everything else that was available to that system.
Also, you can put Linux on it. I had my Box running as a web server for about a month, but decided I liked Super Nintendo much better.
To install the chip, all I did was clip in it with the no solder pogo-pins. It took about 30 minutes from opening the box to playing.
-----.----.-------
I'll
This is where I confirm that my career path is not computers...
I like to hack audio equipment. Most of the stuff I own (quite a bit by now) I've at least pried open to see the insides, a lot of I've fixed, and some of it I deliberately bought "broken" or "as-is" and had a grand time fixing. And I also do occasional sound at a local folk club, where I've put a fair amount of work into fixing things, coming up with new "standard" settings, and there's still a password-protected box back in the amp rack I need to take off the protective panel, break security, and see if I can tweak anything better there.
Yup, that's definitely "hacker" behavior. I was a better than average software developer, but it was never quite the obsession that audio is...
Here are some ideas and suggestions for those who want to hack the U.S. woman culture. The first thing you should know is that hacking your own culture can be scary. It's definitely an E-Ticket ride, for those who want to tackle something seriously complex.
Bitching is part of the American woman culture. It cannot be disabled. For a better experience, try a different nationality. In the U.S., the word "bitch" means both "complain" and "woman". Did you know that there are no other English-speaking countries in which this is so?
This is a bit extreme, but a good exaggeration might be that if you have only known women of the U.S. culture, you have never really known a woman at all. Women in the U.S. commonly: 1) are infantile, 2) live in a fantasy world in which the rules of life don't apply to them, 3) are self-destructive, 4) want control, 5) believe that men are reponsible for all of their problems, 5) are irresponsible to an amazing degree, and 6) use anger and hostility to try to intimidate and get their way.
Want examples? Read the women's magazines on any newstand in the United States. Watch some of the episodes of the Oprah Winfrey show, in which men are seen as the objects of fantasy, or as inherently evil enemies.
If there are any readers who want to give an instant negative reaction to this, please think carefully first. I've traveled to 33 countries and talked with hundreds of women extensively from other countries about their lives. I'm serious about understanding the problems. Ask yourself, are you? Do you really care about what happens in your country?
When I lived in England, it was common to see English and European movies in which there would be a comedy episode in which an American woman did something selfish and out of touch.
That said, the American woman culture can be successfully hacked. It's a limited kind of success, like living in a cesspool and saying that you like the brown things that float past better than the black ones.
First, don't take American women seriously. That gives them responsibility and they don't like that.
Second, don't depend on them. They may want sex with you today for no good reason, and not want to talk to you tomorrow, also for no good reason. A Russian woman said, "It may take me only one minute to fall in love, but I have to be in love to want sex. American women sleep with anyone." I've heard that from people of several nationalities.
Third, don't blame everything that happens in your relationships with U.S. women on yourself. If you did something bad, accept that. But recognize that a common way for a U.S. woman to get control is to try to get you believe that you are an inferior kind of being.
Fourth, spend considerable time understanding the U.S. woman culture. It is, in many ways, not what it pretends to be. For example, women in the U.S. often project confidence, when they don't feel confident at all.
Fifth, stay with what is logical. Logic has little importance for many U.S. women, even those who are successful in the U.S. computer industry. If you stray away from what is logical, you may soon be as confused as her.
Sixth, treat women right even if they treat you badly. Everyone needs more experience in learning how to be good to themselves and others. I'm not religious, but it happens that Jesus Christ was right: Don't answer violence with more violence; don't answer bad behavior with more bad behavior. Like it said in the movie, "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure", "Be excellent to each other." Being excellent to women does NOT mean spending money on them. You should each contribute equally to your relationship. If she doesn't want to do that, she doesn't want a real relationship.
The U.S. is suffering a social breakdown. The breakdown is caused in part by the largely hidden breakdown of the U.S. woman culture. When a man cannot find a suitable woman friend, when a man and a woman cannot make a stable relationship, wh
For the term Beowulf Orgy to be coined!
rejected (19) accepted (0)
Is there a psychological term related to getting your stories rejected on slashdot?
I hacked my son's Darth Vader Toy to spin clockwise when I received and e-mail and counter-clockwise when my machine was attacked (port scanned). I used a floppy drive stepper motor and mouted it in an old CDROM case
r ip heral-2.jpg
http://www.cityhall.com/projects/darth/darth_pe
-Monta at cityhall.com
Me and my ((at the time) little ) brother built a flame thrower out of a super soaker and the butane canisters you get from the grocery store for refilling turbo lighters...
/Legal Disclaimer.
Well it worked like this.. ( I probably shouldn't post this.)
---Begin Legal Disclaimer
This is for information purposes, please don't build one. I am not responsible for my self let alone you. Yadda Yadda.
First you get a super soaker. Preferably a Big one, but NOT the cannon types.
Then Obtain a few butane cylynders.. They last quite a while for being so small.. about 1 min of constant fire.
Then, you remove water resivoir(sp) then clip off the filter at the end of the intake hose. insert butane "cartridge" into hose.
Ductape butane so as to force enough presure to "turn on" the valve. There may be a small kink in the hose, but it should be O.K. Try not to kink it if you can.
To use: pull trigger once to purge the air from the gun.
Since it is a gas& not a liquid a leak is allways present This makes for a perfect pilot light!
Then light the tip.
make sure you are nowhere near combustables!
Slowly pull the trigger till desired flame is achieved. A full power squirt will give you a 3 or 4 foot "Jet" with a 3 or 4 foot diameter fireball at the end!
-dw
I was contacted by the author of this book last year and gave him permission to use my plans for building a Macquarium. So, I am chapter 2 of the "Hardware Hacking Projects For Geeks" book
Woo Hoo!
Anyway, my aquariums are here.
The plans Scott used for his book are here. They are kind of old and busted (there's no link to them any more on my site) and I think the author did a great job.
An old (and well documented) hack to use a mattel powerglove with REND386...REND386 was really really cool.
ham radio, old suns, the governments of minor countries, and I love to cook.
I have bad dorm neighbors. They complained about my alarm clock being loud, so I hot-wired the speaker with a mini-phone jack. Then i hooked it into my cheap speakers, turned all the volumes up, and decided to get up at 5 in the morning. I unplugged it the next day after my ears started ringing. They stopped complaining about the un-modified clock
I have to rule out your hack based on the hacking Prime Directive: do no real harm. Don't even risk it. If you are going to drop a piano off the roof of a campus building, you post lookouts to make sure nobody gets hurt. If you are going to scare your clueless coworkers, consider the possibilty they might overreact.
