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Ask Slashdot: What Is Your Most Awesome Hardware Hack?
An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter once 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?
Never worked quite as well as a paperclip again.
Stranded on Mars, I salvaged the old Pathfinder probe to reestablish communications with NASA.
Mark Watney
>> Have you ever done something stupid and damaged your electronics?
If you haven't you don't really belong on SlashDot.
With a Hammer ,
I once turned a car into a bonfire using nothing more than a can of kerosene and a book of matches.
I either used Newegg.com or pricewatch.com. I ordered all my parts custom to save a couple bucks and it was good to run the latest 3d games. Everything came in the mail and I was happy... Until I realized I forgot to order a case. And not to be defeated, I took the UPS box it was shipped in, and carved out port holes. It worked well as a case. The only downside is I couldn't leave my computer on overnight to automatically play video games for me because I worried about it catching fire.
God spoke to me
I would be admitting to a felony we can't have that now, can we??
The best hack I've ever performed involved sending out a vague and remotely nerdy request to the users of website so I could turn around and write a "5 lifehacks real nerds do" Buzzfeed article.
Only having a 300 baud acoustic modem and a Tandy Color computer 2, I still wanted to run my own home written BBS. Wound up running the phone line through the cassette relay control on the Coco2.
All night long, Click, see if someone hit return at least one, click - hang up. Click - pick up, watch for return. Click - hang up.
Must have driven Thunder Bay Tel completely nuts trying to find out why someone would keep picking up and hanging up every 5 seconds or so for weeks on end. This was back in 1984. The BBS lasted about 2 years and did have a fair number of people connect in to it.
Rewiring my c-64 to use the hardware serial port to communicate with the 1581 disk drive in "turbo mode". When I was 12 years old.
Accelerated Windows at 9.81 m/s/s. If you round it up and eliminate the units, you get Windows 10.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
How many times in one year does this question have to be asked of Slashdot members? Do the "editors" have short term memory issues?
Was an AMD K6-2 350Mhz, Nvidia TNT2 (desktop/video games) and Creative Labs 2 x Voodoo 2 SLI boards (video games) in the late 1990's. My roommates had Intel Pentiums 233MHz systems with lousy video cards. My system blew them out of the water when it came to playing Quake 2 in OpenGL mode. Once you saw OpenGL, you didn't want to go back to software rendering. This rig played a wide variety of video games no matter what the video card requirements were.
I built an electric bike powered by old laptop batteries I collect dead laptop batteries from my employer, many of them contain lithium cells that look similar to AA's called 18650's and it's usually just a single bad cell and the rest are good. I put enough in series to give me 48v and enough in parallel to give me 50 miles of range (about 160 cells). I connected the cells together using nickle strips and a tab welder I built from an old microwave transformer. The microwave was covered in stainless steel so I cut that up and used it to build a battery box that fits perfectly in the front triangle of the bike (yes, it's insulated).
Great phone. I have not found another phone that allows for raw image sensor access, which is required to generate the quantum random numbers. Do you guys know of any?
My favorite hack of this sort didn't involve electronics at all. The building management that the company I worked rented office space from, installed motion sensors in all the offices, with a system that turned all the office lights off unless someone was actually moving in the office. I was there after 6pm almost every day, sitting quietly in front of a computer (the motion sensors didn't pick this up) so the lights kept going out. I'd have to get up from my chair, walk over to the motion sensor (installed next to the light switch at the entrance of the room), gesture in front of it so the lights would come back on for 1/2 hour or so.
I finally got a dippy bird (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_bird) and set it up with a cup of water next to the motion sensor so it fooled the thing. I had to put the bird on top of a stack of books to get it to the right height etc. I'd ask visitors why they thought I had put the bird there, and they usually didn't figure it out, but would burst out laughing when I told them what it was for. Still a fond memory.
I overclocked my graphing calculator in University. Did f-all except run a tiny bit faster and burn through batteries. Got lots of nerd-cred for it though. Ah, fun times.
Modify an old DLP projector to do 3d printing. Still something that it was meant to do sorta.
Bolt a can opener to something entirely unrelated?
No sir I dont like it.
No, really.
It shone brighter than the sun for about 15 seconds before burning out.
Best flashlight ever.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... This thing. We had to make 200 frames of a laser cutter for a kickstarter.
Liberty - Security - Laziness - Pick any two.
When hard disks where counted on the megabyte, i managed to repair one with a burned controller with the controller of another that had faulty disks.
