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Ask Slashdot: What Is 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? Have you ever done something stupid and damaged your electronics?
Using an expresscard PCIe breakout (and an ATX power supply) I have put a Nvidia GTX-780 GPU onto my 5 year old laptop. As an external accessory.
Works like a charm, and really makes this thing a high-end system again.
Probably using a simple webcam + multiple lava lamps and a bit of software written in java to create a true random number generator. Using the prng functions that most languages provide is so 1992.
Yes, I could have also used random.org, but I wanted to show my nephew how to code, and figured that would be an easy project for him to understand and us to have fun with.
Many moons ago, I got tired of what was on the radio, and I built a pirate FM station. It had a studio supplied with over 50 volunteer DJs, but most of all it had the transmitter up in the mountains, with a UHF uplink system, to allow for very broad coverage of our city. I made the uplink transmitter form a 1985 Motorola cell phone, the old brick type. It was suitably modified to put out wideband FM audio. You might be able to read about it by Googling "Radio Limbo Tucson".
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
I got a wakeup call once at 8am, it was my CEO whose Thinkpad laptop failed to boot due to a stuck CPU fan. He had a plane to board in 3 hours to visit a seminar where he had to present a slide stack.. the only copy of which was on that laptop. Naturally, there was no time to replace anything (much less find a spare fan), so after a short lecture on importance of backups I took his laptop, put my lips to the fan intake, pushed power button and gave it a gentle blow. That got the stuck fan started. Perhaps the same could be achieved with a dust blower, but we didn't have one handy. When he asked me how is he supposed to fix it in front of world's most known scientists in the field, I told him - "give it a blow on startup, that's all". Those EYES... It did the job though :)
Back in the 90s I still had a Commodore 64 with a MIDI controller that plugged into the joystick port. I made a homebrew cartridge with an analog sampler chip that plugged into the Commodore's expansion slot. All the parts came from Radio Shack, including the chip. I wrote a program that allowed me to record samples and control playback from a keyboard plugged into the MIDI controller. Eventually I intended to add options to save and load MIDI sequences.
Unfortunately, I was a little too cavalier while tinkering with the cartridge. After making a few tweaks to the circuitry in an attempt to reduce noise, I powered on the Commodore and immediately fried the motherboard.
This one was kind of fun:
http://cassettepunk.com/large-projects/phonetendo/
It's a crappy video phone that was "given away" with a contract, and I got it from a thrift store for $8 or so. Turns out it's got a Linux SBC in it, so between some of my own hacking and others who had reverse-engineered it, I turned it into a video game of sorts.
My company gave us notebooks without SSDs, but they are pretty lax on external devices (you can bring your own mouse, pen drives and such). So I brought a SSD and bought an esatap cable (esata-powered, those cables are a pain in the ass to find https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) and installed linux mint in it. I boot straight to linux (they don't lock the bios) and do not even use the HD inside the notebook. Since the company also seems to think that RAM is a non-renawable resource they also saw fit to give us only 4gbs of it, so my swap partition is also on the SSD.
This setup helps my work a lot, before I started doing this my workflow was frustratingly slow, now everything runs just fine. It helped a lot when the RAM runs out and it starts doing swap, it still gets slow but not anywhere near as much as before.
I hacked a cheap WinCE-based Satnav and installed ScummVM onto it. Also, I made damn sure I didn't pay for my copy of Monkey Island... but I guess that's the pirate in me.
Sorry, but my karma just ran over your dogma.
I recently modified a simple doorway alarm, using an ATtiny85 microcontroller, to monitor two windows and two doors instead of the single door the original device was watching over. The alarm was powered by 4.5 volts which was perfect for the ATtiny, and it used a form of PWM signal for the piezo tweeter which allowed me to let the ATtiny produce different alarms to alert which of the four sensors was tripped.
Took an old PC cooling fan and spliced it into the 5V wires of an old USB lead to help an old EeePC 701 mobo keep cool. Was using it as a super-cheap NAS with a USB HDD
If you gave me a choice between a printer and a giraffe with explosive diarrhoea, i'll get my ladder and my raincoat
I needed to connect two LANs across a street. We were sending data through our Internet connections, but our uplink speed was poor. I had two old wifi hubs, and converted one to a network bridge with an open source firmware. Used it to log into the other wifi hub, and created an 802.11G connection across the street. Took us 3 months to get permission to actually run a cable, so this worked until we were able to do it right.
Many years ago, a friend asked me to help him figure out how to find the code for his new car stereo (never mind how he obtained it). When it first powered up, you had to wait a few seconds and then press buttons for a 4 digit code. If the correct code was entered, audio would emerge. Rigged up a little board with a 16F84 (I think that was the part#), anyway controlled fets with wires soldered to the buttons for entering the numbers, created a simple opto-coupler with led and photo-transistor laying around and some tape. Used that to sense the audio output. Hooked a little lcd up to the mcu, wrote firmware to enter the code one-by-one and just stop and display the last number tried when the audio emerged. Took 4 days for the system to find the code because of the long wait time required between fet-controlled power ups. Worked like a champ. Wrote the code on top and handed it back to him.
When I was in third grade, I made a handheld battery powered circular saw designed to kill ants in the most gruesome way. We had some fun with my friends, but when we brought it to school to kill some ants at breaks, our teacher was a bit weary of the thing.
The same question was asked a month ago.
http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/06/02/1327213/ask-slashdot-your-most-unusual-hardware-hack
I drilled holes into a shiny new ultrabook and installed microswitches and buttons from an old iPhone, then wired them in parallel with volume buttons and remapped volume in the OS to mouse click. This was so that I could have ergonomically friendly mouse buttons instead of the godforsaken Apple-style clickpad that it came with.
