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Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?
An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter recently asked what kind of things someone can power with an external USB battery. I have a followup along those lines: what kind of modifications have you made to your gadgets to do things that they were never meant to do? Consider old routers, cell phones, monitors, etc. that have absolutely no use or value anymore in their intended form. What can you do with them?
The paper-clip CD extractor. I keep one in my desk at all times.
I'm a professional hacker, you insensitive clod!
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Put it all together for near-real-time track of how much it costs to keep my basement at a given humidity.
The Raspberry Pi caches readings in a local database in case it can't connect to the web, then stores in a database on my web server. The database ingestion also keeps a 2-hour running average to smooth things out a bit.
When I set it up, I thought it wasn't working right - I saw sawtooth-like patterns in the humidity data. Turned out, it was working perfectly: the resolution of the humidity sensor was good enough that I could watch the humidity in the room rise until the dehumidifier kicked on!
Just a popped cap replacement, mind. But I didn't throw the thing away, I repaired it.
A company I worked at used to have an annual mini golf hole contest. I hollowed out a computer and ran the ball through it in some 1/2 pvc pipes with the cd tray popping in and out (a batch file from a boot floppy) as a moving obstacle.
Guy at work used his laptop as a holder for his wobbly wardrobe. With the expected result. He's now... cough, cough... the director of the workplace.
Non-Linux Penguins ?
The HP28C had an infrared output, e.g. For printers, but no input. a friend of mine published a book explaining how to connect an IR diode to trigger some unconnected keyboard lines in the calculator. That made it possible to upload programs to the calculator faster. Of course you also needed the matching hack on a PC to send programs. The 48 had IR in both directions.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop to effectively act as a scheduled wall timer for a "VCR for tape decks". He used the parallel port to send current to a few signaling contacts on a cassette recorder in order to record Car Talk and a few other radio programs he liked. A patent was considered, but podcasts rapidly became a thing a year or two after he had it working nicely. Not a bit of that statement that fails to make me feel a bit old.
Back in the '80s, I was in Highschool. We had Commodore PETs that we used for our computer class, and being a geek/nerd, I was regularly abused by the cool kids. Well...one year, I got back at them. They were taking the computer class I was in. Commodore gear was "smart" - each peripheral had a small CPU and could be programmed. So...I hacked the code for the floppy disk drives (in assembler) and when it saw a file coming across it would look at the user. If it was me or someone I chose, it would work normally. However, for those unlucky few individuals whom I had decided to take revenge, it appeared to be working, but actually it was formatting the floppy disk. Those bullies lost their year end projects and all their work. I have to admit that I felt no guilt about this incident.
Back in high school I had a file server whose case was a cardboard box. Bob was a pretty great file server.
There is a story I remember reading once, but can't seem to find anymore. It was about some space probe that was regularly shutting down. The space engineers finally figured out that it had lost a panel, so the sun light could enter inside and that was enough to corrupt the memory that was hit by sun rays. So NASA modified the program so that it "walk around" physical memory, copying its code and data around memory so as to avoid solar rays. I don't know if that story is true, but if it is, it looks like a good candidate to me.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
Can't you just read the answer off your mom's utility bill?
I come here for the love
I was deployed to Iraq, and we had to download a very large file. Unfortunately, we were working on laptops that would lock the screen after 15 minutes, and then the laptop would loose connection. Considering that the file was going to take 8-10 hours to download, this was not acceptable. I found an oscillating pedestal fan, and I duct-taped a yardstick between the fan and a mouse connected to the laptop. Since the laptop would not lock due to the mouse movement, all I had to do is to place a few books to limit the moment area; the next morning the file was downloaded. I realize this might not be the hack for which you were looking, but since it involved duct-tape I thought it would count.
to pull down /. and strip out all the links to medium.com and banal "ask slashdot" questions. When I stuck a logic analyzer on the UART pins and saw no activity I knew it was working. In fact it kept working even after the battery was depleted.
But a bass (Hohner The Jack) modified with two lipstick guitar humbuckers (which I can split or set in series to make it a humcanceller instead of a humbucker). So far nothing too special, right? Well, add a volume and tone control for each pickup. Also not too uncommon at all. Add a blend potentiometer. Yes, lots of controls, but still not a hack.
The actual hack was an active/passive switch. The active switch switches the output to a battery (two batteries actually, one for the filament, the other to power the amplifier) fed tube preamp inside the bass. There are tiny ex military tubes made by Raytheon (6418) that accept low voltage.
It was a "because I can" project, though. I used a solid state preamp there later, after I broke the tube. It sounded actually better.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
During the age of the "CB" radio craze, I made an antenna out of a fiberglass whip flag that was on my bicycle, mounted the radio on a bracket on the handlebars, used a magnetic mount for the microphone. Rigged up a generator out of one of those bicycle light thingys, to kind of trickle charge the 2 6 volt lantern batteries mounted where the water bottle went. Worked pretty good. Use to get truckers going back & forth across the state on U.S. highway 50 would call me on the radio wanting to see it if I was on the air. What the heck...wasn't much to do in a small town, if you were 14, in the mid 70's.
Plug in monitor, throw off roof.
Pretty....
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
Parallel port interface for a SNES control pad. Very usefull for using with SNES and NES emulators
Religion: The greatest weapon of mass destruction of all time
not sure this counts, but i had an old Apple ][+ clone that i ran a BBS on back in the early 80s. I had a phone circuit that sent power to the computer when the phone was rang, which was able to boot up and answer the phone before the 4th ring. Once the session was over, i sent a signal through the game port (a 14 or 16 pin DIP socket) to de-energize the relay which unpowered the computer. I also found the pointer to where the "Apple ][" text was and re-directed to another location of NOPs so I could get 10 characters to show up on the screen at bootup instead of the usual 8. pretty basic stuff, but i was 13.
My Apple IIe as a paperweight.
When I was young (around 2000), I need to reinstall my Windows 98 (kind of usual task at that time). The only pity being that my BIOS is password-locked, so that I cannot change boot order. I then figure out that, I can unplug the hard disk, to allow the Windows 98 CD to boot, and then plug disk back right after to install onto it. This method worked every time.
I'm not mechanically inclined but I'm looking forward to some of the response. Speaking of APS units, I had to tape a piece of cardboard over the switch to keep the cats from turning it off by stepping on it. :\
Normally the game is played with repetitive button pushes, which is dumb. I linked the game, running in an emulator, to a PC based controller, and jury-rigged the wiring to an appropriately disemboweled step counter of a step machine. In general, I'm fascinated by the idea of linking the trappings of compulsion-inducing behavior (a.k.a. computer gaming) to things that are useful IRL. Or in modern lingo, I gamified a useful but otherwise incredibly boring exercise, or sportified an interesting game.