The kid may have deserved to be fired, but he probably wouldn't deserve having the FBI kick his door in.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
'nuff said
Rishi Chopra
www.rishichopra.org
I mixed some polystyrene with toluene and melted it until it was a pourable liquid. I poured it on the basement floor and spread it around with a brush, effectively laminating it. I was trying to come up something that could be put on floors to protect them, could be taken back up chemically when worn, and a new layer put down. I knew I didn;t have the right combination yet because the toluene made me dizzy, but I felt I was on the right track.
Before I could figure out what combination of matrix and solvent to use, someone pointed out I could already buy floor wax at any store.
See? It *was* a good hack. I just wasn't the first to do it. Hey, I was only 14 at the time. The same thing happens fairly often to me now. That's just how science is.
My next hack will be Kline-Fogelman airfoil fins on model rockets. Nobody has ever tried airfoils with a K-F gap on both surfaces.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
When I was a child and played with electronics, I built a circuit which when disconnected triggered my alarm clock. I spent a day trying to hide all the wiring behind furniture and books and under the carpet and eventually got an alarm clock which beeped very annoyingly when a door to my bedroom was open.
Later I myself devised a dart, made out of 4 matches, some paper and a needle. I and my brother hurt each other a lot with that before we realized all the dangers (including losing an eye) and stopped playing with that.
When I grew up a bit, I started playing with chemicals, trying to make explosives... I actually managed to modify my pen so that it could shoot bullets made out of aluminium foil. It could penetrate a beer can from ~10m.
In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is. - Yogi Berra
Yes, i have a few of those (Actually, my cellphone os one of 'em too, a PT500); and i also have a Tango 300 and a Teletac 250 a good Friend gived to me; So, this is what i has been working on: As we _all_ know you can rather easily put one of this phones into programming mode, in emacs-mode (by using a key-short^^^^^longcut) or by wiring an extra ground the battery has. So, in programming mode, beetween other things, you can change the channel it operates on, and unmute the RX and TX. So, i have recently developed a soft for a company that needed to parse some files the telco sents them every day with calls info; this people installs public phones that are actually cellphones, they have a nice contract with movicom so they get better prices than the ones the telco has to offer; so, i found out that they were using different kind of devices, The officil FWT(Fixed Wireless Telephone); and ones someone made for them, that was actually a wrap for this old motorola and other cellphones, so they could attach a normal phone to this cells. Well, i got one of those devices and cloned it (rather simple, less than u$s30 to build it). So, i could get conected to the internet just by attaching a modem to the device and my cell on the other end :). Ok, that is expensive, my actual goal is to put 2 pcs with a modem attached to a cellphone via one of this devices, and put both cellphones on an unused channel, manage so when one of the modems dials the cell ignores it (simple), and then unmute the RX/TX on both sites, and there you are, a wireless network at 33.600!!!:, Ok, the phones has to be on the same cell, but that gives you a nice distance!!. (Still couldn't get it to work, no time, and no luck :), i will write a howto or something if i actually make it)
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
You know those Cox airplanes that had fly-by-wire control? You'd stand in the center with this two-wire hand control that would move the elevator up and down. You'd stand there spinning around and around until such time as you got dizzy and fell down, puked, or the plane ran out of gas.
.049 glow plug engine. A blood blister on your finger from that damn spring starter was like a badge of honor. Do kids even play with stuff like that now?
Well, I got it in my mind that the plane didn't go nearly fast enough. So I went to the local hobby store and bought the biggest propeller I could find. The sucker was HUGE compared to the plane... maybe about 3/4 of the plane's wingspan. Some shims and a new prop-shaft later and I was in business.
Holy crap was that thing fast!!! My dad would have to launch it (couldn't ground launch it anymore because the landing gear was way to short for such a huge prop). Once it got going, I could barely keep spinning fast enough to keep up with it. The whole dizzy/fall/puke thing happened far quicker than the plane running out of fuel. It became a game of the kids in the neighborhood... see how long they could keep the plane in flight before falling down. The game didn't last too long though as it didn't take too many crashes for that monster prop to bite the dust.
Oh the joys of a 'ol Cox
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
Well, I took my sister's vibrator once and I hacked it into an electronic toothbrush. It actually works pretty damn well.
I do believe for those that are interested that it works in reverse as well (electronic toothbrush -> vibrator)
So the next present you give your g/f should be a hacked toothbrush.
There's my two cents, take care guys (and girls with modified toothbrushes)
Latest project on the vacuum forming rig: custom sunglasses. I actually dye the plastic using RIT clothes dye (found at most RiteAid/Longs Drugs) in a boiling pot on the kitchen stove. So there's a chemical hack on top of the plastic one...
If you have a Honda, you can swap out the ECU for a reprogrammable version. So anytime you make a change to the hardware, you can reflect the changes through the ECU by remapping the fuel tables.
;)
Nothing beats hacking both hardware and software at the same time for the ultimate geekdom feeling. And the extra HP gained from your achivements doesn't hurt either.
http://www.hondata.com/
Life is not for the lazy.
When I was a wee bit younger, my dad grabbed an old go-cart frame from the dump (refuse transfer station as they're now so called) along with a briggs and stratton horizontal shaft engine (which were hard to find since most engines came from lawn mowers and were vertical shaft) for me to put together and mess with.
Anyway, I was too young (and too cheap) to spend the $30 on a Sears centrifigal clutch. So I mounted the motor to a plate and pinned it in one corner. Then I hooked the the plate to a bicycle brake cable which was then hooked to the "gas" pedal. A couple of pulleys and a v-belt went between the motor shaft and the rear axle. Pushing on the gas pedal pulled the plate the motor was mounted on and tightened up the v-belt. Voila! Free clutch!
My youth was filled with all sorts of mechanical hacks like that. I wanted an actual suspension system in the Radio Flyer red wagon I used to ride down the hill on my street in. So I took the back wheel bracket off and mounted a couple of valve springs from a V-8 Ford between the bracket and wagon body. Didn't do much (those things were STIFF), but it looked cool as hell. I was the only kid on the block with a wagon with a raised suspension on it.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
they aren't cheap, but a MoTeC ECU will let you play with your injection maps to your little hearts content, along with pretty much everything else that you can electronically control in your engine (uhh...injection mapping, ignition...what else is there?). truly a hacker's dream toy.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
pop it into the toaster and - voila -
home made pop tart!
is that a kind of second hand toaster hack?
How about if I wrapped my old Amiga 4000 with paper towels and sprayed it with Pledge - then it WOULD be a toaster hack. The dirt would then be time base corrected and the floor clean.
HA!
