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?

Comments

External GPU on the notebook

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Converted old cell phone to uplink transmitter

[NixieBunny]

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".