One less RMA.
I turned an ADM3A terminal into a fishtank, so it could continue to live on my desk and amuse me. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So this one is cool, few people realize there isnt much difference between a speaker and a microphone. If you plug an ear bud into a microphone Jack, you can use the internal speaker as an impromptu microphone. Saved my ass once, but that's a story for another time.
First, the pictures - http://i.imgur.com/moKxZEU.jpg and http://i.imgur.com/XCtxuqg.jpg
Old, cheap $3 pair of Cube headphones found at Big Lots. Had them for years, cabling finally gave out. Came across a broken Polaroid PBT598 bluetooth speaker set, literally the only thing intact was the gumstick amp/bluetooth board, and even then it had damage, it having fried a couple of SMT capacitors, the battery and speaker trace pads were missing.
So, first order of business, get the SMT caps replaced. Easily done - just salvage components from various boards I've got around the house. Slightly trickier was exposing traces and fresh metal to solder to for battery and speaker connections. Making it fit required Dremel and hot glue work due to the shape of the headphones, and as a result the thing does look like a total hack job on the case itself.
But if I want to drown the world out in its entirety, 2x3w strapped to my head certainly does it. I can't hear my garbage disposal, vacuum cleaner, or even the neighbor's loud rap music. Volume has to be kept at pretty much 25% as anything higher, while clear (up to about 60%, then the poor speakers begin to distort) simply hurts.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Just by soldering a couple of resistors and a USB connector to the mainboard of a very common ISP-provided router and flashing the firmware so it could start a script from an USB drive I got a nice linux SoC before cheap boards like the raspberry pi appeared.
About ten years ago I decided to dust off my tele-operated car and take it for a spin. I started by plugging the red wire into the battery's negative terminal and the black wire into the positive, and watched as all the magic smoke escaped. I just stood there for 5 minutes staring down at a thousand dollar's worth of ruined electronics. Now I always use an actual black wire instead of adding a little black electrical tape to the end of a red one.
I eventually built another one a few years later. some pics.
Here's a hardware hack I need some serious help with. I've tried everything, and it seems like it's something someone out there would have figured out by now.
I have a bluetooth speaker. My phone is paired with it. I can listen to music from my phone or ipad on it via bluetooth. However, due to an accident, the input jack on the speaker (headphone size) is broken, so I am ONLY able to listen to music by pairing it.
What I would like to do is use my phone to play on two different devices, one of which is the bluetooth speaker, and the other is a regular speaker. You can't pair bluetooth with two receiving devices at once, so I can't use another bluetooth receiver for the other speaker (which does not have bluetooth). I've tried using another bluetooth receiver for the other speaker, and I can get music running through that one, but not both.
Is there a solution? Also, the bluetooth speaker, a Jawbone Jam box, has a small USB power connector for hooking up to the computer and getting updates. But as far as I know this port will not accept incoming sound.
Suggested hardware hack?
Put in a DVD drive where you flip the motor so it reads inversely and skips the DRM checking. Soldered in a mod chip onto the mainboard's debug extension. All for the purpose of being able to play backup games... Not ISOs I downloaded online and burnt on a DVD no, backup games.
Here are a couple of bodges from when I was back in school (i.e., over 25 years ago). Sadly, these projects would be more difficult for me today.
TV remote: Before TVs came with a remote control, I wired a long cable to my computer's joystick. Feedback came through speech synthesis (the TV was busy), and when I pressed the button, a servo would select the channel I wanted.
Coin relief map: I wanted to digitize the relief (imprint) on the surface of a coin. I used a pin in a capillary tube with two coils of fine wire to make a variable core transformer to measure z-height. The x-y stage was Lego Technics, with PWM controlled motors (running on an ARM2 in interrupt space). It worked far better than it ought to have.
My best was when I was a kid. We had an Atari 400 and my siblings kept breaking the pins on the tape drive. Eventually it stopped working, but I figured out that if I held the [Enter] key down (on the membrane keyboard) while the program loaded, it would work (a bit slower but what did I care). My guess is that the pin that eventually "broke" it was a timing pin or something like it and holding the [Enter] slowed the CPU enough to allow proper timing/sync.