Any preoccupation with ideas of what is right or wrong in conduct shows an arrested intellectual development. (Wilde)
This is the most interesting way I've seen a company try to unload their broken bits and pieces.
To understand recursion, you must first understand recursion.
you can bubble the auto-grade n2o through 4 or 5 water washes; it will greatly reduce the so2. [n2o is "slightly soluble"; so2 is "soluble", sez the merck]
disclaimer: i have my bs chemistry, so i can claim "epxertise" and state the above as Fact - but if you're idiotic enough to actually TRY bubbling dirty n2o, it's at your own risk.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
The most recent actual "hack" I've been involved with is the single-use (Dakota) camera. So far, the 25-picture disposable camera has been made to also support time-lapse computer-controlled photography, continuous video (i.e. Webcam) modes, and been able to store (in my brief, informal test) 58 pictures.
The rest of these might not be considered hacks per se, just projects.
A project that never got finished would have put a high-power subwoofer amplifier in my car, complete with an authentic '60s fluorescing vacuum tube as a level display. Much classier than the usual LED-bargraph arrangements popular with the kiddies these days. Unfortunately, in the middle of building this I got offered a job and moved 'cross-country, but didn't have room to pack the unfinished bits+pieces and all my electrical test equipment in my little 2-door.
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.
I enjoy defeating the door switches on various household appliances. That is to say, getting the mto run with the door open. The dishwasher is my favorite so far, there's just something about a dishwasher with the door all the way open shooting scorching water everwhere... I am working my way up to the microwave, it is a lot more scary, but in the end, I think it will be more rewarding.
it's not a hack if you followed directions.
I took an RC truck that I had no remote and converted it to be controlled by an RCX. I was suprised at how well it worked. The truck works exactly the way you would think it should (one motor output controls forward/back, another left/right, steering is electronically limited and self-centering) and it runs off it's own batteries drawing only a few mA from the RCX.
You need to hack the sound insulation in the walls around er... wherever you are.
Let me be the first to say it... "OMFG wallh4x!!!"
"We have to go forth and crush every world view that doesn't believe in tolerance and free speech." - David Brin
This is a really handy one. Connect a small value resistor (you can calculate it or just go by ear) in series with a noisy fan to bring down the RPM and noise.
Try about 7 ohms, 1/2W for a 60mm fan. Make sure the fan starts EVERY time.
So I jumpered the TV output into the speaker using some scrounged wire, and a bic lighter to solder the connections. Worked great, however ...
A week later I was walking through one of the other sleeping areas aboard ship and heard moaning and grunting coming from somewhere (disturbing on an all-male ship). It seemed that the guys in my compartment were playing a porn movie and the audio was being broadcast on "channel one" of every box throughout the ship!
It took lots of explaining when I when I ran back and disconnected the sound from their porn movie!
More like 3000 psi. But you don't try and confine it...you get a regulator on the tank (or not, if you're cheap), you attach a hose to your serial-bubbler setup (think a few bongs, each with a hose from the mouthpiece to the next downtube), you set up an underwater collector (bucket full of water upside down in a bigger bucket of water with the hose going into the little bucket), then you crack the valve on the tank till it bubbles nicely and fills the bucket. unplug the last hose, suck the bucket dry, enjoy the brain cells dropping like flies, repeat to your heart's content.
Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored. - Aldous Huxley
I think my favorite hack was when I installed a new phone up in my room. I didn't feel like laying any extra cable (not to mention that I was in a hurry, and I don't think I even HAD any phone lines that long.) So, what I did instead, is cut open the cat-5 cable leading to my computer upstairs at two parts, and cut the brown twisted pair, which is unused in 100BaseT ethernet (it's used in gigabit ethernet, though, so proceed at your own risk if you try this at home). Then, I took a phone cable, cut it in half, and wired in one half downstairs where I could plug it into the phone line, and then wired in the other half in my room so that I have a phone right next to my computer.
I hacked my kitchen sink via an electric screwdriver, a cheap mouse, and a fax machine to produce the POWER SINK DUN DUN DUHHHHHH... http://gogglemarks.homelinux.net/cgi-bin/display.c gi?file=projects/powersink
Back when I was about twelve, I found a book on fireworks.
My first try at making black powder, I used a peanut butter jar to heat the charcoal, sulphur, potassium nitrate and rubbing alcohol. I found out what "pyrex" means when the bottom fell out of the jar.
My next attempt worked. I had a nice, big pile of dry powder. I wet a piece of cotton string and rolled it in the powder. When it was dry, I lit it to see if it would burn. It did, FAST! I dropped the fuse...in the pile of powder. Luckily, my eyebrows are very white, so my parents didn't notice they were missing.
I was telling this story to my 10 year old son today, as an explanation of why it was a bad idea to try to make a flamethrower out of bic lighter. Instead, he thought it was cool and wanted to know why I didn't try a third time.
Damn genes!
OK, I can't beleive I'm telling the whole world about this, but I'll be damned sure to post as anonymous coward this once, and I've had several drinks (to cure my back pain; another nice hack).
My Dad once bought me a Ryobi model DS-1000 detail sander. A quick digression on sanders- most newer sanders are counterweighted random-oscillating sanders- that means that they spin around in circles, but with random eccentricities thrown into the orbit to prevent a pattern from appearing on the sanded object, and that they have an integrated counter weight that weighs about as much as the sanding surface that moves opposite the sanding suface to conteract most of the motion- this means the handle jiggles a minimal amount, while you can get some serious sanding done.
But old style finishing sanders, often called something like "jitterbug" sanders, worked on a different principle: the sanding pad just shook like all hell in relation the base, in the hope that the whole thing shaking around like mad would maybe make the sandpaper move somewhat in relationship to the object you wanted to sand. Ryobi makes cheap tools, and detail sanders were in their infancy at this time, and the DS-1000 was one of these cheap models that just vibrated all over the place like mad in the wild hope it might get some sanding done. All it really did was shake like mad.
But what I noticed it did do very well was get some vibrating done.
Enter my hack for my girlfriend- I removed the sanding apparatus, and got down to where it bolted into the actual vibrating mechanism.
I then cut a 6" long by 1/4" diameter aluminum dowel on a metal lathe, and drilled holes in the ends. I tapped the holes, and screwed a 3/8" stainless steel ball onto one end, and a piece of threaded rod into the other.
Then I bought a 7" silicon dildo and drilled out the center right up to the head. I slide the aluminum shaft-ball end first- right up into the dildo. Then I screwed the other end of the shaft-tight-down onto the vibrator. I plugged the whole thing into a variac (for speed control) and plugged it into the wall-
It's noisy, but it makes orgsms, and fast every time.