Wrote up a little build: http://jadware.com/button-hacking-the-lenovo-yoga/
Reverse engineered the Nintendo light gun (with the help of patents, purchased by snail mail, this was 1997). Soldered some wires to the inside of the Nintendo, connected them to the computer parallel port. Two of my friends and I wrote a Duck Hunt type game for DOS, just fitting under 640KB.
Pulled the 19-inch monitor from a (then) old video game - can't remember if it was Spacewars or Pong - for use with my HP-75C portable computer. It was B&W, no grayscale, so it worked great displaying 32 columns, 16-rows of text. Better than the one-line screen on the HP. Luxury!
What you call SSD now (both @ home & industrially - albeit, here writing up software in 1995 to do it for software ramdrives in 32-bit that did pretty ok - going a combination of that tech w/ hardware + software & massively LOW latencies in both in 2015 here):
Since 1990 w/ PCs it's the SINGLE best performance enhancement with the "best bang for the buck" there is as you notice it immediately:
Primary SSD = Intel 530 240gb Flash SSD (SATA 6) - OS & Program disk - latest 3.0 firmware & trim tools (vs. my WD Velociraptor -> http://www.anandtech.com/bench... )
* Used to use a CENATEK "rocketdrive" circa 2006-2010 before what's next below (PC-133 SDRAM 2gb unit on PCI 2.x bus).
Secondary "True SSD" = GigaByte IRAM 4gb DDR2-Ram based (SATA I) - for PageFile placement
Controller 4 Backup = Promise Ex-8350 128mb ECC ram caching controller (SATA 1/2) - for WD Velociraptor
RAM = 8gb Kingston DDR-3 (1gb for 64-bit NTFS Compressed Software RamDrive = webbrowser cache, hosts file, print spooler, %TEMP% ops, + %COMSPEC% location)
---
NTFS timestamps, all perf counters, & excess services off.
Less work done on MAIN OS & Programs bootdisk = faster main drive doing less bs vs. REAL work + reduced fragmentations.
I place my custom hosts file on a software ramdisk by redirecting it in the registry (for performance + security):
HKLM\system\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\Parameters
(Via "DataBasePath" parameter - acts like a *NIX shadow password system)
I increased hosts' priority to its load/read too:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\Tcpip\ServiceProvider]
"Class"=dword:00000008
"HostsPriority"=dword:00000005
"DnsPriority"=dword:00000006
"LocalPriority"=dword:00000007
"NetbtPriority"=dword:00000008
APK
P.S.=> Lastly, changing a clock crystal/oscillator (?) in a 486SX/25mhz into a 33mhz one eventually had that system @ 133mhz via a Dx/4 Intel CPU & 8x the RAM of the original 1st system I had...
... apk
Using greased loop of coat hanger in place of a broken ball-bearing spacer for the vacuum timing advance inside the distributor of a late 1980s Nissan Z-###. Or did you just mean for computers?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Used an ultrasonic rangfinder part for cheap cameras to echo-locate breakdowns in high gradient accelerator structures.
I had a friend who needed a tub for medical reason, but only had a fiberglass shower stall.
Scrounging, I found some scrap aluminum rails. I cut and mitered them to fit in the stall, and screwed them into the stall with stainless sheet metal screws. I put lexan/polycarbonate over the frame, and fixed it with screws and nuts, also stainless. I sealed it with silicone sealer, and...it held!
From time to time, she would let the water run, but it held with about 2 feet of water in it.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
My first computer was an IBM PCjr. I created a board that fit in the modem slot that allowed me to support a second floppy drive. I also hacked up the DOS boot sector to get rid of the hacks normally needed to support more than 128K. This was back in high school.
One of my favorite hacks was to turn a styrofoam ice chest into a peltier refrigerator for work since they charged a fortune for sodas (at a time when most silicon valley companies offered those for free). It had a temperature sensor and controller and worked quite well.
This post is encrypted twice with ROT-13. Documenting or attempting to crack this encryption is illegal.
The 40 channel CBs that use a PLL IC instead of individual crystals can trans/rec extra channels by wiring another rotary switch to one side of the PLL IC. The ones I did had 10 channels abouve ch40 and 10 below ch1. Of course, you had to use a freq counter to see what channel you were on. Yes, other hard core CB'rs knew this hack. Another one only with Gemtronics CBs, they had a rheostat inside to limit trans output to 4w, they were easily adjustable to about 16w on A.M. more on SSB. Then there were homemade "rabbit meters" for hunting down garbage mouths or for playing turkey hunt (hide and seek). There were also linear amps you could use to get as much power as you could afford, I was running 100w and could easily talk to people 1000 miles away. Worldwide communication was also possible when conditions were right, shooting skip was what it was called. All illegal, and now outdated now that the internet is here.
I was staying with a friend who worked for the local electricity distribution company. He was on call, and as it transpired he had to go out to a substation to manually cycle certain lines for maintenance. So rather than sit around the house like a lemon I chose to go with him. Strict order to be quiet if he was on the phone; it's frowned on having numpties wondering around where there's hundreds of kilovolts at play.
Now all the switchgear was powered by compressed air (because the electricity might be off) so the first thing you do is fire up the compressor & pressurise the tank. The tank was clearly full from its gauge & if you vented it it made an almighty hiss, but one of the sensors on the actuators was reporting back to base that there was no (or insufficient) pressure. In this case you aren't supposed to so anything, since you won't have enough gas to undo if you need to.
This sensor was all fluted brass with scrolly writing on it, & I suspect it was older than both of us put together. Anyway, he was sure there really was pressure, and I could see how this bloody clockwork gizmo worked so I shoved the piston into place & held it there with a bit of wood. Back at base, the green light went on.
Anyway, we cut the power, the lines were renewed, we switched it back on and nobody died.