I had a kludgy hack to get my Nintendo 64 to be displayed out of my computer monitor back when I was in high school. I took the video from the VGA cable and hooked it into the Video-In of my Power Macintosh. I then took the audio, connected it to a CD to Cassette converter using some components from Radioshack, and put the Cassette tape into an old boombox. When you opened the video capture software on the mac and pressed play on the boombox, you got full audio and video!
to a fully functional doorstop!
We had a server at a co-lo that was locking up on a regular basis. It had a phone line that it used on an infrequent basis with a modem to send faxes. When it would lock up, usually at 4 am, I would have to drive 45 minutes to the co-lo in order to press the reset button. I took an old 1200 baud modem, and cut the traces on the PC board where the off-hook relay connected to the analog phone circuitry, and instead brought those relay contacts out to a set of wires. I hooked those wires into the reset switch on the server, put the modem on the same phone line as the outgoing fax line, and set the modem to auto-answer after 20 rings. There were never any legitmate incoming phone calls on that line, and any random wrong numbers would give up after 4-5 rings. When the server did lock up, I would just dial the number of the outgoing fax line and let it ring 20 times. The modem would "answer" - but the relay would actually "press" the reset button on the server instead, saving me a 45 minute drive.
At one time I got a broken MagSafe power supply, the ones that Apple ships with their laptops. Since I was curious how these switched-mode power supplies work, I cracked it open and somehow shorted the big capacitor. These temporarily store up to 400 volts but it wasn't that much left. I still got quite a zap, though :-)
Anyway, I got a big crate of broken ones from a local Apple dealer in town. I found out that they usually didn't work because the wire would break close to the adapter. eBay sold replacement cables and I started fixing the power supplies. Cracking them open, replacing the cord, testing them, glueing them shut as neat as possible, then selling them for 25 bucks.
It was fun but with a kid on the way, I had no room for a separate table for my soldering iron, electronics stuff etc. and I stopped doing it. Cleaning up every time you want to do something small isn't fun.
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The power supply board from an old DVD player powers my workshop lights. Hardest part was mounting the box on the ceiling, German concrete is HARD!
Out of a DeLorian! Retrofitted it to run on fusion power.... Then ran it using a steam locomotive...
- Doc Brown -
I made a circuit to glitch the h-card after DTV killed it on black sunday
it counted the clocks after a reset and at a specific count it dropped the VCC to the card to 1.5 volts for 2 clock cycles
this caused the CPU in the h-card to return a low from a particular flash memory location and bypass a loop that killed the card
it used 3 4000 series CMOS chips, 1 PNP transistor and several diodes and resistors
I was missing the hardware to mount a 5 Mb hard drive (yes, 5 Mb) in my XT. Didn't want it sitting directly on the case (cable length, vibration, possible short, etc), but really wanted that upgrade. My French-English dictionary was sitting nearby, so it became the support "bracket".
My mom used that computer many years for checking email (she did upgrade to 2400 baud), but one day it needed a repair. She said the guy was a bit surprised to find a library in a PC.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
time resolution
I fully expect that all the unused electronic gear in my garage (old s-100 computers, for example) will provide significant structural support for my house (no, I don't live in my mom's basement) in the event of the inevitable seismic event.
I have a working Amiga 3000T.
The gasoline heater on my VW Camper wouldn't start consistently - it used a small Kettering type driver and coil for the spark igniter. It didn't have enough dwell to create a strong spark, and no real way to adjust it. So, made a driver using a PIC, trimmer potentiometer, a transistor, protection diodes and some passives. I read the pot with the a/d, and used that to set a PWM duty cycle. Adjust the pot for enough dwell to get a consistently strong spark. Once working and adjusted, the whole thing was potted in some JB Weld.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Well, both, really.
I guess I should say accuracy, or repeatability or noise floor of the humidity sensor - since I originally thought I was seeing some capacitive artifact. It actually does a pretty good job.
I get a lot of crap at yard sales, thrift stores, etc. Eventually the stuff makes its way into projects. Got some of those NHT transducers out of some toy cardboard guitar amplifiers. Used one of them to make a lunchbox into a speaker, it sounds a little tinny... Got a LCD backup mirror with a broken mirror for $10, nice source of a backup camera (with range marks) and a 4.3" LCD. $10 later and I've got a touch panel to go with it, I plan to attach them to my R-Pi soon.
Outside I've made a table for my (yard-sale acquired) lathe out of pallets and I made a 4x8 table saw by making a wooden frame for a portable jobsite table saw I got for ten bucks missing the extending fences and whatnot but with the pusher.
I don't depend on this stuff for livelihood, it's just a hobby, but you can live better on the trash in this country than you can on normal wages in some others. There's just valuable shit going to hell everywhere. If you could line up end-to-end all the cars that people would have liked to fix up which have been parked in people's yard and just rusted away, they'd probably reach across the country.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Or rather I disassembled two broken power drill and used the parts to make one functioning one. The hardware hacks I did on my VW bus were too numerous to mention.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
Old HP GPIB-based XY plotter with laser diode in place of pen, does a nice job of cutting gaskets for steam engines.
Broken 8 track player in ginormous am/fm/turntable cabinet, replaced with beaglebone, so when I hit the next track button it plays a 'clunk' sound and then fires up a random streaming internet radio station. (That one made hackaday.)
A nearby company went out of business and sold all their stuff and I scored an electronic balance with an RS232 output. Some arduino code later, and I now have a fuel injector flow tester: force known-pressure fuel in for a known amount of time and measure how much actually comes out, tare, repeat. It's neat to be able to characterize just how narrow a PWM signal the injector can register and react to.
My current work project is even a hack: I'm repurposing an abandoned semiconductor automated test system into an evaluation board characterization system. The test guys don't want it because it's too slow and limited, but I'm all "whoah, 192 arbitrary waveform generators? Let me at it."
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
Well it was not a USB battery but does running through a dark forest with a UPS-powered stroboscope count?
0x or or snor perron?!
I use a sheevaplug with a usb cd-rom drive to close the air hatch on my wood burning central heating system. Of course it also has some fishing line and duct tape. The idea is that i can close the hatch with a timer or remotely at will. I've built a website for this purpose. I have two raspberry pis working as cameras for the system. If I leave the hatch open the air getting through the system will cool down the system much faster. I just eject the empty drive and the fishing line gets "longer" and closes the hatch.