If anyone wants more details, I'll respond to serious replies. This thing is like magic.
-Anony Mouse.
good site with lots of info, may be related to the original poster...
UIUC acm SIGarch project
I spend all day thinking about hacking my TV, but I'm just too lazy to get off the couch and go buy a hatchet.
I hacked the cheapo wall-mount DSL filter (for wall mounted phones) that they sent me.
It only filtered pair#2 of the two pairs available on 4-conductor RJ-11 sockets. My phone line with DSL is on pair#2, so that filter let all the noise through and both phones and DSL failed to work.
So I cross soldered inside, and routed pair#2 thru the single available filter (there's space for another filter, but is empty). Pair#1 now remains unfiltered.
Then I put it back on the wall, and everyone is happy.
Let's see if I can remember this. I must have been around 14 at the time, and my goal was to make a burglar alarm for my bedroom which would keep a record of unauthorized entries but not be too annoying (so as to avoid pissing off my parents if they triggered it).
First step was the sensor. I taped a wire to a small piece of aluminum foil on the inside of the door near the doorknob, then another wire to the doorknob itself with a wadded ball of aluminum foil at the end of the wire. I bent the wire so that the two pieces of aluminum foil would touch as long as the doorknob was in its normal position, but if you turned the knob the contact would be broken.
This and an AC adapter that produced 9vDC were connected to the relay in a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic project kit, and wired such that the relay would remain on as long as the circuit was closed, but switch off and remain off once the circuit was broken.
To the other side of the relay I connected a battery pack holding four C-cell NiCd batteries, and the tape recorder for my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computer, such that when the relay switched off, power would be applied to the tape recorder.
On the computer (with its own AC adapter) was a BASIC program I wrote. The first thing it did was attempt to read a file off the tape. To do so, it would switch the tape player on, wait until it found the file it was looking for, read the file, and switch the tape off.
Let's review. Normally with the doorknob in its normal position the relay remains on. When someone turns the knob, the circuit is broke and the relay switches off (and remains off until it is reset, regardless of the knob). When the relay switches off, power is applied to the tape recorder. The computer has been waiting to read a file off the tape. The first thing recorded on the tape is the the file the computer is looking for. The volume is turned up on the tape recorder so that when the tape is played, it makes a really obnoxious screeching sound for a few seconds - this serves as an alarm. Think of the sound of a modem handshaking; same idea.
As soon as the computer has finished reading the file off the tape, it logs the occurrance and displays a message on the screen with a timestamp. It then switches the tape back on. After the file on the tape is a recording of my own voice saying something - I don't recall what. The computer waits an appropriate amount of time for the message to finish playing, then switches the tape off. The computer then beeps, and keeps beeping every few seconds for awhile, then shuts up.
So there's the alarm. Now I just have to be able to get in and out myself without triggering it. Getting out is easy - since the relay circuit is only broken by turning the doorknob, I simply open the door, reset the alarm, and close the door behind me without turning the knob. To get in, though, I need a way to deactivate the alarm from outside (before turning the doorknob).
So, I make a keycard. I use a small piece of cardboard, with more aluminum foil and masking tape. I tape non-touching strips of aluminum foil over one edge of the cardboard, connecting two of the strips together and leaving the others not touching. I now have my keycard. The card reader involves more of the same materials, mounted on the wall outside the door with a piece of telephone wire running to it. When the card is pressed against the reader properly, each strip on the card should touch a strip on the reader. The two contacts on the reader that correspond to the two that are wired together on the card are wired in parallel with the doorknob sensor, so that holding the card in place will maintain the relay circuit while opening the door. Some of the remaining contacts on the reader are wired in parallel with the other side of the relay so that if they are shorted together, the tape player will come on - the idea being, if you try to forge my keycard by shorting random contacts, you'll trip the alarm instead of disabling it. I don't recall how well I actually got this working, but since nobody forged my keycard, it wasn't an issue.
So there you have it: my burglar alarm hack. One of many, actually, but this was certainly the most interesting.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
back in the early 80s we used to make tailpipes out of aluminum baseball bats to increase compression and mill the cylinder heads down by dragging them in circles on a flat sidewalk. of course then you have to add three bottles of octane booster to the 2 gallons of gas.
You could get 50 mph out of an old 1.5 horse Puch moped.
I guess it's not quite hacking, but there are a few digital cameras that run the Digita OS which allows you to write programs and scripts. OK other people do the hacking and I reap the benefits and I run MAME!
I do A LOT of digital electronics hardware hacking.
Did you know that Vodavi Triad extension DSS keypads have nice boards with GM6486's on them.. Add a board and a microcontroller, and you've got one of them lights-out games.
And then there was that unused SPX-90 attached to the paging system. every time some one paged in the building it would threashod triger, "bark bark bark"
On the other end of the spectrum. I knew a guy with a Civic that put a 12v computer P/S fan in his air intake ducting to "increase" airflow into the engine.
The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.
At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.
At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.
People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.
If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.
If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.
If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.
Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.
Me? I do engine swaps. Then I go drag racing.
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Oh, you had tip and ring reversed.
"I'll pass in a minute after I type this..."
Can't forget this set of instructions.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
I imagine an Airzooka could be persuaded to make a flaming ring...
It's great. My resting rate is now 300 bpm.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I picked up a couple of these on sale at walgreens for some ridiculously low price ($10 i think, but they usually retailed for about $50 at the time). I'd read a few things about them, they had rudimentary AI and a lot of hack value physicaly. After about 20 minutes of them crawling around my floor exploring the place i got fed up with the noise, it was this awful screeching that could be heard through the entire house. Took em to the basement cracked em all open (i turned them off, leaving them still screaming while i did this would make me one sick bastard...) and soldered in a, i think 100 ohm, resistor right before the little piezo chip thing. Put em back together and their screeching was quieted to an acceptable level that you hear the motor grinding before you hear the bugs noise when their approaching.
"Sic Semper Tyrannosaurus Rex."
I don't know if it's a hack or not.. but on an East coast trip in HS a friend and I decided to take apart our disposable cameras for the sake of shits and giggles. After unwrapping them and exposing the circuitry we discovered by accident that if you charge the flash and then touch the two metal rods going to the flash it delivers a nasty jolt that makes your arm shake - all off a little 9v battery.
Needless to say, we carried that thing around everywhere "stunning" people until we were caught and it was taken away.
--
|-_-| . o O ( bEef!)