We departed for home via the pub, but forgot to take the twig out. I wonder if anybody found it yet, and what they thought.
I patched dosbox to run the unpatched MSDOS version of Pinball Fantasies and provide I/O via an arduino controlling a replica of the PARTYLand Pinball table. Photos of the construction (work in progress) are here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/... Videos here: https://www.youtube.com/user/f...
Probing and soldering wires from a 'speak and spell' motherboard, to toggles and momentary contact switches so it would play techno beats and say random letter sequences.
Then I started learning 3d modelling and I build a framework around python and OpenSCAD to aid in the design of pinball playfields: https://github.com/felipesanch... Using that I prepared CAD files for the PARTYLand playfield (the one I actually built was originally manually drilled): https://github.com/felipesanch... One Pinball Fantasies enthusiast in Sweden found my CAd files and actually started building his own playfield replica in Sweden! And he used a CNC milling machine, so his replica is much better than mine (Great Work!): http://cyb.se/pinball-fantasie... I'm astonished, since the game was originally developed in Sweden, then I came up with this project here in Brazil and later it naturally got back to Sweden in the hands of this guy! Happy Hacking, Felipe "Juca" Sanches
hurricanes suck! So the power has been out for 3 days, I'm flushing with pool water and making coffee with bottled on the chars of a grill in a stove pot and I'm sitting pretty with a swanky lil pre-netbook acer or other, barton core (strange, the thing was an odd ulv only variant of the 462 socket) and a 90odd watt hour external battery (my survival gear at the time), powering over usb, a voip ata, an ancient cordless phone, and a 1x cdma candybar data connection. Awesome, stuck on a deck, covered in tarp and garbage bags like a geodesic dome. My battery dies, again... then refuses to trickle charge (2nd replacement, and 4months later -cheap ass Chinese lion cells). Eager to finish a (4 day late) 30 page paper for a course which would cost no less than 3G, I was fairly distraught. In the end, a plentiful stock of AA batteries, a palmfull of resistors, a little mermaid lunchbox, and duct tape saved my ass... coffee and about a pack of cigarettes later it was submitted, I got a C-.
I dropped my phone on the ground in an effort to disable the bottom portion of the screen with the navigation bar. Then I downloaded an app to get a navigation bar in the middle of the screen and now everything is fine.
I had an upstairs appartment neighbor who played his electric piano really loud at all hours of the night. I found his power line, and put a high-power diode + shorting switch in series. I put a current probe on it so I would know when conditions were right, then opened the switch to send lethal DC to kill the piano. Saw him taking the dead piano out of the house three expensive times. Problem solved.
I have an extraordinarily heavy CPU heatsink, of about 2 kg, that would tend to bend the motherboard, and maybe damage it, or lose close contact with the CPU because of it, so I have supported it with a Meccano support beam and suspension to a higher part of the case. So far, this has worked perfectly.
I do this kinda hacking/cobbling. (sorry I don't have an account) The units are all selfcontained using various vid player boards, old ipods, guts from photo frames, even a minipc in an upcoming build. I know, I know, you guys can make a far more functional model. And I'm jealous of that. But these really are for the art and the love of old tech.
http://imgur.com/a/1JhZ5#0
100mhz fsb tualatin @1.2ghz on a 1st gen asus bx bord using a slocket fcpga adapter and fcpga2 to fcpga adapter running @ 1.8ghz @150fsb using 133mhz sdram... is still running, almost 15 years later
I was working on one of those gigantic 'motion theatre' fairground rides:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This was back in the era of 286 PC's - running DOS. The software was suffering timing issues and we really needed a hardware timer interrupt - but DOS already stole all but one of them - and we simply didn't have enough.
I needed a *roughly* 1kHz interrupt to monitor some ride function or other (I forget exactly what) - so I came up with the idea of putting a bent paperclip between the RxD and TxD lines of the RS232 port and using the serial port interrupt. I'd send a character out through the serial port - and at 9600 baud, with one stop bit and one start bit the character took ~1/960'th of a second to arrive back in the serial port chip...at which point it triggered an interrupt - and I could send another byte out to make it happen again.
We used paperclips on a couple of machines as an emergency hack - but later versions used a 'dongle' plug that went into the RS232 port with a wire soldered across those two pins)...this plug was named the HPE..."Hardware Paperclip Emulator".
www.sjbaker.org
Once got stranded out in back country (I am a DirectTv installer) with a dead battery and no jumper cables. Used an 18 volt DeWalt battery from my drill and two pieces of copper ground wire to jumpstart van. Lots of sparks but it worked.
I used a Windows tablet to defend myself from an angry llama once.
The tablet did not fare well. I suggest taking a Toughbook when making service calls where ticked off llamas may be present.
Always wanted to try home automation but landlords don't like it if you mess with the wiring in a rental apartment. So I did that.
Not sure if it still works but... Back in the day when the car next to you was blaring their radio too loud, if you slowly tuned your radio to the right spot, it would cause interference to their radio, making theirs go silent unless they changed stations. I never figured out how that worked.
I'd tell you, but then I'd have to kill you.
Every system along those lines since 1992 & https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
* It's the song title @ that position, for sure, real "Johnny B. Good fast responsive machinery simply by making the most of what you have to work with, natively...
APK
P.S=> It works (fast)... apk
My old Chevy has the worlds most rocking wipers. They can move independent of each other and freaks most people out when I have a different interval on the driver side and the passenger side. :-)
Back in the day friends were into doing Lazertag with the original retail guns and detectors and they came to me to see what I could do for them. I reverse-engineered a gun, scoped the output to the IR LED in the muzzle and discovered it was a simple short burst of 1kHz, nothing complicated for the target detectors to register.
