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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.
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!
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.
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
I'm a professional hacker, you insensitive clod!
I checked out a book on tape at the library called "What would MacGyver do" about true stories.
After listening to several real stories I realized that just myself and my immediate family could
fill an entire book full of better "hacks" that were listed in that book. Most of them I had never
considered "note worthy" until finding a entire book with many other less note-worthy stories in it.
The hack I'm probably most proud of is rather simple. My work was needing a watchdog timer
to reboot locked servers and most of the off the shelf solutions were several hundred dollars
so instead I created a simple program on an arduino that connected to the power button and
the usb port so it could "press" the power button if there was a hard lock. It has been deployed
with several hundred servers at this point and at a fraction of the cost of most other solutions.
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.
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.
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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I did that while flashing bios chips.. Boot the board with a good chip, extract it while the computer is running, put in the new flash chip, flash it... Had to do it on my gf's computer a few times.
Cool! My solution in the 90's to that problem was to find some ip power switches so I could power cycle the devices remotely. It wouldn't be an acceptable solution today.
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.
nice. I used a pager connected to a relay across the reset switch. Dirty but it worked.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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!
I did the exact same thing in 2000 when I worked for a consulting company... except with an AIX machine which was password-locked (with the admin who skipped town and I was hired on to clean up the mess, especially the fact that he enabled every password he could find.) Thankfully these were the days before 5L and disk encryption (AIX's EFS), so I was able to do as the parent did -- unplug the HDD, boot the AIX media on CD, plug the HDD in, pull out the root PW, then go from there.
Another AIX issue with booting on an older machine (the 500 series boxes, if anyone remembers those) was solved by my using an old printer that had an onboard SCSI port (font cache drive) as a temporary rootvg.
As for other hacks, I can't decide between the seat cushion that was a momentary on switch, which was attached to the serial port of the box I used. That way, when I got up, I knew it would auto-xlock. This was when I worked at a university, and wanted to have a failsafe, since we all know how tempting unlocked terminals are.
That, or an el cheapo car alarm system with the siren ripped out, and the dome light circuit connected to a relay, where I could press a remote, the port went low or high, the machine it was connected to would immediately execute a new set of firewall rules when it detected this. The result was a firewall that would change ACLs when I hit the remote (for example, when I'm gone, no machine should be communicating out, but SSH from the outside should be enabled.)
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.
You can recycle a lot of parts from printers and scanners into a desktop CNC or 3D printer (RepStrap).
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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 turned an old shopvac motor into a ping-pong ball cannon for, uh, cubicle defense.
You made a time machine and still didn't get first post? Hmm.
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.
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.
Cool! My solution in the 90's to that problem was to find some ip power switches so I could power cycle the devices remotely. It wouldn't be an acceptable solution today.
That would have probably worked except in this case the servers are what are providing the
connection so if they go down so does the connection. Telemetry operations where you are
operating a remote server over a single pipe and have no easy way to repair it or even reboot
it makes for quite a few creative solutions to try to not have to send a technician to a remote
location.
Would have been terrible if a telemarketer ever got that number.
Making my 5 1/4" floppy disks double sided with a hole punch.
Decent hardware also has watchdog timers and watchdog programs have some clever/ugly hacks where no watchdog is available. That or IPMI. An Arduino and stuff is about $30, if you have a few servers, a remote KVM/Power switch may be cheaper.
One of my hacks was well before multi-boot became a thing and DOS could only boot from disk ring 0 on SCSI device 0, we would hook up the internal SCSI cables to a parallel port selector switch and put it in the computer where the 5.25 bays went. We could then switch 'boot' devices. Similar hacks would connect switches to the jumpers responsible for setting the address or later on IDE, swap master/slave between drives.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
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.
They probably set it to the maximum allowed by whatever governmental agency is in charge of radio frequencies for your country.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
I'm not trying to troll, but am genuinely curious as to what you're doing if you've got several hundred servers running that are at enough of a risk of locking up hard enough that they need a physical power cycle to reset them?
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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.
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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.
itappmonrobot thedailywtf 2007 http://thedailywtf.com/article...
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Telemarketer, how about a pissed off ex girlfriend or disgruntled employee.