Ok...when I was in grade school I tried to wire up my clock radio to activate my train set every morning. I'm a heavy sleeper and I had a bad habit of turning the alarm off without waking up. My idea was to get the alarm clock to activate the train which was set up to run into my light switch. I figured all the noise and light would wake me up.
I expect that the details they want are pictures of it in real life action.
Do you have diagrams of the mechanism?
Do 5 seperately controlled halogen lamps that could be controlled via network *and* local keypads and automatic timers count as a hacking project?
:-)
Well, at least the software is a bit hacky, because i only had 20 Bytes (!) of RAM in the controller (8 of them for serial input/output and another 10 for the timers and menu-controls), i had to use "Year" and "Month" from the internal clock as temporary variables for local keypad input.
Works great, although there's some kind of race condition when you're typing at the moment a month ends
Look, this thing is totally safe! Built it myself, you know. You just press that button like this and then turn that lev
In the words of Dennis Leary: "That apple would make a great bong. That guy's head would make a great bong. Why is it that potheads have to make bongs out of everything? The reason why you start smoking is because you DON'T want to build stuff."
I have misplaced my pants.
Device with 8 monitor inputs and 4 outputs (2 used), connected to several computers and monitors and connecting them any-to-any. With a pair of BCD selectors to pick the signal (which turned out to be easier than other methods of switching). (No wonder - couple transistors, couple analog multiplexers, a board with some simple logic.)
Device with one keyboard input and 6 outputs, connecting the keyboard to one of them, according to which monitor was set as primary on the previous device and what computer was connected to it. (Again, no wonder - a handful of relays and some trivial logic.)
Coffee pot; glued a pushbutton under the lever that snapped back when the water boiled, connected it to the server's parallel port; when the water was ready in the kitchen, the computer in the lab beeped. Then beeped once again two minutes after the pot was put back to the holder, reminding me to take out the tea from the cup.
Lots of various voltage convertors, usually based on 780x chips. (Hint: you can raise the output voltage by putting a Zener diode or a LED between its GND pin and the ground, making the ground float. Useful when you need 7 volts and have just a 7805 and a yellow LED.)
Lead cell battery for an ancient Nokia communicator; the old lithium battery died, so after finding I'd pay for the replacement much more than I paid for the entire phone, I took the lithium cells out, connected a 7.2V stabilizer circuit to the terminals of the Nokia proprietary electronics board the cells were connected to, and fed the assembly from a small 12V/1.5Ah gel cell. It turned out later that a lead cell is heavy, but well-worth of carrying - gives a lot of power when needed (eg. for a small soldering iron). The assembly looks like a bomb, but who cares, it was cheap.
Polyswitch fuse on the mentioned battery, after I ripped off the connector and shorted the wires and they caught fire (well, just a lot of smoke, but it wasn't exactly public-friendly in a subway). Super-bright white LED and a pushbutton, mounted on the same battery, as a tiny flashlight (I didn't have the old Dancall phone anymore).
LOTS of various cables and wiring convertors.
A gadget with LEDs that shown all the RS232 port signals. Very valuable toy.
19" rack case for the computer. All made of solid aluminum L rails and 1mm sheet metal, with hard drives on springs and in rubber foam. Later survived fall from stairs; the disk assembly itself survived impact from 4 feet onto concrete.
Standard USB-B port built into (or rather onto - hot glue rules) a secondhand digital camera. Gods how I hate proprietary unobtainium connectors!
A diode bridge and a stabilizer built into a walkman/radio, to allow feeding it from any 6-15V power supply regardless of polarity. Together with the lead cell battery it turned out to be valuable; I never ran out of juice when outside.
A cooling fan mounted on a cap, for hot days. Powered from the same battery, aka Personal Energy Supply. Surprisingly effective. Next Summer I'll replace the big one from a power supply with a smaller CPU one. (Please don't comment about propellerheads. ;) )
Another cooling fan, this time mounted over a big mug with tea, to cool it down faster. Again, surprisingly effective. Wire rails added to the fan after it ended up in tea after I knocked it; fast-spinning bl
Intel never released their AudioPort product, which was an MP3 player that connected to your home stereo system to play audio files served up over WiFi or ethernet from a Windows-based server process running on your home PC. It would have been a sweet product if it hadn't been killed during one of Intel's slash-and-burn campaigns.
I managed to get hold of a beta model and tried to set it up at home. The server software running on the PC was flakey at best. It would randomly become unresponsive, making the whole thing pretty useless. The developers obviously never got a chance to really finish the software.
So out came the network traffic analyzer. I figured out that the stereo component was running a Linux image provided from the PC server over BOOTP/TFTP. I don't want to think about how many hours I spent figuring out the sequence of start-up messages required to get the device fully booted. Once it's booted, the protocol for controlling the stereo component is pretty simple: one control channel for sending play/stop requests and a data channel to send the MP3 data for it to decode.
Once I had learned all of that, it was pretty straightforward to set up BOOTP/TFTP on my Linux box and write my own server application which handles the rest of the boot sequence and allows me to send MP3s from my collection to the stereo on command. I've got a Perl script that I can use to talk with my server to send it playlists, sub-trees of my collection, or individual songs.
I've got a cron job running that sends a couple of random songs to my stereo every morning to wake me up. Another cron job plays something out of my "Garbage" collection every Monday night to remind me to take out the trash.
I got tired of always using the command line, so I created a plug-in for XMMS that causes it to send songs to my stereo instead of playing them on my PC.
I'm currently working on a Java-based GUI for it so my wife can control the stereo from her Windows laptop instead of having to bug me to play music for her.
I suppose there's something out there that I could purchase for $200-$300 that would let me do all of this without all of the hassle, but it's been a fun project.
Sometimes all you can do is to take a drill and drill the screw head off, then get the rest of the screw shaft out somehow, then find it's goddamned Whitworth because metric threads were apparently too unoriginal, and then cut new thread, this time metric, in the resulting hole.
Another big gripe, and a wish to live in really interesting times, comes to the vendors who put all the functions of their devices into one black flat undocumented vendor-specific chip with lots of legs and no chance to reverse-engineer, rendering the device much more difficult to enhance and, consequently, much less worthy.
The last black eye goes to the keyboard manufacturers. I still keep (and use almost 24/7) an ancient keyboard that came with my 286. It was the time when keyboards used real pushbuttons, instead of the wimpy pair of silkscreened foils, were repairable, felt MUCH better on touch-typing, and were made with a REAL circuitboard to which new buttons could be glued; having a Tab and Esc keys right next to the cursor keys turned out to be more than helpful, especially in the days when the IDEs were rather standardized on (I think) TurboVision set of objects. (Sheesh, I feel like an old fart now.)