By the time I had finished they had a couple of hand grenades (push a button, toss it at the Other Guys, three seconds later it fired a burst of 1kHz through a bunch of small IR LEDs peeking through holes of the plastic casing made from laundry detergent globes) and a "knife" (push the handle down against the Other Guy's body close to their target, another short burst of IR from LEDs in the handle shielded from the holder). The best item though was the "bomb on a stick", an omnidirectional radiator on a short pole, just push it round a corner and fire it off. That one emitted for as long as the switch was held down and it had a LOT of IR LEDs. One-shot room clearance FTW.
when i got sick of my cable modem getting so hot it would shut down i put it, my Ethernet router, inside a mini soda fridge. after that the modem could handle playing warcraft III The frozen throne 12 hours a day and spend the entire night providing a local mirror of files that were important at the time via bit torrent.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html
A piece of custom industrial equipment had a barcode scanner that malfunctioned due to an employee cleaning the wrong thing with the a steam wand. At the end of the day the barcode scanner was just a generic off the shelf one with a custom cable based on RS-232, but where 24V power was run along one of the lines. I used a cheap-o USB Motorola point-of-sale scanner, a mini-PC with 20 lines of code, and two XBee test units (one RS-232, one USB) to build a temporary replacement.
The kicker is how the replacement got to us, in Portland, OR. The new barcode unit was manufactured by MetroLogic, headquartered in Eugene, OR, about 2 hours south. The country of origin was the Philippines, and it was sent to Denmark for the after-market custom cable assembly, before being send to us. That one part had to be designed, manufactured, and modified in a literal around-the-world trip. Thank you Friedman.
My brother and his friend found themselves without any matches recently, but needing to start a fire to roast hot dogs and marsh mellows over. Using a paperclip and jumper cables they got the fire going quite quickly so they didn't have to eat raw hot dogs. They did have to carefully lay the fire though with lots of tinder as the paperclip only lasted a few seconds. But it was enough.
I once programmed an arduino to move my mouse cursor in the shape of a square to keep my workstation from auto-locking per company policy. There's a slider control on the Arduino board that I have that I used more-or-less as an on-off switch. For fun I'd hook it up to my supervisor's machine just to hear him try to explain it to somebody.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Back in the days of punch cards, I was working as an intern. There were several large trays of cards that were sitting untouched for a long time. I was told that two sets of unrelated data had accidentally been collated together into more-less-random order and no-one had come up with a way to separate them other than manually. As there were perhaps 20,000 cards the other operators were doing their best to ignore them.
While the others were at lunch, I looked them over. The most obvious difference was color, one set buff, and the other set blue. Then I noticed that one set had a corner-cut on the left and the other set on the right. Poking into the card sorter, I found I could loosen one of the metal hole sensing brushes and cock it to one side to sense the cut corner. In just a few minutes I had the two sets cleanly separated and back into separate trays.
When the others returned, I pointed to the result. They asked me how I had done this. I told them I had set up the sorter to sort on color and never did tell them the real story.
I also made an antenna ot of a toilet seat for a crazy antenna contest.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
At a DoD facility we were developing an app for SimNET, BBNs distributed entity-level simulation protocol, that would leverage some existing training facilities.
In our lab we used a Sun 68020-powered workstation with a 150MB external SCSI drive in a 'double shoebox' along with a DC6150 tape drive for backup. The target was a VME card cage with several 68020 CPUs and miscellaneous peripherals, running VxWorks.
We used that machine for eleven months, running it 24 hours a day for nearly a year, but one night the cleaning staff used one of our power strips for their floor buffer and the breaker tripped. When we came in the next day and tried to boot the system the drive wouldn't spin up. It just hummed.
Now, this was only 150MB, but back then 150MB was a full height 5 1/4 inch collection of a half dozen platters. There was a flywhel. I gave it a spin. I felt what I imagine was the heads unsticking from the disc surface... And the drive spun up in my hand. With significant gyroscopic action. I didn't dare turn it off - an associate informed my SunOS 4.1 was booting. I carefully held it there while my associate assembled the shoebox around it.
We finished our work on that project without another power interruption, but we definitely backed up every day.
The circuit board from an old IDE drive re-purposed as a networked device for controlling an irrigation system. Seemed obvious when I looked at it - after it'd been done. I/O, CPU, Flash, JTAG header, stepper motor controller - dirt cheap, tiny, low power, and built for harsh conditions.
The Commodore 64 had a nonstandard serial port, meaning that I couldn't connect my standard RS-232 modem directly to it. Being just a kid, I couldn't afford the $50 or so that an adapter would cost.
My solution: I borrowed a family friend's RS-232 adapter, opened it up, examined the components and circuit board traces, bought the parts from a local electronics shop, and built the same circuit with perfboard and wire wrap. I cut a slot in the back of my C64, mounted a DB-25 connector in it, wired it to my frankenboard, and stuffed the whole thing into the free space inside the computer.
It worked like a charm. I was the only kid I ever met whose C64 had a standard serial port on the back.
Today, there is no shortage of SBCs out there, and intel has released some pretty powerful x86 based ones, like the minnowboard max 2.
On the market at this very moment, Western Digital is offering an external hard drive that has an interesting enclosure. (See Western Digital MyBook 3TB and 4TB models) This is basically just a little triangle shaped USB to SATA adapter attached to a standard 3.5 inch SATA HDD, which is itself mounted on 4 little rubberized pegs, held into the enclosure via some little receptacles for the rubberized pegs.
Now, the hardware hack.
I bought one of these late one night (way after midnight after all more reputable sources of computer parts had closed) just to get the HDD inside, as I needed a replacement RIGHT NOW. (Got the 4TB version. 3Tb drives have terrible failure rates. It was a 4TB WD Green series SATA drive. Not splendid, but it serviced.)
That left me with the shell. For awhile I left it to sit around and ignored it, but the more I looked at it, the more it just screamed to have something done with it.