When I was a student, I came across some blueprint and made a monitor cable that allowed the use of less expensive, commodity IBM PC compatible monitors on Apple computers, and created a little company to commercialize it. As I lacked funds, or a PC, a monitor or an Apple computer, I borrowed a large CRT monitor from a distributor and brought it to an Apple retailer for the demo via public transportation. So much about budgeting for proper testing and QA. I was lucky with the soldering and it worked straight away. Due to reported availabilty from some asian 'competitor', no order was placed but I got paid for the prototype. I carried back the borrowed monitor and recovered the safety deposit.
Yes, half of a clothespin (sans spring), saved having to order a hard drive mounting assy for my laptop's second drive port, perfect size to keep it snug. That'd probably be my most unusual, all the others were relatively mundane.
Oh wait, as a kid, not allowed to read after bedtime, I ran a wire from a train transformer to the room door frame wrapped around a metal tack, a matching thumbtack on the top of the door with wire going to a spare 12v auto parking light bulb and back to the transformer completed the circuit. I got away with reading at night for years just needing to hide just the book, not flashlight too, if Mom checked on me from seeing light spilling out under the door.
But I don't consider turning my door into a knife switch unusual.
The day she pounded on my ground floor window from outside shouting "go to sleep" did make me jump and lay awake a long time though!
YOU'RE NOT MY REAL FATHER!!!
I live in a house over 100 years old with original heavy wood frame windows. The windows have rope that goes to counter-weight anchors inside of the window frame to balance the weight while the window is open. On one window, the rope broke...
I now open the window and place an old AT keyboard from the '80s on the side to prop the thing open.
My father has space on a farm and built a rotating roof structure on the ground, with about 20 panels that are highly sensitive to light directiion. There are two light detectors: one is an ambient photoreceptor, in order to detect that the sun is shining. If it is above a threshold, it activates the rotary motor (salvaged from a washing machine) that turns the contraption until another light sensor measures bright light. This second sensor sits deeply in a slit, therefore it only detects bright light if the vertical slit directly aligns with the Sun. If the Sun moves (well, the Earth, or both, but anyway) then the slitted sensor will taper down suddenly, but the ambient sensor will still signal, so it'll apply rotation until the slit is lit again. Once it bumps into a terminal button, or a timer is activated, it winds back, otherwise it would be the end for the cords. It wasn't all fine and dandy: a year long legal battle was needed to convince the power utility to settle the net balance rather than the gross balance (inclusive of network charges etc.). Then lightning stroke and it all went out (with essentially all other electronics on the farm). Luckily my father had insurance, but it took about a year to collect and repair.
Everything I do is a hack.
Back when I was military, we were stationed off post for training. One of my classmates had his car broken into and they ruined the column trying to get the key to work. I popped the steering lock and pulled the starter switch out of the column so that he could drive it. While trying to dress up the hanging wires, he grounded out a wire causing the starter fuse to blow. As I'm sitting there, I reach into his console, pulled out a piece of big red and started chewing while folding the wrapper. I got out, unscrewed the fuse.. put the paper under it and screwed it back down. told him he might want to drive to the store to fix that.
Don't know if it counts as a hardware hack but I had a Suzuki Samurai (jeep knock off) back in high school that didn't have warning buzzer if you left the headlights on. Must have drained my battery a dozen or more times and had to wave down someone to get a jump. Finally got fed up with it and rigged a buzzer to a simple circuit that detected if there was voltage on only one of two circuits (power to headlights but no power to the accessory line), in which case it would of course feed 12v to the buzzer.
You can recycle a lot of parts from printers and scanners into a desktop CNC or 3D printer (RepStrap).
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
Back in the 90's I had an office chair that made the most awful screeching noise (Freddy Kruger at a chalkboard bad). We tried everything to lubricate that chair. WD-40, dry silicon, heavy moly grease... Nothing worked, until in desperation, we tried the last thing we could come up with.
Kraft American cheese. It worked like a charm, and silenced the screech for more than a year.
F X=0:1:9999 F D=2:1 Q:((X>2)&(X#D=0)!((D>X/2)&(X'=1))) I D>(X/2) W:$X>75 ! W X,?$X+5-$l(X) Q
I had an old Pentium with an usb ADSL modem, it was on 24/24 and I was tired of the noise in my studio.
I removed all the fans including the one from the power supply and put it in the fireplace which had a metal door.
It keep the noise from the hard drive down and was safe from over heating or bursting into flame.
From pre-internet pbx days we had a guy dial in and use a machine, but the machine tended to lock up overnight, so I wired up a blinking light on line 6 (of 6 - no one would call after hours) of the phone to reset the computer by triggering the reset switch so all he had to do was dial line 6 and wait a sec for reboot. Thankfully Internet made hack obsolete...!!!
I turned an old shopvac motor into a ping-pong ball cannon for, uh, cubicle defense.
That wouldn't break it down to a per-outlet level. :P
Way back in the 70's I encountered a bug in software I only had hardcopy source for. A device would not initialize due to too short a timeout in the code. Timing on the device was controlled by a RC delay circuit, and soldering a resistor in parallel to the one on the device made it all good.
I used two old 5 1/4" floppy drives to build a pan/tilt control for a webcam. Those drives used nice little 5V stepper motors to move the read head back and forth. I used one drive fairly as-is, connected to a push rod that tilted a platform up and down that the webcam sat on. I removed the stepper motor from another and used it to rotate a turntable that the whole thing sat on.
That was all hooked up through some transistors, driven from an 8-bit shift register, hooked to the LPT port and controlled through Python.
This was all back in about... 2000?
fun stuff
I used to have a sig, but I set it free and it never came back.
Try and top that one!
I had one of those stupid FM transmitters that broadcasts your tape or CD player through your car radio. The output on that thing was weak and barely worked so I cracked it open and looked at the chip they used. I dug up the specs of the chip and found it was capable of outputting a whole lot more power than what they had it set to. Did a little rewiring and maxed it out. You could broadcast almost across the house at that point so the car was nice and loud. It also used batteries so at the same time I rewired it with a 12v plug for the cig adapter.
I adjusted my ejectrode to jumper the OBDII port on my car and add a new remote to the keyless entry.
But more fun was to buy a remote case/flip key fob for it. And then find a locksmith that would cut the keystub for me. Now I have one of those flippy-key things like the VW and MB owners have, and saved about $35,000 on the car.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
AutoHotKey was awesome!
Did something similar for re-saving a dozen cds worth of corel draw clipart (probably about 30,000 images all together) into an actually usable format (probably eps).
Essentially it involved open file, save as, pick eps format, ok, close, alt-tab, down arrow, open file on repeat.
The computer was slow, so each command had a delay of a few seconds, and about a minute for the actual saving. Took a couple months worth of computer time, but I just had to start it up in the morning.