Which reminds me about a partially successful attempt to turn a dotmatrix printer into a scanner for a C64. Attached a phototransistor and a LED on the printer head, connected them to the joystick port, removed the tape from the printer, set the printer to very small line spacing, and then scanned line by line by printing two dots at the very ends of the line, while reading the joystick port input during the head movement. Good old times... :)
Hello, I hacked the Opel display. Normally it shows the RDS information of the carradio. Now it shows the revolutions per minute of the engine. I used a PIC processor to measure the rpm and talk to the display. www.eelkevisser.nl/display.htm
Humor aside;
:)
http://www.honda-tech.com
I'm in the process of connecting a fan to a civic engine - a nifty fan called a turbocharger that spins at around 100,000 rpm, give or take. Estimated wheel horsepower at 10-12psi of boost is 210-240 from a 1600cc D16Y7 engine. Starting horsepower was 107 on a good day.
To accomplish this I'm using a secondary fuel system running a custom intake manifold with 4 extra injectors. The injectors are controlled by a atmel AVR microcontroller programmed with the port of GCC. (avr-gcc, www.avrfreaks.net). How's that, a little piece of GNU in there even. Ignition retard under boost is being handled by an aftermarket controller until I get that figured out.
Obviously the engine internals have been upgraded with forged components that are designed to handle more load. The total cost of the engine and related parts is under $5000 though - with me doing the labour.
Ultimately I want to do my own EFI system based on a real RTOS like QNX. I have done smaller EFI systems for less complicated engines. People have reverse engineered the honda ECU, although in my experience, it's more trouble than it's worth. Check out the systems offered by Hondata, and it's open and free friend, Uberdata.
Anyone can make big numbers with 5 liters of displacement. It's a little harder with less than two. The reason you want more power from a small package isn't just elegance though; lighter cars handle much, much better than heavier ones.
There are very, very fast civics out there. Be careful who you laugh at if your girlfriend is riding with you.. but oh wait, this is slashdot.
..don't panic
Back at a school where I went, they had motor-driven blinds in some of the classrooms. The idea was good; rather than having to raise and lower curtains manually, there was two pushbuttons, one would start them going up and the other would start them going down.
When you pressed both at the same time, there was a fuse that blew somewhere. Basically a quick DoS-ing of any lecture that would depend on a slide-show in a dark room...
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Since there may be FCC people out there....
"police" Scanners and "ham radio" equipment...
I still have my Apple II+ and wanted to see if I could recover the source code to Repton - a game I co-authored back in '82. The end result was that I wired up a cable from the Apple II printer card to my Linux parallel port and wrote some C code that made the Linux box look like a printer to the Apple II card. Since I could not get Merlin ( the apple II assembler ) to boot I also had to write a BASIC program that would read the binary files directly from floppy and send the text out the printer port.
Some day I may try to get the code to actually compile so I can run the game on my Nokia - but I'd have to mess around with getting the graphics files over as well if I want to build the game.
Amazing to me that 25 year old floppy disks - and all the hardware still work - including my Amdek Color monitor. As best I can tell, only the 16K expansion card has problems, and that might be fixed if I could find a 4116 (?) 16Kx1 chip or two.
Apple RULES!!!
Yes. This was yesterday.
Yes. I use old hardware.
Insert `fortune -o` here
When all my friends got a brand new Soundblaster Deluxe V.1 (with Dr. Sbaitso!) when they first came out, I had to make do with my little hand-made Parralel port IO jobbie.
Got the plans off BBS's and was cheap to make. Can't remember the exact name but it was widely supported in games back then and worked perfectly with ScreamTracker!
Sweet hack...
"I used to have that really cool,funny sig
That's my primary criterion before beginning a hacking project - will the electric shock cause permanent injury or death?
Sounds like the quailification to build tesla coils and spud guns.
Is building a spud gun qualify as hacking ABS or PVC pipe?
The truth shall set you free!
I play with Mercedes parts sometimes aligned as running vehicles and old BMW's. They cost a years salary new but that was 20+ years ago you can pick them up for dirt cheap if your very very careful. They're an utter blast.
Need Mercedes parts ?
Thank you PAIA ... thank you all the other synth hackers out there ...
Tons of great stuff going on in the audio world.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Non-PC?
Well, I got my brother Jeb to help me rig an election...
But seriously, folks...
I did fairly recently add a small power supply and 3rd(!) CD drive to my PC case - for music only, available even when the PC is not booted...does that count? (In fact, this project was the topic of a previous Ask Slashdot that wonder of wonders, was accepted!)
Can anyone give a review on the book?
Is it worth spending 30 bucks or should i buy 5 pizzas instead?
This article has inspired me on a new hacking project : to 'hack' my bf so we have better foreplay ;)
:))
I'm betting most Slashdot readers(like my bf) think foreplay is something that is done in less than 5 mins.
1. Long-distance leaf vaccuum: Last fall was the first fall for raking leaves at my new house. I had an electric leaf blower/vaccuum. The vaccuum bag was way too small. Went to Home Depot and bought 200 foot of 4-inch corrugated drain pipe. Duct-taped the pipe to the outlet on the leaf vacuum and put the other end of the pipe into my wife's garden. That way I just keep walking around and vaccuuming without having to empty the leaf bag every two minutes.
:-)
2. Remote mouse manipulation: Back in the old X-windows environments, wrote a program to move somebody else's mouse around on their screen for them...would drive 'em nuts trying to clean the mouse...especially those optical ones.
ok, its wetware, but being as dense, stubborn and full of fixed ideas as i am i'm f* surprised that this is *first post* on the brain hacks.
;)
binaural beats, nutrition, brain machines, experiments in cognitive procecessing, character analysis, self-transformation?
anyone else smart enough to repell the woo woo label and 'evolve' while on or off the IT gravy train?
personal growth hacking.. self-encounter.. non drug trips to inner space..
it may be the change in tests, but i've never scored higher on iq tests than i do after having tinkered on and with the stuff that used to freak me out
A planned hack rather than a completed project:
I want to set my box up with a projector so I can use the same screen to browse the Internet, email and watch films/TV. Saves space, looks cool, impresses the girls. Figured I'd use a wireless keyboard and mouse but then also thought maybe I could do better than a wireless mouse.
First thought was a light gun. ACT do one which works as a mouse with a CRT but they don't work on projectors. So that's out. But I have a cunning plan....
I'm intending to set up a small camera on top of the top of the projector, pointing at the projected image. I'll use 4 lasers to pick out the corners of the projected desktop image, which can then be used as reference points relative to the desktop. My mouse will be a modified laser pointer connected by USB to the wireless keyboard to give the mouse button information and power.