The drive kit came with a 12vdc wall wart that can put out about 30W of juice. The enclosure has cutouts for the 12v barrel connector, the "USB3.0 HDD style" connector, and a lockstrap hole.
Minor modifications with a dremel tool made the USB slot into a standard USB sized opening, and the lockstrap hole large enough to accomodate a mini HDMI port.
Inside, I took a 2.5in to 3.5in bay adapter, put the rubberized pegs on, then marked mounting points for a minnowboard max 2 with a sharpie marker, drilled them out, then attached standoffs using a combination of small back-facing nuts and washers. In the 2.5in bay, I installed a 2.5 inch SATA HDD.
The minnowboard is unique among SBCs, because it has a real SATA interface on it. It is a dual core intel atom system with intel integrated video. Whoopy freaking do, except for the fact that it's total TDP is around 6 watts. That's low enough to run without a fan, and well within the 30W the DC supply that came with the drive can deliver. The problem is that it needs 5vdc, not 12vdc. Easily fixed with a DC-DC power converter.
Long story short, I found that there was enough room inside the enclosure for the HDD, the minnowboard, extender cables going to the port openings from the minnoboard, an interal USB2.0 hub for things like WiFi and Bluetooth, the DC-DC power converter, and all that jazz.
It makes a very snazzy looking HTPC box.
I started out with a TRS-80 Model I in high school. I spent a lot of time on that machine, and applied a lot of the "canned hacks" developed by others -- add-on hardware better than that Radio Shack sold, a memory remapper to let it run CP/M, soldering in another 1024x1 RAM chip to support lowercase video, jumpering the clock divider chain to effectively overclock the CPU, and so on.
Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to have wrist problems, especially when I used WordStar -- that WP used the non-existent Control key quite a lot, and the CP/M port mapped it to one of the arrow keys, which was an ergonomic nightmare. But I happened to find a pair of foot switches on clearance at Radio Shack, pre-wired to mini audio plugs. I drilled two holes in my system unit, mounted two mini jacks, and wired them to the keyboard in the same position as the shift key and that arrow key. Stomp-K-D for the win! My wrists were better in no time.
Later, I got a state-of-the-art 1200bps modem, but my poor terminal program couldn't keep up. Any time the screen had to scroll, I dropped characters. The solution: I rewired the 40Hz real-time interrupt to fire at 160Hz, and wrote a little interrupt-driven driver to catch and buffer characters coming in over the RS232 interface. It was completely bulletproof. Unfortunately, it also sped up the keyboard timing (repeat delay and rate) by 4x in CP/M.
I guess the biggest hack, though, was building a full character-based video display subsystem that hung off the expansion port. Forty or fifty SS/MS LSTTL packages spread across eight or ten solderless breadboards, with a couple of static RAM chips thrown in for character generation and storage. It ended up being something like 30 lines of 100 characters, comfortably larger than the original 16x64 display or even the 24x80 displays in the computer labs, and each cell was 8x16 pixels, so they were nicely readable characters. Luxury. I used that "in production" for a year or two, until I managed to land a Lisa.
Dunno why, that reminded me of some of my own late 80's early 90's hacks.
I once had to take an X-Acto knife to the backplane of something (VAX or PDP-11 or vice-versa to get a card for the "wrong" one to work).
Another time, I needed 240V, but the office only had 110V, so I made a "two headed" extension cord - two normal plugs, and one 240V twist-lock socket.
Then All I had to do was find two outlets on opposite phases and I was in business. This item would probably NOT get UL approval.
Not really a hack; but as a software guy there was one problem driving me nuts, to the point that I had to figure out how to use the logic probe to prove to the hardware guys that the circuit board they layed out had flipped the upper and lower 8-bits of a 16-bit buss... I fixed it in software (until they did a new spin of the board and fixed it, as it was just a prototype).
That was back in days when the CAD program would take days to route a board, and PCs were expensive. We made a moderately priced PC into an expensive (faster) one by changing out the clock crystal - back in the day when "overclocking" was a hardware hack.
Best modern hacks? Root your Android phone and put Cyanogen on it, for crying out loud, stop whining about bloatware!
Also, not too long ago, my kid complained that the "windshield washer fluid" warning light was on all the time (older Camry), but there was plenty of fluid and it worked fine. So, rather than "fix" it, I figured out which wire needed to be snipped... problem solved. (Now you have to "manually" inspect the fluid level of the washer fluid - oh the horror.)
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
My most unusual hardware hack was jailbreaking my friend's PS3. That, in itself, is not unusual. What was unusual about this hack was that my friend was a Ketamine dealer. Ketamine is a dissociative drug that (usually) takes you far away, but somehow in this case, it gave me razor focus, and I was able to perform the rather complicated jailbreak despite the fact that my friend was feeding me Ketamine every 20 minutes or so.
This ancient microcomputer had both a basic and forth interpreter implemented in hardware. There was a jumper to switch from one mode to the other. I used one I/O bit to implement a dynamic switch between these two using software in forth to switch to basic, and basic to switch to forth.
I once used an Atari palmtop to rip off an ATM machine. Oh wait, maybe that didn't really happen.
I bought an old Magnavox tv with built in Pong, but it was missing the controllers. To play games, my brother and I would shove speaker wires into the ports and hold the bare wires with our hands.
By staying very still and very carefully pinching one wire in each hand, tips of fingers touching, we could control the resistance in the range needed to start and control the game. So much as a twitch or turning your head would cause the pong paddle to go off the screen.
Holding that still and staring at the tv, it looked like we were controlling it with our minds.