Way back in the day, I soldered some Happ Controls arcade joysticks and buttons to some PC gamepads. This was when there were less than 80 games in MAME.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
This was a long time ago, but I wired up a photometer (counts photons) to an Apple 2 joystick port, then wrote a tight 6502 assembler timed loop that would count pulses on the joystick button input. It would accurately read over 50,000 button presses per second, which was good enough to do variable star photometry. I also wrote an applesoft basic program that assisted in the process of variable star photometry and used the assembler routine to read values from the photometer. By connecting the photometer to a telescope and following directions of where to aim the telescope given by the software, it could be used to observe and graph brightness of variable stars over time. Also could be used to calculate the angular velocity of asteroids. This was is the days before extrasolar planets were found, but similar in principle to how that is done. Though the objects we were looking at were orders of magnitude brighter than the brightness fluctuations observed to find planets.
I did the standard Billy Bass hack, and then connected it to the parallel port on my HP B132L+ running HPUX 10.20. I then created a character special file to use the parallel port in "raw" mode. Using a perl script, I made it play the AOL "You've got mail" sound every time new email appeared in my Netscape client. Okay, it wasn't the "most awesome" hack, but it was fun. And annoying.
I didn't have a scanner, so I hooked up an old digital camera to the USB port, and pointed it at a printer output. I fed my originals into the paper tray and printed a blank page. Took a picture some number of seconds after I started the print.
at the expense of a Motorola serial I/O chip and the dime-sized blister on my thumb. the fingerprint came back, by the way.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
I used to buy single sided floppy disks and then use a hole punch to create the track index hole and the write tab. This turned it into a double-sided floppy. I'd this with good quality Verbatim disks. You could then take the disk out of the single sided drive and flip it over -- by hand -- to get double the capacity. But that was way before most of you young punks were even born. Now... get off my lawn.
Actually, my best hardware hack was an Arduino device that I turned into a product which has since sold thousands of units. 32kB flash, 2.5kB SRAM. Can send messages via the international space station.
the growth in cynicism and rebellion has not been without cause
I created a modification for the original first and second gen PS2s to play backup/burns a good 4 months before commercial modchips. No fancy reverse engineering needed. I wired up a switch, a few resistors, and a usb connector to feed USB power from the system back into the DVD disc drawer motor to allow the old disc swap trick to work. Yes, It did.
F-22 launched JDAM!
Wire wrapped PCB containing a GPIO chip and a Z80 running my recreation of the 3" floppy protocol and a subset of PC BIOS (burned into an EPROM), a PAL with some delay lines to convert bus timings from Z80 to x86, a PC XT connector, a PC Winchester controller card which now talked to the Z80, and a 5MB? HD. The Commodore saw it as a 3" drive (which supported subdirectories) that happened to be quite a bit larger than the floppy. Later I taped up a PCB on large mylar sheets, still have the films in the garage somewhere, actually had a few of the boards manufactured for fun. (Think I had one of the chip sockets backwards, swapped IO pins on a 74?373, IIRC...) Worked nice, should have sold them. Thankful my dad funded the hobby, learned enough to open several career paths...
0. Many old IDE drives failed when the stepper drivers got flaky and when hot would crash the heads. I put them on long cables, stuffed them in a freezer compartment, and they would usually live long enough to be backed up. Seagates did this some, but Maxtors were the worst.
1. When I was asked to install a 750MB drive in an old Novell 2.15c server, it took some thinking to figure out how many disk buffers would be needed to access the drive reliably. The customer asked me to leave the DCB attached, with both 20MB drives still spinning and serving data. Doing this without powering down the DCB and drives? Priceless.
2. Going back to the same server and replacing the thinnet NIC with a gig Ethernet NIC a year later. If you configure enough packet buffers, it works... We used a number Novell had never tried.
3. A few years after this, the DCB is still running, and they call me back to install a pair of 320GB drives. More buffers. Add-on zero slot SCSI RAID controller in RAID 1 mode. Linked the driver as required, the manufacturer did this hack and wrote the driver floppy for me, as NetWare 2.15c was EOL'd at least 10 years before this card was produced. They get credit for that hack. Keeping the DCB drive spinning so they don't stop and stick? Priceless. Figuring out the LBC-CHS mapping that allowed the server use all the space? Scary. It was non intuitive, but fixed thanks to a friend who does octal math in his head to 8 places. He's weird.
4. When GroupWise 4.x wasn't quite patched up, you had some Korean jerk reflecting Yahoo addresses off it as SMTP postmaster error replies to spam the world with Yahoo Mail addresses. The server I serviced could send 200-250 million in a weekend until the disk filled with the errors. Fix was to set the MX record for the customer to a server at their ISP, teach GroupWise it's SMTP gateway was that machine, and let it properly refuse the incoming mail. GW was patched a while later for this and the big security hold that this was not part of. That ran for about 8 years. Finally Exchange worked well enough for that customer to switch.
