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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.
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.
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.
Oh, god, space technology is full of brilliant hacks. For example, New Horizons' radio. It has two amps connected to one dish, designed as a primary and a backup. But while it was en route, an engineer hit upon an idea to have them both transmit at the same time through the same dish, doubling the bandwidth. Normally that wouldn't make sense, except that the amplifiers have signals with different polarization, and these can be separated back out on Earth.
Great, except for one problem. The second radio was designed as a backup, they weren't planned for simultaneous operation - so there's not enough power to run them both and everything else at the same time. There's barely enough power to run just the radios - and I mean, it's not like you can just shut off the flight computer to free up more power. Well... actually, that's exactly what they do. When have a ton of data accumulated that they want to get to Earth and no critical science to do, they spin the craft up like a bullet to keep it stable and the dish pointing at Earth. Then they shut down the whole guidance and control system and pretty much everything else on the craft not essential for reading and transmitting data. It stays in this mode for days for a week or two, until all of the onboard data is transmitted, then they spin it back down so that they can do things like take pictures once again.
"Who the **** put an emergency exit in the interrogation room?!" -- Police chief, "Jesus Christ Supercop"