Using things for what they're not meant for is my favorite thing.
My dishwasher thermostat is repaired by jamming a coil spring between it and some cables, making sure it contacts the washing chamber properly.
Microwave ovens work great for drying some hygroscopic substances, such as lithium chloride (for making red fire with methanol).
I've made rockets out of paper, glue, kitty litter, fertilizer and powdered sugar. And a bamboo stick. My fireworks colors come from pottery chemicals.
I've made a potato gun from a PET bottle, indoor drain pipe, bits from a CRT monitor for a HV spark, a doorbell button for a trigger, an empty TP cable as a tube for gas (canned butane), and a mattress pump for removing the combustion products.
The valve for another cannon powered by compressed air contains two slices of a bouncy ball as a gasket.
I made a semiautomatic bb gun out of only copper tubing parts, discs, o-rings and a threaded rod. It has only two moving parts.
Almost every single one of my numerous small electronics projects have beem from desoldered parts.
If recapping counts, I've done a tube radio and a guitar amp.
I'm considering making a device that lets me draw 10 ampere from two 6 ampere outlets, to charge my electric car at work.
Has anyone had luck repurposing broken tablets? I've accumulated 3.. no 4 now. Kindle Fires are still running, but Apple, Android and WebOS have gone bad.
Is there a way to pull the touch screens and use them with a Raspberry Pi, for example? Or hack around a failed battery/micro usb connection?
One with a metal band spacer between barrel and clicker end. Take the barrel and cut a U at the threaded end as deep as metal band is wide. Compress metal band to fit inside the just cut U channel. Insert metal band and tape to secure to barrel. Take the spring and cut it long enough to fit inside metal band and place your new screen in bottom of bowl. You now have a pipe which works well with soft hash. Forget about it with the rock hard stuff, the barrel will melt. Came in handy when visiting Morocco with no bowls available.
Not quite a hardware hack, but I'm proud of it.
http://forum.xda-developers.com/nook-touch/development/rd-nst-future-cm11-twrp-t3075458
A guy at work had the controller on his dishwasher go out. He replaced it with a suitably-programmed old PC and a parallel cable.
Got an Asus Xonar from a buddy for my gaming rig, but my crossfire cards (dual 5850's I think) were in the way and it blocked the fan port of the upper card. I tried a loud "ghetto fan" blowing on the whole mess, but the top card was still overheating and it was really loud. The solution was to use a ribbon cable plugged into the mobo slot and the low-profile bracket to move it out of the way of the two video cards. I was really happy with it until my buddy asked for his sound card back... =(
'nough said.
Making my 5 1/4" floppy disks double sided with a hole punch.
Way back in the day there was a period when homebuilt Apple ][ clones were popular. There were all kinds of available bare motherboards available, and all the chips were standard LSI logic, it was dead easy to stuff your own. The (EP)ROM chips were of dubious legality, but were available lots of places. I put one together then wrote a quickie program for a VIC-20 to act as the Apple-clone's keyboard (the Apple design expected ASCII input from the keyboard, and I didn't have an ASCII-encoding keyboard handy.)
A few months later I put that to more practical use. A friend had a 15" telescope he was doing photometric observations with and wanted a way to log the data from the photon counter, along with some other info including filters, etc. His main computer was a (non-clone) Apple ][ with suitable interface board for the photon counter, and since Canadian winters get effing cold, the Apple was in his basement about 10 yards from the observatory with a cable run between them.
I ended up using another VIC-20, with my Apple-keyboard program plus some other gadgets: The filter wheel on the telescope was connected to a potentiometer that the VIC read as a paddle input to determine which filter was in place, there were a couple of toggle switches (connected to the joystick inputs) to indicate a couple of other parameters (eg pointing at target object vs pointing at black sky for baseline, and some logging options).
When it was all set up he could sit out in the observatory with thick mittens on and work the telescope controls and the toggle switches, while the VIC pretended to type various controls and data into the Apple happily running in his basement without worrying about e.g. the effect of cold on the floppy drives.
Fun project (except for testing on a few cold nights). These days of course I'd do it all with an Arduino and/or RaspPI.
I made a laptop out of a Kodak easy-share picture frame and as Raspberry PI. And I made a digital picture frame out of an old laptop.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Had a antique tower server I wasn't allowed to replace (extenuating circumstances), that would during the quiet period of the night lock solid. Put another old retired tower server in front of it with a lump of blutack on the CD tray and faced the problematic server. Installed NetBSD 1.6, wrote a script to ping the problem system. After it timed out, eject the CDROM tray which bunts the reset switch on the problematic server, and because it was "too close" the drive would go back in.
Nice work-around that functioned for several weeks till we were able to fly back with spares.
I once used "xor AL" instead of "mov AL,0x00", does that count? I think I was saving a cycle or two by doing that.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I know this isn't directly related, but it's the first thing I thought of (and it's a good story anyhow). http://www.catb.org/jargon/htm...
Via plugging the cassette motor relay of one into the joystick port of the other, and writing a simple serial protocol in basic. A few bps. I just wanted to see if I could do it.
I couldn't - I was still too young to fully understand syncronisation issues. It would work for a while.
I still remember the key command: OUT, port 720 decimal. That's the way to toggle the cassette motor relay.
This one -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I took a Roland TR-626 drum machine from 1988 and hacked a 48x8 solid state patch bay into it, controlled by an arduino and touchscreen. The result is a lot of fun to play with....
Probably not exactly what you were asking for, but my all time favorite was back when I worked for an ISP, and we had a core router go down in the middle of the night. I get out to the POP and find that in order to get into the console of the router, I need to be able to plug a female 9 pin connector to a female 9 pin connector for the cables that I actually have with me.... I promptly found a couple of paperclips lying around and used my side cutters to cut off several lengths to short between the two connectors and make a gender-changer and Null Modem adapter in one, since it turned out I needed the null modem adapter too...
To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer
Cut a couple of old HDDs in half, glue bits of platter to the head arms, add large-area photodiodes to sense position and a bit of hardware and software to read ILDA files. Works really well considering.
pic.
All your ghosts are just false positives.
This isn't much of a hardware hack, as FPGAs are meant to be hacked for various odd purposes anyway. Nevertheless, I thought it would be fun to play with a 100 MHz digital system as if it were analogue, using basic trig formulae to first adjust the carrier frequency, and then modulate it with sound coming from a computer via RS232. One general idea is that 1-bit channels are enough for a great sound quality (e.g. SPDIF), and the main limitation in these setups is usually the serial link.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
I think the most complicated thing I ever did was install an ethernet adapter on a series 1 tivo (they had no USB ports either.) To do so involved using an adapter that had a female PCI form factor socket, which connected to an ISA protocol motherboard that had a male PCI form factor shunt. Then of course there was drilling a hole for an ethernet port on the back of the tivo.
Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame wrote the driver for it.
I used a TRS-80 CoCo 2 as a controller for a ribbon winding machine (ribbons for dot matrix printers). I'd feed off a master spool through a tenson arm on to a smaller spool. An old tape drive motor was used for the winding which could be controlled as well. A button cannibalized from an old joystick was pressed by a small arm on the bottom of the spooler in order to count the revolutions so it could stop winding at a predefined number of revolutions. Then I could use a ribbon welder to close the loop.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I jerry rigged an intrabdominal pressure sensor by clamping a foley catheter and connecting the sample port to an arterial line transducer, then used it to diagnose abdominal compartment syndrome in a cirrhotic patient.
Back in the 80s many of us shortwave listeners began using VCRs to record a specific frequency during times when we weren't near our radios. Unlike cassette tapes with VHS tapes we could record up to eight hours of audio and review it later. Early form of time shifting out entertainment.
A friend's kid aged about 3 used to love playing the game TuxRacer (controlled by arrow keys, which Dad had to work because he wasn't dextrous enough). So I got a plush Tux toy penguin, and fastened him on top of a small plastic box, in which I placed the guts of a wireless keyboard, and 4x tilt switches connected to the arrow keys. Now simply moving the penguin controls the game :-)
I recently had to open up my washing machine to fix a clogged pressure switch tube. Inside the control panel I found a wiring and timer diagram. I am mostly finished with writing some Raspberry Pi code to replace the timer with a Pi and a relay board. I installed a web server onto the Pi and put it on my Wifi network also. The ultimate goal is to allow Wifi control of my washing machine, as well as have it send notifications when it finishes, be able to check status, etc. I foresee those notifications popping up in the corner of my desktop in the immediate future, and maybe on a media center in the future (if I ever bother to make one an attach it to the TV)
Another interesting tidbit - a new washing machine timer costs more than the Pi+parts that I will replace it with. (Might Ebay it when I'm done)
When I was a teenager I used a pair of needle nose pliers to pull the copper traces on the circuit board of my cd player up enough to haphazardly twist wires from a nintendo controller to them so I didnt have to get out of bed to skip tracks.
I had an F250 Super Duty with suspension leveling air-bags. So that the air-bag pump would not come on at odd hours in the middle of the night, I hooked it up to a time relay to energize the pump a minute-and-a-half after the ignition key is turned. Hooking the pump up to the ignition on without time delay would not be good enough, as the truck had a diesel engine that needed not power robbed from the glow-plug on ignition. Worked like a charm!
I've also got a wheat bag that you can heat up to relieve headaches. As it turns out, you can fix a USB TV tuner with it as well:
- http://aarongnielsen.blogspot....
Apparently, if you took off the plastic casing and baked it properly in a medium oven, you could enact a more permanent fix. I haven't been game to try it, though.
Attack its weak point for massive damage!
To teach a parakeet talking, I modified a standard audio-cassette, by opening it up and splicing the tape together to form closed-loop.
Ammonia based fertilizer makes nice rocket fuel, if you dissolve fertilizer in water, soak cut sheets newspapers in the solution, and then dry the sheets with a regular clothes iron.
1948- 11 yrs old, I received a Lionel trainset for Christmas, this with a four-switch figure 8 layout all mounted on plywood by my Dad (a railroad man). This had only one problem, when crossing switch points the locomotive would sometimes reverse (the loco used power interruption to set the direction). Having read that the whistle (mounted in the tender) used DC current detection (DC supplied by imposing DC bias on the normal AC drive voitage), I disconnected the whistle and wired the DC detector to the power interrupter. Reversal was then obtained by operating the whistle button and transient power interruptions had no effect.
(I'm still programing and wiring machine tools)
I once worked at a company, and during an office relocation our servers were located a 15 minute walk away.
We had two dev servers which were sometimes a bit flaky. And when they crashed, it required a 30 minute round trip just to reboot the machine. (This was in Central London, where walking was just as fast as taxis or public transport - it was also quite pleasant)
When the weather got colder we decided something had to be done. When threw around a few solutions, but mine was the cheapest and most interesting: align the servers facing each other, with corks taped to the CD drawers. When one crashed, remote into the opposite server and eject the CD drive. The cork would then reboot the other machine.
Basically cross wired two cables into a single cable that plugged into the server / router. Allowed the computers to see the server but not each other. This was long before auto sense became standard.
Took an old sewing machine pedal and wired it across the pause contacts of a tape recorder so a friends grandmother could record her memoirs of time in Auschwitz without having to use her hands (which were arthritic). Not elegant but it worked.
I was in my 20's and living in Boston in the 1970's where a few UHF broadcast stations were transmitting on-air scrambled pron. They scrambled the signal by reducing the amplitude of the horizontal sync signal. I built a circuit using a 4046 CMOS phase locked loop that re-injected the missing sync signal at the proper time. Lots of trouble for some early mild videos. Sad material compared to today. Little did I realize how much technology would advance in this important area in subsequent years.
I once fished a Quadra 630 out of a dumpster. It wouldn't power up. I fished out a Dell P3 low profile desktop out of the same dumpster. Its power supply fit the space of the old power supply pretty well. I was able to re-wire the ATX power connector to match the Quadra motherboard pinout. The tricky part is that the ATX power on signal is inverted sense from the Quadra. I found a hex CMOS inverter in a disused component shelf (no one used throughhole components any more) at work and soldered it in to use the stand-by power and invert the signal. The Quadra still works.
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
While inserting a brand new Pentium 4 CPU, one of my friend dropped it by mistake, and a few pins got bent. Trying to straighten a really bent pin, that pin broke out of the package. The computer would not boot after we reseated the CPU with a missing pin. In frustration, we took the loose pin and inserted it into the correct hole in the CPU socket, by counting the row and column, and reinserted the CPU. The computer booted up! and passed a few CPU benchmarks without any issues.
I use my Wii as a power supply for my Raspberry Pi. The Wii gives power to the USB port on when it turns on and shuts it off when it powers down. That lets me turn my Raspberry Pi on and off remotely without having to add a separate power control board.