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)
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.
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."
funnily enough, that never became an issue.
Can't think why but they seem to have managed to avoid the pager block when they were all the rage, preferring instead to harass landlines. Of course, when cellphones really took off in the fashion consumer market, pagers died a death. I don't even know if they got the "7" when the DEXes were updated.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
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!
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.
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.
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.
of course not he traveled to the future to post it in the first place
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
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
I did that about 6 years ago myself. I had about 25 computers doing accelerated life testing of a chip in them, running it at elevated voltage and temperature to see if there were likely to be any reliability issues during the lifetime of the part. Unfortunately, one of the disadvantages of running a chip well beyond its rated specs is that sometimes it doesn't work - and it takes the rest of the computer down with it. So the computers would frequently write to a log file (one for each computer). I had a script running on my PC that, if a computer's log file hadn't been updated in about 5 minutes, would telnet to the appropriate IP power switch and toggle the appropriate outlet for the given computer. If that didn't work, it would try again in another 5 minutes. And if it failed 5 times in a row, it would send me an E-mail to go check it out manually (at that point, sometimes I'd find that capacitors had melted themselves off the board and embedded themselves in the floor wax below).
This same setup also had customized heatsinks - there was a fan mounted on the heatsink, and also a couple of resistive heaters attached with thermal epoxy. (I must be one of the few people in the history of the world to attach a heater to a heatsink to make the component underneath run hotter.) We had a custom controller that would monitor the temperature of the chip, and cycle the fan and heaters appropriately to maintain the target temperature. There were scripts that controlled both the voltage and temperature of the chip, but periodically dropped them down to nominal levels to run functional testing or (somewhat less often) to measure the speed of the chip, to see if it had degraded. It was a pretty nifty automated setup.
It had its bugs, though. It was DOS-based (since the diagnostic software for our chip ran in DOS), and apparently something in this version of DOS (or the computer it was running on) couldn't handle the time going past midnight; after 11:59 PM on June 3rd, it would go to saying 12:00 AM on... June 3rd. This made timekeeping rather difficult, so I had to add some logic to my scripts to determine if time ever went backwards - when it did, I knew that we must have passed midnight. The fix in that case was to have the computer reboot itself, at which point it would figure out that it was really June 4th, and time would continue marching onwards.
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...
Years ago the local cable internet provider had a rather low cap (10GB/day) after which your connection would drop to some ridiculous speed. Fortunately their implementation was rather incompetent, tied to IP addresses rather than modems. If you just rebooted the modem to get a new IP address via DHCP it reset the cap for that day. Some people but their modems on timers designed to turn appliances on/off at set times, so that they got a new IP address every hour and avoided the cap.
They eventually figured that out and changed the system to use the modem's MAC address. That could be bypassed by changing the modem's MAC address to one used by another subscriber. You could gather valid addresses by simply watching the traffic on your local network segment. Some people had JTAG connectors permanently attached to their modems so they could cycle MAC addresses regularly.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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...
I'm not trying to troll, but am genuinely curious as to what you're doing if you've got several hundred servers running that are at enough of a risk of locking up hard enough that they need a physical power cycle to reset them?
They are linux boxes and they actually rarely hard locked. The problem is that they are all
in remote locations several states away with no way to reboot them if something does go wrong
so even if they only freeze once a year it is alot cheaper to put a watchdog timer in them
than to pay someone to drive there to press the power button.
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.
we were coding madly in a tiny, cramped room in Tokyo for an on-stage performance the next day of some virtual characters
Is this a quote from a William Gibson novel?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
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.
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!
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.
I was using a Vic-20's resistive analog joystick ports for potometry of a solar eclipse in the mid 1980s but the more hacky invention was my setup for numerical analysis class. The teacher cared about algorithms, not the details of what OS or hardware we were using but the code and results had to be printed out. So I used a pair of transistors and an optocoupler to interface the Vic's TTL RS232 port to a BELL R33 current loop teletype machine. The Vic wasn't terribly fast so the printer would chug out a result every minute or two which I could hear from anywhere in the house. 3.14159265358979...
And that was the most reliable printer I've ever owned.
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.