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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.
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.
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.
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.