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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
Does 'hacking' into my girlfriend count?
I hacked my Sony Aibo into its component parts. Worthless f'n robot.
I performed surgery on my Furby and created a secret stealing super agent. Muhahahaha...
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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."
...into a million peices with an ax.
Is it staring at me?
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.
Actually, they've already used a monkey for "Managing the Windows NT Registry".
:)
No - I'm not joking either.
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.
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
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
I don't see why it wouldn't, it certainly qualifys as hacking.
I hacked a Dakota digital camera.
10 bucks for a blurry 1.3 mp camera, how could I not hack it?
Let's make a difference
I hacked several functioning consumer electronic devices into fully-working doorstops?
sig under development
$5 / month hosted VPS on linux = awesome!
I usually find it to be the opposite. After I hack some women in a dark alley under the cover of night and shadows, her limbs become detachable.
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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.
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
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.
rumor has it leia did once
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).
Possibly, though it seems you might need a bigger tool for this job, or so I've heard...
Slightly OT
I once bought an original Pole Position II arcade off ebay (about 120). After a few months the screen went a bit screwy, so i found a newsgroup concerning acade repair.
The people on the group were really helpful and were talking me through fixing the problem... however I kept the arcade plugged in so I could see the results. FZZZZZZPT! I get knocked about 5 foot, manage to crawl to my laptop and type very slowly "brb, ambulance"
my gf was first shocked, then scared, then calling me "pathetic"
Hey, so what permanent injury's do you have? As clearly your not dead.... erm are you?!????
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
I took the toys apart and would find the right value resistor that would top off the speaker volume
Wow, that's a lot more work than putting a piece of tape over the speaker grille.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I stick a wad of paper into the latch on the washing machine so I can watch it fill up with the door open.
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).
Wow. Heloise could totally own this thread.
When I was younger, I was very much the mall rat. I spent a lot of time at the local arcade in the mall and got to know the people that worked there pretty well. I remember one of the managers telling me a similar story. This guy was an area manager in the NC area and would visit the various stores throughout the month. He said one of them (I forget which one) was supposed to have a dent in the wall where a repair guy had done the same thing. The dent was supposed to be autographed too! :)
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.
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.
Even better, a coffee pot that sounds an alarm and sprays purple dye on that person who always drinks the last cup and doesn't make another pot.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Why do they sell "medical" N2O at the porno store? I don't see any doctors there, just naughty nurses.
-B
it's not a hack if you followed directions.
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
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!
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!)
Do pacemakers come with a lifetime warranty?
I just ignore it. It just means that a lot of ugly men with small penises read slashdot. But heh, this is geek culture what else do you expect.
Wanna see Darth's head spinning _really_ fast ?
Post your IP address here !
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.