After a couple days, the TV died. But $18 well spent.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
Our site had a "name brand, enterprise" tape carousel and "the" (not one of two) power supply failed. We have platinum support so I called the data-center team at the central office and their answer was "it is going to be about a month." The warranty was up, it was the end of the fiscal year and they were in negotiations for new hardware. I was dismayed that the data-center team thought no backups at our site for a month was ok, and further dismayed that no amount of escalation could get us even a used drive. I took it apart and it took a fairly standard power supply, just with long IDE power leads and a SUPER LONG floppy power plug to run the board, etc at the front of the machine. After some thinking I remembered an executive assistant had one of those really old Dell desktops that opens like a clamshell, with unbelievably long wiring that runs all the way around the case. Wirh a super long floppy power plug. I whipped them up a new replacement PC and retired the old one, ans stole the PSU. Pulled the whole wiring harness into the carousel chassis and reracked the whole thing. It ran, racked and with a power supply sitting on top of it, for 8 weeks until the replacement got there. DB
I have an older used Focus Enhancements 40GB FS-4 firewire hard drive for my Canon XL1 and Sony HDR-FX1 HD camera that is used to store video from the cameras. The battery that came with it was dead, it cannot be rebuilt and the closest battery I found was almost $500 to fit it. not to mention it's not a very big battery. I bought a 12v camcorder battery (2400Mah) and literally duct-taped it to the hard drive unit and hooked it to the 12v input connector for charging. It runs off the external brick and after soldering new connectors/etc... I can charge it and run it off power just by hooking the lead acid battery charge to it. In the event that I have to run the camera away from a power source, I have the ability to mount it to the camera. Makes it a bit heavy but if I do live shoots, which sometimes is needed so the battery is essential.
Seriously. I've got to see this.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
When I was a teenager back in the 80's, I was into computers, electronics, and blowin' shit up. In the summers my cousin and I would sit at his mom's kitchen table and cut up packs of firecrackers for the powder. We'd then "supercharge" weaksauce firecrackers and large bottle rockets. Long story short, we eventually started making ones powerful enough that we were afraid to get close enough to light them because of the potential for shrapnel (We were also doing stuff like seeing how high we could make a bucket or a dog dish fly.) before we could achieve cover. I was also playing with model rocketry at this time and realized that we could probably use model rocket igniters instead of fuses. My cousin mused about being able to do it by remote control and that got the gears turning. I had an old Radio Shack remote controlled car that was broken some way or another. So I worked out a way to use a relay and a size-J camera battery to provide the current necessary to fire the igniter. Packed it all in one of those Radio Shack project boxes with a power switch and an alligator clip pigtail. We'd hook up the firework and go back to the other end of the cable and hook up the detonator and "arm" it. Then we'd go behind the stairs or sometimes even INSIDE, push the right turn lever and *BOOM*. A small crater and a dog dish 30 feet into the air. Good times.
Lately the most adventurous thing I've done was to [heavily] modify a Commodore A520 RF modulator for component output so I could hook my old Amiga 1200 to a modern TV.
This goes back to the early 1980's. I used to hang out until the wee hours with some folks at a local 24 hour donut shop. The owner had rigged-up a stereo inside a locked box, in the back room. It was set to a local "Elevator Music" station, and everyone (even the employees) hated it... but there was nothing anyone could do... until I came along. :)
I used an "FM Converter" (remember those? You could listen to FM thru an AM-only car radio) which I modified for direct audio output from the detector. This fed into a basic amplifier system, and into a home made FM transmitter. I would be sitting in a booth with my friends, and could not only change the station to almost anything we wanted, but also adjust the volume, bass, and treble. They were suitably impressed.
So, each time I'd come in with my device, they'd say, "Here comes OVERRIDE!" (their new nickname for me). I would then proceed to knock out the elevator music, and tune in to the local rock station. Everyone loved it.
I also made a smaller version that I could connect to a Walkman cassette player, and play my music over any other FM radio in range. All it took was a few milliwatts of power. Fun times.
Now I am a Broadcast Engineer... and I get to play with real transmitters and control systems, etc.
Willie...
In the pre-iPad days, I rigged up a stand for an old twist-screen convertible "tablet" laptops using a mic stand, some plexiglass, a few bolts, and one of those plastic troughs you tack on the bottom of a door.
Nothing posted to
Back when Overclocking was more popular, I screwed up a bios update because I was clocking too hard . Had a very similar mobo and was able to put the older chip in, let it to boot, and hotswap the newer borked chip in and flash it. Looking back I could likely have just flashed the chip I put in, but I did end up with two functional mobo's and 'Whoah" from my friend who was there
My brother, already a horrible high school student, got a girlfriend and proceeded to become even worse at school. The problem was he'd spend hours talking to her. This wouldn't be a problem if he actually tried at school work. Anyway, hooked up the spare telephone wires to a relay and the other end to a lawn sprinkler timer. So now all the phones in the house worked for 15 minutes and then went dead for 15 minutes. My brother couldn't understand why my mom and I weren't concerned. Obviously, cell phones render this pointless nowadays.
Scutbitch field tech for the local school district. Ghetto fixes are routine, but not the impressive kind.
"Projector isn't working" means you need a rubber band to hold the classroom's shitty VGA cable into the shitty faceplate (feeding into the ceiling).
"Remote isn't working" means you broke part of the battery seat, and I have to use tin foil from my lunch with a coiled paper clip "spring" to close the circuit.
"Printer isn't working" because someone probably bumped that 20kg laserjet right off the counter. Opened it up so I could glue the ethernet port back together. I've gone through so much glue...
Jammed staples into ports more than once to align shit. Usually from inside so user can't see. Usually laptops. Pretty sure you dropped this, pal.
"Computer turning off"? No friend, it's overheating. Because HP (or was it a Dell?) uses shitty plastic clips on that model's CPU fan frames, which often break. I fix these by stuffing folded paper in as a gasket. Still a generous fix for an XP machine.