Was away on a job for Christmas one year and some of the people wanted to decorate the work space for the holiday. We had a xmas tree but no lights and no way to get any (the company said they couldn't justify a chopper run for xmas lights). I took two wires and soldered them to pins 2 and 5 on a DB-9 connector, then ran the wires parallel to each other about a centimeter apart. Tore apart an old device to get a bunch of different colored LEDs out and then soldered them between the wires every 2-3", reversing the polarity of every other LED (used hot glue to make sure they wouldn't short out). Then I wrote a quick little program to open a serial port and turn the break state on and off at intervals of ~700ms. A serial port's idle state is -5V and its break state is +5V. So when I plugged the connector in, half the LEDs would light on the idle state, and the other half would light on the break state. I would consider that unusual.
The path to enlightenment is truly through homemade drugs!
I once worked on an old RCA 301 mainframe which had an attached Bryant disc drive that used a hydraulic pump to move the head assemblies. Our unit was old and the seals leaked hydraulic fluid which simply drained into a cup under the raised floor. If the main reservoir had drained dry, then we'd have had an enormous head crash, so someone had to go in to the computer room every 6 hours or so simply to move the contents of the cup back up to the main reservoir. We quickly tired of having to get up in the middle of the night and driving in to work just to move hydraulic fluid around, so I and a friend came up with a kludge fix. We bought a plastic bin and an auto fuel pump. We hooked a 12V power supply up to a micro switch which had wire from a coat hanger attached to its actuator - and on the end of the wire we put a ping-pong ball float. As the tank filled with hydralic fluid, the float/switch turned the on fuel pump to pump the fluid back in to the main reservoir. We no longer had to get up in the middle of the night to move hydraulic fluid around.
As an Australian, I feel it my civic responsibility to post this wonderful hack: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/33425222204984883/
A hex head machine screw bent pi/2 radians in the middle acts as an inbalance in a dremel. Good vibrations result.
that's all nice and all..
but that's not an unintended hack? I mean, the humidity sensor is meant for reading humidity (you're not just using a piece of cloth and two wires), the wattsup is meant for reading electricity use and the rp is meant for having pins to communicate with both of those and to take wifi.
my unintended hack.. using an electronic cigarette 'mod' as a multimeter replacement to read contuinity while soldering a hack charge cable on this laptop when the charging ports middle pin broke up
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Wrote a utility to browse 9 track mainframe tapes on a modcomp mini computer using a Vector Graphics CPM pc connected via RS232. Could advance forward and backward, display contents in HEX.
I used to work in creating traveling museum exhibit hardware and software. We had an exhibit that had an LCD Projector in it. Turns out that most museums just turn off the power at night so this would definitely shorten the life of the projector and bulbs if it was just shut off. So we cooked up a little circuit that would communicate with the projector via serial while watching the power coming in and send the shut off command to the projector as soon as it could. The projector was plugged into a 500W UPS but it would still suck down the power so fast once AC power was cut that it would only run for a couple minutes, unless the lamp was turned off fast enough. This gave enough time for the fan to run and cool things down. Bonus: the chip was powered by a big capacitor...
I re-purposed a dial up modem to automatically dial the TAB (our betting agency) and programmatically send DTMF tones at just the right times to put the bets on. My system scraped the XML feeds of Horse and Greyhound race results for years and used this info to decide what to back for future races. The whole thing was automatic. The only thing I had to do was turn it on and keep topping up my betting account as my algorithm was statistically flawed and I never made any money. From a technical perspective it was successful and a Raspberry Pi was also used in a more recent version of it.
Before the XML feed was available I scraped data straight from the TAB website but even before that I scraped the data off teletext with analog LifeView TV tuner card.
Good point. Making the RPi talk RS232 to the ancient WattsUp took only a level shift and decidedly retro baud rate (the summary said "outdated"). (FYI, there's now a "net connected" WattsUp, but they want you to go through their proprietary portal: NFW! Hunk of junk!)
I probably should've mentioned that I initially used Google Analytics to build the graphs. It's really not designed for that.
The duct tape-like approach I took with hardware I had sitting around to bend it to my will (vs. buying something off the shelf - not to mention final fit and finish) make it feel like a hack to me.
But OK, point made. I DQ myself.
Not invented by me, but the rtl-sdr project seems like a pretty awesome hardware hack.
It basically uses a TV tuner as cheap high bandwidth tunable analog to digital converter. Then you can decode the signals in software on the computer.
Since it has pretty wide bandwidth, you can simultaneously decode dozens of signals. If you record the entire signal, you can go back and demodulate the signals once you figure out how they are being modulated (or in realtime if you recognize them up front). So you can decode AM/FM/SSB/SSTV or whatever digital modes. Put a good antenna on it and you can listen to the space station or view weather satellite images.
AOL disk beer coasters aren't a premium nowadays.
http://gamehacking.org/vb/threads/12747-nensondubois-codes http://twitter.com/nensondubois_
Two different vehicles, two different hacks/hillbilly engineering solutions. An old Chevy Van 108 (the ones with the engine between the two front seats, solid front axle, three on the tree) where the gas pedal had broken free of the rotating rod that moved the linkage. A 6" pipe wrench adjusted just right was affixed to the rod and performed just as well as the pedal.
An old Beetle's accelerator cable broke near the pedal assembly...in morning rush hour traffic... in an effin snow storm. I barely was able to pull into a strip mall parking lot on the carb's fast idle cam. I rummaged through the glove box. A small key chain and a pink balloon were all I could find that looked helpful. It was enough. I forget exactly what I did other than the balloon got tied and knotted about the remaining cable end piece and the key chain which was looped around where the cable hooked up to the back of the pedal. As with any good hillbilly solution I left the "fix" in place as it held up to daily use for close to a year till It was decided I should just part with the three bucks and
replace the cable.
Serenity now, insanity later.
Nothing like this before. When I saw the nuclear missle I thought,"Wow".
Then I thought, "What can I do with this?" So I added red LEDS and the nose cone lights up. So it's a plastic toy. :) What did you think? That it was a real missle?
I once had a POS Terminal at work that kept ringing up random items and cashing it off. Turns out because they were selling hot chocolate, the powder was attracting Flies (Australian Summer Regulars) and they would walk on the touch screen pressing buttons as they went. So I took an old CPU fan wired it up to a spare wall wart and attached it to the top of the touch screen. Instant Fly curtain. Never had any trouble since.
Once upon a time I found that old, obsolete AT power supplies made for a pretty good more-or-less-regulated high-wattage DC power supply for powering all sorts of random circuits which needed more amperage than any typical wallwart that one had lying around.