I'll need software to locate the spots, fix the 4 reference spots relative to each other and then use their locations to triangulate the projected spot from my pointer. It'll then need to use this information so that the pointer on screen moves wherever the pointer spot goes (ideally I'll put the on screen pointer down to a pixel so the laser spot *is* the pointer).
Anyone done this already? If so is there code available to save me some time? Any thoughts on improvements to the plan or problems I may not have thought of?
(Unsurprisingly I'm running Linux!)
You see my amplifier used to only go to 10, but now I've hacked it so it goes to 11 for when I need that extra boost.
Now I'm old and work all day and play video games all night. Well.. actually
Its funny to see that anything can be made fast - check out thedodgegarge.com to see a 10 second 1/4 mile K-car. It might be useful to you anyhow since he used to have lots of notes on turbo charger hookups (though mainly for 2.2L Chrysler engines, but still is informative)
Hey dickead....
most turbo/superchargers spin up to about 13,000rpm not the "100,000 rpm, give or take" that you purport.
If you want to actually impress people, impress them with facts...
I opened up my digital alarm clock and rewired it so that snooze turns the alarm off until tomorrow instead of normal snooze function. I never used snooze anyway and I always forgot to turn the damn thing back on for the next day.
AEM makes drop in replacement ECUs for many different cars. http://www.aempower.com They're cheaper and have as many features if not more. Things you pay BUX for with MOTEC (including support) are standard with the AEM boxes. I have been running one for two years on a turbo Supra and am really happy with it. You can even goto http://www.Gauge-Tech.com and get a nice standalone display for the AEM EMS. A friend makes those and I've got one of his latest boxes, very cool to see realtime MPG, HP, Trq, and other things!
All in all MOTEC is overrated unless you REALLY need the potted ECU and Mil-Spec connectors or have more money than you know what to do with...
Build it, Drive it, Improve it! Hybridz.org
Thanks for your reply. You are assuming that I don't understand the American woman culture, but I do.
I learned by asking my women friends a lot of questions. I never found any American men who had much insight into women. However, women have insight into women, and I put a lot of effort into learning from them.
I got started when my woman friend at the time, with whom I was living, told me that there was a man in one of her college classes that was extremely popular with women. I asked her, and she said that he was not especially good-looking. I asked her how he did it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the answers.
I never used my knowledge for negative purposes. I always thought I would like to get married, and I was looking for a wife. Obviously, to find a wife it is useful to be popular with women. However, there have been at least 100 women who wanted to go to bed with me for every woman who was serious about wanting a life partner. It is a compliment the first 30 or 50 times a woman wants sex with no relationship, but then it gets annoying. It was either Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix who began to try to discourage women by saying, "I can't make your body feel as good as my music makes your mind feel." I'm not a musician, but I sympathize with the problem.
Along the way I learned a lot about things in which I really never had any intention to know. I learned about the inside of the modeling business from two women friends who were models. I learned about the beauty queen business from a woman friend who was a Miss Texas contestant. (She didn't win the Miss Texas title.) I learned how to cure yeast infections. Once a woman friend called me and told me that she had gotten pregnant by a man who was not her husband. (Not me.) She asked me if I knew of an abortion clinic. You know that you are being accepted by women when they treat you as a sister or as another woman friend.
After many years of looking for a wife in the United States, I began to think it was impossible. There were many women available to marry, but none who had the necessary skills or commitment. I spent time with Thai women, but most of them were too silly. I spent time with Iranian women, but they weren't nice enough to men. I found an interesting French woman who was not serious enough.
Finally I found and married a Brazilian woman. She's sleeping a few feet from where I'm sitting. (I slept too much yesterday and woke up early, and decided to check Slashdot.) I am very happy with her. Like most Brazilians, she likes to joke, but she can be serious when it is necessary. Unlike many Brazilians, she is careful with money, and good with details. She is, in some ways, better than me at repairing computers, because she has more patience. She's studying C++. She's good at web design, but doesn't have much time to do it.
It is interesting to note that my comment (#8380610, grandparent to this one) was modded up to +5 during the time Europeans and Asians were reading Slashdot, and is now at +4 now that American men are awake. People from other countries generally recognize that all is not right in U.S. society.
If you are a scientifically-minded person, you will realize that, if you reject my hypotheses, you must then try to make your own:
If everything is okay in the U.S., why is the U.S. the most obese nation in the history of the world? Eating when not hungry is an indication of unhappiness.
Why can't the U.S. government find a way of living in the world that does not involve violence?
Why does the U.S. government spend more money on weapons than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Why does the U.S. government spend more money on spying than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Why does the U.S. government have a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Somet
Perkele!
-el
I'll have to agree and disagree with you there about him passing Porsches because I've seen it done in person with a nearly stock Acura Integra LS (~160hp/120tq). Not to mean any disrespect to the Porsche line of cars, because they are wonderful cars, but I noticed that the casual owner who participates in SCCA events just go out to push their car a little more than driving on the highway and around town. The Integra and Civic owners just flog their cars around the track whereas some of the Porsche owners are out there that don't push their car to the same limits.
Not to make this into a Fast and the Furious type of argument because I don't think that was his intention (even though he did eerily lay down some numbers), but I've noticed that in the straight line the Porsche's fly down the track, but when it comes to taking the turns, the Hondas and Acuras catch up to them and set up for the pass.
You know what, though, in this instance, it comes down to driver's skill. The guy who just bought his Porsche, has no track experience and finds out that a local SCCA club is having a track day wants to go out and see how he does. He enters the event and finds himself against a few seasoned racers who autocrosses and races open track 3-4 times a month who happens to drive CRXs, Civic hatchbacks, and Integras, and those drivers know how to make their cars perform faster than the Porsche driver. I'm not saying that those Honda/Acura drivers out there know what the hell their doing with their body kits and 30lb wheels, but there are a few people out there that own these vehicles that know what they're doing. And a few of them are winning.
Much respect to those who take it to the track.
In model railroading, kitbashing (often abbreviated to "bashing", our form of hacking) is not only common but often the only way to get just the model that you want. One of my bashes was published in Model Railroader in 1997 when I worked on the Wisconsin Central project layout (I built the Tews Cement facility). I took two kits, one ready-made structure and several more parts to build one cement distribution company complex.
I'll refrain from the name calling, but maybe you should search before you post. the first google hit for "turbocharger rpm" is this http://www.performanceoiltechnology.com/synthetico ilandturbochargers.htm
and it says:
"Typical turbocharger RPM is between 10,000-15,000 RPM at low engine speed up to around 60,000-100,000 RPM at full engine speed."