I'm like a dropout veterinarian who ended up playing hedge doctor in Nowhere, Africa.
I bought my ex-employer's IBM AS/400 E35 for $10, including the following:
rack
processor board (now hanging on my office wall)
memory boards
various I/O boards, e.g. ethernet, 5250, DASD controller, etc
hard drives
cooling fans
power supplies
service processor
After taking it all apart, I used two of the cooling fans connected in series with my 24 volt refrigerator power supply. Directed the fans at the 'fridge's fins and cut the compressor run time by about 40%
They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
I was working on a Linksys Quadcopter with the help of friends at work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRzf-Yvx3uk
This actually used the router and WiFi (I think one of the first quadcopters to do so) with a home-made web server to take commands from a PC. The web server relayed commands over the router's UART to an Atmel ATtiny2313 chip. The program used to send commands to the router used a standard PC flight simulator stick.
Documented a lot of what was done (more pics / videos) on my web page... was afraid to link directly for fear of being slash dotted :).
Once a RAID card on a machine with a critical database croaked. I EBayed for a replacement, did a buy now and phoned the seller and offered him 100$ Cash if he sent the damn card by courier RIGHT NOW at . Next morning it was waiting for me.
Problem was that the yokel who configured the card did not write down the config and I could not boot it. So I looked at the chip numbers and figure that one of them was a NVRAM chip. Took the NVRAM chip from the broken card with the hope that it had the config and plugged it into the new card. I was never in my life so happy to see Windows NT boot.
The data was rescuable, a few years later wrote a C program to reconstruct the RAID disks from image on that same damn machine, but that was critical and had to be done fast.
OF course my boss ran around and told the board that WE did some hardware engineering. He had nothing to do with it.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
I worked in a computer repair shop back in the 80's. My boss picked up the old screen lugable 286 machine (built in red screen and thermal printer) which came with 2 floppy drives standard. Panasonic started selling an internal 20MB 3.5" HDD for the machine with a very high price point. The same boss decided we needed a way to add a HDD without going through Panasonic but the stack version of the drive wouldn't work. I spent a couple or hours comparing the stock drive to the Panasonic drive and figured out changes they had made to the controller board. Several traces cut and rerouted to other places.
Long story short, we started ordering drive 50 at a time. I'd modify them and we would resell them to other dealers in the network at a lower price and twice the profit. It was a blast back in a simpler time.
Amsterdam, Netherlands – Hackers from the LinuxOnAnything.nl Web site successfully installed Linux on a potato. It's the first time the operating system has been successfully installed on a root vegetable.
“A potato doesn't have a CPU, memory or storage space, so it was quite a challenge,” said Johan Piest of the Linux on Anything (LOA) group. “Obviously we couldn't use a large distribution like Fedora or Ubuntu, so we went with Damn Small Linux.”
After weeks of trying the group got a Linux kernel specially modified for a potato loaded, and were able to edit a small text file in vi. Linux was loaded onto the potato using a USB thumb drive and commands were sent in binary to the potato using a set of red and black wires.
The LOA group is a part of a growing group of hackers attempting to get Linux loaded on anything. It started on electronic devices like Gameboys and iPods, but recently groups have taken on tougher challenges like light bulbs and puppies.
The LOA group was in a race with another hacker group, the Stuttering Monarchs, to be the first to bag the potato. “The potato has been the vegetable that everyone has been gunning for, because it's so versatile like Linux itself. You can boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew,” said Piest. “You'd think we'd get some sort of reward for this, but it's all about bragging rights for us.”
LOA was the group that first installed Linux on a Shetland pony in 2003, but growing competition from other hacker groups have shut them out in the past five years.
“We were close to being the first with Linux on a cracker, but those jerks from Norway beat us out,” said Piest.
The first vegetable Linux install was on a head of iceberg lettuce by a group of hackers in Turkey.
http://www.bbspot.com/news/2008/12/linux-on-a-potato.html
Jiggle the power cable and some games would mess up the memory state. In Pitfall you can start the game halfway through. Several games had fun effects although most crashed.
1. I changed an engine to the reverse rotation direction. OK, it was a 2-stroke engine but anyway. It allowed for a more reliable transmission changing from belt drive to cog drive.
2. Transplanted the electronic board from a hard-crashed ST402 drive to another that had dead electronics to get one working drive.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I had gotten a couple of small 6-volt jell cells from work (a UPS that had been in a plane crash), then I got a dead cell phone battery from the repair shop. I ripped the battery pack apart and put in a small voltage controller then ran the voltage controller to the jell cells. The whole contraption fit quite nicely into a fluke multimeter case.
Now I had a portable cell phone with 3days of standby PLUS 8 hours of talk time ... couldn't be beat until they came out with digital cell phones.
Telus at the time had 'unlimited talk time' contracts, knowing that battery life would be the limiting factor -- but not for me! I regularly went over 1500 minutes, and Telus eventually changed 'unlimited' to '1000 minutes' after I taught my hack to a couple of other hardware types.
OS Software is like love: The best way to make it grow is to give it away.
More than a hardware hack, it was a desperate work around. And it "fixed" the issue temporarily.
I had to process data from a tty on navy ship.
Pain to type in from canary paper.
Bought black box tty to rs-232 and built cable and used Procomm Plus to capture and turbopascal program to parse data. Fun!
...made ramen in my Mr Coffee, which was one of the very few appliances we were allowed in the dorms.
Yeah, that's me. Living life on the edge.
I made a sensor system and controls for it that didn't use a commercial system for thousands less.
I had a kit theremin way back in the early 70s when I lived in a small dorm college. Sadly, I was the only one with brains and my room was raided a lot. :)
So I tuned the theremin to squeal as soon as anyone went into the room. making it one of the first 'human' sensing alarms. I got some respect after that.
