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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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Something similar. Cue around 1978 ... 1969 Mustang Fastback. I was driving up with a friend to go skiing and at about 3000' the car started to lose power, then *really* lost power. Popped the hood and two of the places where the plug wires attached had cracked off on the worse spot arcing to the coil wire. No spare, so looked about for something. Found a quart coke bottle, broke it perfectly and stuffed it in-between as an insulator. Worked like a charm for the rest of the trip.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Most FM Radios uses a 10.7MHz IF, so 10.7 MHz up or down on the tuning dial you had a chance of interfering with a station. Both radios would have to be virtually unshielded.
AM radios typically used 455kHz. Just as much fun.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
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
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...
It isn't too unusual, do a search for "diy vidock" "diy external gpu" or just look here:
http://forum.notebookreview.co...