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?"

Comments

Good hacking tool:

[t_allardyce]

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