Same place but a little while later: I had a portable mono cassette deck and a mono record player. It pissed me off that I couldn't get stereo from the expensive vinyl, so I got a 2 wire patch lead coming from the unused cartridge channel in the mono player and into the mic input port of the cassette deck. Worked a treat
Previous to that, I made some phenomenal rockets with warheads. I used 20mm glass tubing I got for free that I heated and stretched to form a combustion chamber and 45 degree rocket exhaust, sealed up the other end. I packed the head with ammonium iodide that I made myself (I was more of a chemist than an electrical hobbywise) then filled up the rest with propellant - a handy mixture of potassium chlorate, charcoal and sulphur. I wrapped a thin layer of sticky tape around it as the heat generated would fracture the glass and placed it inside a long metal tube. I won't go into the repercussions.
This was a common problem, especially if the machine was turned off for a period and the ambient temp was cool. My solution, which didn't require any box openings, was to disconnect all the cables, hold the Sun pizza box over my head and do the hokey pokey. The movement was usually enough to unstick the recalcitrant drive lubrication.
And the video to prove it. https://youtu.be/ldII1t0Ulio
Back in the 1990s I was on a short assignment in Botswana and needed to get a USAID WANG computer, a Tandy (mini) portable and my NEC PC to connect to share documents, and then bring those different document formats together for the major report that the 3-person team was working on - each of us using our own proprietary hardware and software.
I did it!
That trip also finally convinced my boss - the user of the AA-battery powered Tandys who believed that was all we needed - that the office should make the leap into the PC age! As I recall our office computers were DEC. Talk about built in incompatibilities!
Best hardware hack was one a former boss did, in the late seventies. The building housing the computer center had caught fire, and everyone needed to evacuate the building he had dozens and dozens of backup tapes, but knew he couldn't cary that many out in his arms. The he realized he could string most of the 9-tracks onto a stand-alone coat-rack, and so he used that to carry them out.
Schäuble Junior combined 9 cameras to a 360 view. and had sonar. and more.
seemingly named after the finance minister of germany, who at that time was minister of interior, and presented some hardcore surveillance laws to be introduced to germany.
My first hack: built a motorised table for my mum's Singer sewing machine, came complete with foot operated beltdrive for the flywheel.
My second hack: built an automatic typewriter head cleaner, which was basically similar to an electric toothbrush. It would "walk" the keys one at a time, cleaning the heads as they came up.
More recently, I've just finished building a server inside a wooden footlocker. Weighs a LOT but boy, is it ever quiet - even considering it's got five fans and five hard drives in it.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
A couple years back I experienced a 3-4 day brownout (60 VAC at wall outlet, should be 120 VAC). Ended up daisy-chaining two Veriacs in series that were designed to adjust the input 120 VAC into 0-140 VAC. Set them both to 140 VAC and achieved ~90 VAC. That allowed me to run my cable modem, wifi, laptop charger, transistor radio, an electric fan and a dim incandescent light bulb! My one fear was that if full power was restored I would over-volt my devices so I ensured that all power supplies could accept 240 VAC or that the devices were sacrificial (60 w light bulb).
In hindsight I liked another commenter's trick for 240 VAC, select two 120 VAC outlets on seperate phases. With that trick I probably would have achieved 120 VAC using my two browned out phases running at 60 VAC.
back in the day, early 2000, working at a startup we had a new programmable switch with that security feature of admin access only through physical null modem port, problem was we didn't have a com cable that was female on both ends, switch was $7500 and needed to be online and happy and patched all to hell long before we could make it to frys and back so we tried every combination of cables and adapters we had to try to get there when finally my electro-nerd plus spacial orientation paid off: we had a cable extender, all of 2in long, female on both ends, we had that to begin with but no combination of cables made it useful then it hit me, take 2 rolling file cabinets, put the laptop on one, switch on the other, extender in the middle and back that shit up til ding! we have root! my new boss who had been at this game for 20 years longer than I had was permanently impressed, totally earned my nerd stripes that day :)
Years ago I had a pair of like motherboards that suffered bad BIOS flash images from [the manufacturer]. Ended up having to send both back to the manufacturer so they could change out the toasted bios chips for new ones. [Manufacturer] had a run of bad bios builds around this time resulting in this happening several times over. After the 3rd firmware update bricked one board I decided to get creative. I pulled the bios chip from the still-functioning board and tied floss around it, carefully re-installing so that none of the contacts were affected. I then repeated with the bad bios chip. I booted to the DOS flash upgrade program using the good chip then popped the chip out like a loose tooth and installed the bad one. Bingo! Wrote the known-good image back to the chip and went on with life. This happened several more times such that I just left the floss in place, prompting several "WTF?" moments for people looking at my rig.
In our lab we used a Sun 68020-powered workstation with a 150MB external SCSI drive in a 'double shoebox' along with a DC6150 tape drive for backup. The target was a VME card cage with several 68020 CPUs and miscellaneous peripherals, running VxWorks.
We used that machine for eleven months, running it 24 hours a day for nearly a year, but one night the cleaning staff used one of our power strips for their floor buffer and the breaker tripped. When we came in the next day and tried to boot the system the drive wouldn't spin up. It just hummed.
Now, this was only 150MB, but back then 150MB was a full height 5 1/4 inch collection of a half dozen platters. There was a flywhel. I gave it a spin. I felt what I imagine was the heads unsticking from the disc surface... And the drive spun up in my hand. With significant gyroscopic action. I didn't dare turn it off - an associate informed my SunOS 4.1 was booting. I carefully held it there while my associate assembled the shoebox around it.
We finished our work on that project without another power interruption, but we definitely backed up every day.
Slashdot's name? When my compiler sees