There are 10 kinds of people: ones who understand ternary, ones who don't, and ones who think this joke is about binary
we were coding madly in a tiny, cramped room in Tokyo for an on-stage performance the next day of some virtual characters,
and the breakers kept tripping because of the number of big heavy SGI machines and so on we were running.
i was just a kid.
but i noticed that the incandescent light-fixture in the ceiling never went off.
so i went out to a 7-11 analogue and got an extension cord and a couple light bulbs.
back in the room i carefully smashed a light-bulb, cut the extension cord in two,
and soldered the cord into the husk of the lightbulb and screwed that into the ceiling,
effectively giving the room an additional power circuit and more or less saving the day.
This one is somewhat specialised, but may still be worth sharing. Back then, I was working on HP ECUTEST, a refrigerator-sized machine that simulated all electrical inputs and outputs for a car engine control unit (ECU). Basically, it was "The Matrix" for an ECU: you plugged the car's brain into it, and it couldn't tell it wasn't in a real car.
The customer wanted a way to create defects on the ECU pins, e.g. short them to the ground. Problem is that an injector signal is 60 amps or so for a diesel engine, and an ignition coil signal is easily 500V. Try shorting this with a low-cost relay, and your relay gets fried pretty fast. But then, we were emitting the "cogwheel" signal that the ECU used to know the position of the engine, A pretty complicated signal in its own right, that varies in shape, amplitude and frequency as engine speed increases. Generating that signal was a story in itself.
Anyway, we wrote software that would synchronise the flipping of the relays to create defects with the rotation of the engine, so that we knew that at the moment we were switching the relay, there was little current and little voltage in the corresponding circuit. Of course, you can imagine how many relays it cost to make the stupid software work as it was supposed to. Well, actually, not that many, all things considered, but the hardware guy who had to replace the relays still cursed me whenever I goofed up.
-- Did you try Tao3D? http://tao3d.sourceforge.net
I have a heavy CPU heat sink (Thermalright True Copper) that could easily bend my motherboard with its 2 kg coppery goodness. To prevent that, I have made an extra support structure using Meccano. Luckily, the distance of the holes was precisely right for the support.
I added a transistor in line wirh the voltage reference on a 24 to 12 volt power supply. With a zener diode and resistor that progressively brought the output up with input between 22 and 28V, I made it into a solar charge controller for a 60 cell 240 Watt panel for the motorhome. It worked great and closely matched the panel peak power curve keeping the panel voltage high for any input power. It has been running trouble free for a couple years now.
Not electronics, but related. Converted disposable Freon tanks into high power t shirt cannons for an engineering challenge. www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Klxqav_6NM Free tanks counted as part of the bill of materials, where cost was part of the contest. I'm in the blue shirt with the initial prototype at the end of the video.
Salvaged a 0.001Mhz crystal osc to use in an electronics shop. Used it for a reference for adjusting tape decks for speed and wow and flutter. A free crystal audio reference was much better than a reference CD with a short tone track. It was mush more stable than any shop function generator we had at the time. In a pinch it doubled as a stable square wace source to use for TDR with a scope.
A Hall sensor from a broken PC fan coupled with a 9V battery and a couple LEDs made a quick magnet sensor to check relay states in equipment for quick troubleshooting. Coupled with a scope, doubled as a tach for brushless DC motors.There is more I can't think of at the moment.
The truth shall set you free!
It's a mini bluetooth headset which you can plug normal headphones into, I'm surprised it's not more popular but it's weekness is the clip, where it's faaaar to easy to loose the spring... Found that mini pegs are perfect...
http://keyboardwritescode.blog...
I have one of the Omron pedometers with a coin lithium battery that had to be replaced every other month or so. Realized the battery in the Nokia had the same voltage, so got my colleague to donate his broken Nokia to me, scooped out its brains and soldered some leads from the converted battery holder to the pedometer. Still running, 2 years and counting...
I had a modem that would not stay connected to the internet for longer than 20-25 mins, after much rebooting and computer frobnicating, I happened to touch the top of the modem and burnt my hand on the plastic. I stripped the top off to find a very marginal power transistor, that after about 5 mins of being on it felt like an oven. It happened to be one with a small metal heat sink and a screw hole, so I took an old 486 passive heatsink, screwed it to the heatsink and that sorted the issue, I could stay on the internet all day, with a cool running transistor. The top wouldnt fit back on the modem, but who cares - made it look much cooler too.
Not sure if this counts, as most of the components used were technically made for at least part of the purpose I used them for. But I do not think anyone used the combination like I did, so here goes. I once created the most convoluted way of having a remote control for my pc. The setup consisted of a microcontroller board used at the company I worked for, attached an infrared port to that so it could read the infrared signals from a PDA. The microcontroller board was attached to my pc using the serial port. I wrote the embedded software to read the IR for the microcontroller board, then send signals to PC via RS232. Then more software to allow the PDA to send specific signals to the microcontroller, and a third bit of software that allowed the PC to respond to the signals of the microcontroller. This way I could have some basic control over Winamp, which I was using at the time. This setup did actually work "fine", but was eventually replaced by a simple USB dongle + actual remote control when I found that those were actually readily available. :D
One of my more complex hacks: One night I needed some extra light in my room. I could have walked next door to get my XL flashlight but instead went through my boxes and found a cell phone charger (USB output) and a USB LED lamp. By connecting the two I was able to get more light in my room!
I could list a number of more simple ones but I need to go back to HTML programming.
Client - a theatre box office - had an ancient, unsupported ticketing system. They wanted to migrate to a new platform, but there was no way the volume of data could be rekeyed manually and no apparent way to extract in a sensible format digitally - however the system did have a dot matrix printer and the ability to generate paper reports. I knocked up a 'printer emulator' for a PC which wrote data that was 'printed' to a flat file. I then used the existing reports to extract the data from the old system & reformatted to the new...
My first hack was realising that when copying an old BBC Micro game (I forget which one - probably wasn't a very good one), if the destination disk was write protected, the game would run, otherwise it wouldn't.
More recently, a fun one I did was at work. I was given a wireless headset for my desk phone which came with a 'handset lifter'. I found it 'lifted' whenever the phone was picked up, so I stuck it to the monitor arms and attached some chopsticks and a bit of paper. I then had a little flag that went up whenever I was on the phone :-)
An old friend powered his CCTV camera from the network cable it was streaming down.
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Apart from a couple of simple firmware hacks, like running Rockbox on all my Sansa players, one of my most elaborate hacks was bringing a 3D model of my actual car into my hardware GPS navi:
I was bored with the arrow symbol on my Becker car navigation system (which is using Windows CE and an embedded version of the navi software iGO), so I played around with its system files - which were readily accessable via USB. I found the 3D model that the thing was using, but it was a proprietary file format ending in .mdl (no, it wasn't any of the usual MDL formats, I checked throroughly). Then I reverse-engineered the file format and wrote a script (in PHP, yeah, I know) that could convert Blender's PLY output to their MDL format.