Turbochargers and superchargers are similar in purpose, but vastly different in approach.
And if you are going to be name calling, be brave enough to not post AC.
Shoot, I guess I have other problems.
Not that this wasn't entirely predictable.
Bah, you're just installing a piece of aftermarket equipment :-) A REAL hack would be turning that turbocharger into a miniature turbojet engine.
This is the axe George Washington used to chop down the cherry tree.
I've had to replace the handle.
And the head.
But it occupies the same space.
Anonymous
To clarify, I don't particularly disagree with your assertion that Americans have some serious problems. What I do disagree with is your analysis of women's culture in the U.S. (I think you've got a very narrow band of data, I'll eleborate below) and that somehow women are (or women's culture is) somehow more responsible for the problems in the U.S. than men or men's culture or any other factor. If you'd posted something that criticized all Americans I probably wouldn't have blinked, if you'd posted something that was critical of women, but didn't echo known, common anti-woman beliefs/propaganda (for lack of better words for the phenomenon), I would have been less likely to react as well.
:) ).
Your complaint about women not wanting to commit is interesting, as it's one I'm more used to hearing from women about men than vice versa (though I've heard it from women about women and men about both men and women, so no one gets to completely avoid it, I suppose). I don't find that surprising. Marriage has it's pros and cons. It's not just about committing to have sex with only one person. There are a lot of practical aspects -- financial (dependant on where you are and who has what money and what income, you can lose quite a bit of money in taxes and such if you're married that you wouldn't if you were single), geographical (if one partner gets transferred at work, do both move or does that partner have to lose their job and find another?), emotional (living with someone is very difficult -- esspecially if one was an only child in a 'standard' household [parent(s) only, no extended family]) etc. And some of these fall particularly hard on women, because traditionally they've been the ones expected to make greater sacrifices for the marriage. If a woman wants to have a career or continue her education than it makes sense to delay marriage. And all of this is intensified if children are expected to be part of the package.
My mother went to four different colleges and ultimately decided to go into nursing rather than medicine, because she got married and had to follow my father around. Two years later she had me and three years after that my sister. It took her fourteen years to get her BA in Nursing, and she started before she met my father (and she was her high school valedictorian, so I don't think that was a problem with the academic work). Now, she doesn't (to my knowledge) regret any of this, and I respect the decisions she made as those that were best for her, but I certainly can understand why a woman would *not* want to do that. I don't think one can explain away difficulty finding a wife or the rising age of first time brides by claiming that women on the whole have become less willing to commit. The social and economic factors affecting marriage have changed in the last two generations, and they combine to make getting married, and esspecially getting married young, a less attractive choice than it was before, at least unless one really wants to have children.
Incidently, life expentancy stats would seem to bear this out. Married men have longer life expentancies than unmarried men, but the reverse is true for women.
On a related point, to find a wife, being popular with women is not really the best strategy. It's being appealing, as marriage material, to at least one woman (and it only has to be one, though I suppose increasing that number would increase your odds somewhat) who is interested in getting married. I know one guy who is really popular with women, but not in any way that would be useful to find a partner -- for various reasons he's very popular with..lesbians. Not very useful for getting married or getting laid, but his parties are great. Actually, I exaggerate a little -- he ended up marrying a woman who thought she was a lesbian, but decided she'd just hadn't met the right man. This is, however, a lousy strategy in general and I don't recommend it (because it wastes your time and annoys the lesbians
Modeling and the whole beauty queen business is
Thank you, it is nice to see so many pages in a row on Slashdot that have thoughtful debate, back and forth, on a serious topic.
It's still a front wheel drive car and therefor, IMO, not a sports car.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
I like your V6 RWD chevette. Did you do the crab claw flames yourself?
I thought you might find this amusing. Ford did the same type of thing for the SEMA show. To show off their new 5.0L Cammer crate engine (aluminum block and heads, DOHC, 32-valves, 420 HP) they put one into a Focus. It isn't the first 5.0L Focus I've seen, either, but the pushrod powered one didn't have 420HP.
On a related note, I recall seeing video of a little tiny Dodge Colt, complete with roll cage and big slicks, and a 442 squeezed into the front (firewall was pushed back some) tearing up the dragstrips years ago. It tickles me to see little cars like Chevettes, Colts, or Foci staging up against Cameros. I think it would be funnier still to show up at an Import Drag night with V8 RWD power.
Don't moderate flamebait as Troll. Know the difference or you will be Meta-moderated.
Hahaha.
..don't panic
If you want to see what I am currently doing, and have done in the past - check out my website. My current big project is fixing my 1979 Bronco - but that is just basic mechanic-type work. My real project is building a recumbent electric "vehicle" from bicycle parts. Recently I built an electric motor (that I toasted) using paperclips (though I don't consider it a "hack", because I followed directions in an old Time-Life book). Long time ago, I "hacked" a PowerGlove to hook up to my Amiga, then to my PC, and recently got it working under Linux (using this one guy's driver code). I have had recent thoughts on a variety of internal and external combustion engines (one a two-cycle alcohol engine, the other a simple Sterling engine). I helped bring together a community of people hacking the Acer NT-150 settop box. Recently I was digging through my old junk from my youth when I had a TRS-80 Color Computer - found an old "light gun" I had built using a CDS cell, a toiletpaper tube, a small lens, and a spring for the trigger - hooked it all to the joystick port, and it worked OK. I could go on, and on - but suffice to say, I have hacked hardware nearly my entire life, and I don't plan to stop anytime soon...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Indeed!
This may or not be "news (specifically) for Nerds", but it is Certainly 'stuff that Matters"!
I would hope for more Slashdot like this!
Peace!
Umm, I didn't exactly draw up plans. If anyone's seriously interested, I can send step-by-step intructions and some pictures (of the device, not operating diagrams! Bad reader! Naughty!)
But keep in mind you pretty much need access to a metal lathe.
I suppose you could probably do it with a hacksaw, a drill press, a good drill press vice, and some patience, intead of the metal lathe.
You'll also need a tap set, or at least a 10-32 tap and a tapping handle. There's really no way around that.
Let me know if you're serious, I'm happy to help other people let the good times roll.
"... your data set is weak."
There is no data set presented. It's just a Slashdot comment.
"My god, I don't even know where to start with your recommendations on how to treat women."
My recommendation: "... treat women right even if they treat you badly." That applies to everyone, of course. Treat everyone right. As I mentioned, I got this idea from someone else. I think it's a good idea.
http://www.graphicsinterface.org/proceedings/2002/ 221/paper221.pdf