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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?"
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...
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...)
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
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?
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.
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
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.
We built a fireplace and I wanted something cool for the kids so I took one of the kid-high rocks and drilled a hole in it then epoxied in a brass "peep hole". I put a geode behind the rock and ran some fiber optic cable to it then mortared the whole thing up.
The other ends of the fiber optic cables went to a hidden box which contains the guts of one of these fiber optic Xmas trees (including the spinning color wheel).
Push a secret rock near the peep hole rock and the whole thing turns on - cool crystally color changing happiness. The kids love it. Now on the other side of the fireplace I installed a "peep show" but that's a different story...
I've made up my mind and now I've got to lie in it.
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.
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.
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.
Happy Trails!
Erick
http://www.busyweather.com/
I'd actually be interested in what people think about working with cars in terms of hacking. Do you consider it hacking if you're modifying your car to improve performance, for entertainment (ie, stereo stuff, DVD, etc) or reliability?
Would it be hacking if you just took off the shelf (either stock or aftermarket) and installed them? Or would you have to kind of cobble together something that's rarely normally done for it to be hacking?
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
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
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...
Two sheets of bounty with a little Pledge sprayed between makes an excellent, cheap replacement for those damn swifter rags.
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.
...
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!
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It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
I think my Mini would count as a "hack" - See Picture
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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
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.