Then I built a 3D model of my own car in Blender, ran it through my exporter and now I have a hardware navi that shows my own car as the road marker.
I've also documented the process and released the script here:
http://rahdick.at/en/02_projec...
Banksia MyFast modems (can't remember whether they were the 28.8 or 33.6 variants) had a nasty firmware problem where they'd randomly stop answering incoming calls. This was a real problem for a local ISP who was using lots of them in a round-robin dial up installation - one faulty modem could stop new connections until some of the old connections got hung up. We made some line dongles for them that would take indvidual modems out of the round-robin group if they didn't answer after five rings and then would flash a LED and chirp until a tech came along to power cycle them.
More recently I setup a Parrot AR.Drone in a docking station and a separate computer with a web cam. The computer's running OpenCV-based software and when the web cam detects magpies hanging around our chicken run (i.e.: scavenging food) it cranks up the drone to chase them away and then returns it to the docking station to recharge.
Many years ago while at University, I had a Nokia 3210. Great phone, but rubbish NiMH battery. Once it started to go flat during the day, it meant I had trouble getting my parents to pick me up from the train station and had to use a phone box (remember them?). So, I added a small power port to the side of the phone that allowed direct connection to the battery through a diode, and made a custom connector that would let me connect this port to the headphone remote port on my MiniDisc player. This gave out around 3.3V, which was enough after the diode drop to power up the phone and let me make a quick call.
I thought it was awesome as a cash-strapped student - all I had to carry around was this extra wire since I already had the MD player with me, and it was long before the availability of these USB power packs. Kids don't know how easy they have it these days ;)
Another project of mine was based around an old Amiga 600. I fitted it with some relays, a small hard drive, and a general purpose parallel bus to which I could connect various I/O modules including light sensors, IR remote receivers and even a small alphanumeric LCD. It was set up for controlling all the lights in my room, the stereo, the TV, and even the blinds. I had it set to open the blinds and turn on the lights to get me up for school (and later college), turn off the lights when nobody was in the room (it had a PIR sensor on it), and it could also be controller over serial so running a little web server on another computer let me log into it remotely to turn things on and off. Was very proud of it (I was 16 when I built it and wrote the software) and it ran non-stop for 3 years until I moved out for Uni.
It should still be up in my parents' attic at home...
Back when DVD players first dropped below $100, they were still using standard IDE DVD-ROM drives inside with molex power connectors. When my parents' DVD player quit because of an underpowered power supply, I connected an AT Power Supply to the drive that they could switch on with the DVD player. Worked for years like this.
Quite some time ago I worked at a small company, and we had a PC in a remote location that we would occasionally connect to by directly dialing it up by modem. (this is in the pre-ubiquitous-Internet days). Well, of course, every now and then the computer would crash leaving us unable to perform its intended task, and also unable to answer our calls. After having to drive out there a few times just to hit the Reset button, I installed a circuit inside that "eavesdropped" on the phone line. If the phone rang more than X number of times within some period of time (meaning the computer had crash and was not answering), it reset the computer by way of a relay connect in parallel with the case button.
For a Micro-controller class I hacked my musical keyboard. I took a micro-controller and wired it directly into the MIDI port of my musical keyboard. The micro-controller would read the MIDI signal and based on certain notes it would send signal back. Mostly it just started and stopped scales but I still think it was the funnest project I did college.
I used to go to the local electronics repair shop in my town and dumpster dive for parts.
I wasn't fantastically knowledgeable about electronics but I wanted to learn. I was pretty young. Less than 10. Built all kinds of things including a burglar alarm for our garage because my dad had noticed some people paying extra attention to it.
The alarm consisted of the parts of an old 8-track & stereo combo, speakers, door switch made of nails, fishing line for a trip-wire. It was super fun.
It's hard to come up with good candidates because growing up I didn't have a lot of cash, so we always made due and were inventive with old stuff.
My dad once made a pretty rad cooling-aparatus/TV-stand for our TRS-80. He took the cooling fan from a dead photocopier and bought sheet aluminium and rivets. He bent the sheet aluminum into a C shape and mounted the cooling fan to it with a scoop to push air into the CO-CO-2 intake slits. The TV sat on the top of the C-shape and the TRS-80 slotted into the middle. We could take advantage of overclocking one whole megahertz baby! Woo!
In 1986 or so, I connected the speaker output of my amplifier to a parallel printer port input channel. Then I wrote some software in assembly to sample the signal, and recorded "My Baby Just Cares For Me" (Nina Simone) and "Yellow Submarine" (The Beatles), and they sounded pretty good when played back via the internal speaker. These sound files are likely around somewhere.
It eventually fried the PC's port a bit, so I couldn't print anymore. Then I studied the schematics of the parallel port, figured out what damage it might have done, and derived that I had to cut one wire in the cable to make it print again, which worked!
From those days I also remember that people created a text-scanner by opening up a RAM chip, plus some software of course.
Back when D-RAM cost a mint and the first faster CPUs were comiming out the college was considering putting locks on all their public computers at a cost of &100.00 per computer. One other fellow and I were able to convence them to replace one or two screws in the computer cabnets with aluminum pop rivets at a cost of $40.00 a department for a drill, pop rivet tool & pop rivets.
Red
A (New) Coke bottle, toilet roll tube, floating styrofoam bernouli ball to redirect the power supply fan's airflow over the hot running 386 CPU card on Zenith's passive backplane. This was all strapped to a 1960s era portable reel-to-reel tape recorder case with duct tape. Lots and lots of duct tape.
My most interesting hardware repurposing hack has been building a small CNC engraver out of the stepper motors from a few old dead (or dying) printers, and an old PC as controller. I have built a few full sized CNC mills as well, and a CNC lathe, but I wouldn't count those as hacks, since thery are more a DIY kit style machine, but the engraver was all salvaged from old computer equipment.
Back in the '60s I was able to control the image quality on the invention of Philo Taylor Farnsworth just by waving my arms.
-Eric
I get a network error on the original Vance Haemmerle’s 1997 VAXBar website, but in any case, converting an old DEC VAX into a bar is awesome to mine eyes.
I found a reference here.
Dushnock
"Soylent Green is people." (1973)
I once had a "check engine light" go on in my 2001 F150 pickup a short time before it was due for an emissions test. I didn't have time to fully correct the problem in the time available, I did some online research and found that simply reversing the exhaust gas hose connections on the engine's Differential Feedback Pressure Sensor (no tools necessary) fooled the car's computer and temporarily corrected the error condition. Later I corrected the underlying problem.