5. There was the Novell era where we did so many weird hacks to overcome corrupted volumes, funky network routing, and Novell's figuring out the IDE driver was causing the clock to lose time, forcing us to install NTP and eventually the whole NAMP stack. Apache on Novell was not my hack.
The Selectric stuff wouldn't interest anyone here.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I turned a minifridge into a sous-vide cooker: http://peltierfridge.wordpress.com/
I once turned a $15,000 laser into a massive paperweight by turning a simple water valve from the "on" position to the "off" position.
Oh, wait, you mean a hack that did something useful? Well, I made an iPad stand out of a pile of dirty laundry, but I don't really like to brag about it.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Took a fisherprice toy recorder and cassette player, drilled the case and screwed a 1/4 audio jack, then hooked it to the tape reader wires. I plugged in an electric guitar, pushed the Play button and voila, I had a portable guitar amplifier. As a bonus, you get an interesting distorsion when you crank the volume, plus you can sing along with the mike !
So, to encourage us sales associates to familiarize ourselves with the kits, they gave each store in the Ottawa region an extra write-off allowance, and told us to use it opening some of the kits and playing with them, and that there would be a race among all the stores at the regional Christmas party in late November.
I was determined to win, so I asked Artie, the store manager, if adding more batteries was a violation of the "stock parts only" rule, and he said he didn't give a fuck. The motor in the kits was driven by a single 9V battery, so I opened four kits and tore the 9V leads/housings off three of them. I then added them to the remaining car, wiring all the leads in parallel, and gluing the housings to the top of the frame, where I was "supposed" to attach some sort of molded-plastic carapace that looked like an exotic street car.
We tested it on the carpet in the store and it was very fast, despite getting bogged down in the fibers. We kept it at low speeds because we didn't want to blow the engine out.
When the big night came, I put in 4 of the expensive lithium 9Vs from the top shelf. I put it down on the hard wood of the race track, next to seven other cars, each with just the stock design, despite their varied appearances. One of the visiting executives called a simple "Ready, set go!" and pandemonium ensued. You see, nobody had realized that all the sets being used were still configured with the default radio frequency settings. So the start of the race was just a burst of cross-talk, and the cars when zipping off in all directions. Our car lost three tires, as its axles spun so fast that the double-sided tape securing the tires to the rims completely delaminated.
Anyway, we eventually realized that there were not enough frequencies available to race the cars all at once, so the decided to judge the winner with a small device that simply measured the rotational velocity of the wheels and reported back an actual speed (as opposed to scale speed) in kilometers per hour. I replaced the tires on our car, and brought it to the tester. After the performance with the tires, they let me get tested last. The record car among the other seven was capable of a respectable 11 km/H. I put the car in the test bed, and gently pulled the throttle trigger up to maxim. The tester stared at it a moment, as the wheels whined away with a high-pitched scream. "Sixty six." he finally said, slowly, as if not really believing the number on the display. "Sixty..." and then motor burst into flames.
- In Soviet Korea, only old people loose all their bases to Natalie Portman's petrified hot grits overlords.
I can't take any credit for it, but http://www.xbox-scene.com/articles/rf-power.php was the awesomist of awesome back in the day. Buy remote doorbell, install into original Xbox, and voila! Remote on/off. With friends over for beers and NHL 2k series, ringing the doorbell instead of getting off my ass to turn it on was the tits. Felt like the [very near] future!
I once used a roach clip to hold an irregularly-shaped specimen onto the stage of a scanning electron microscope.
This was at the University of Washington back in the mid 1980's, and the hack was prompted by the professor (who shall remain nameless) saying, "What we need is something like, you know, a roach clip."
I ran down to one of the many head stores on the Ave, bought a $3 roach clip, came back and affixed it to the specimen stage. It worked perfectly, and for all I know may still be in use today.
The SEM was a JEOL JSM-35C and department was involved in studying moon dust and dust borne in the high, high upper atmosphere (stratosphere?). It was colloquially called the "Department Of Interplanetary Moondust".
If you look at the images found in the google link, I actually installed at least two of those found on the first page of results. :)
Samples were collected by a U2 airplane with silicone oil-covered panels that swung down from the wings upon command. They also used thin slabs of aerogel to collect the samples on the panels, but that was much later.
And no, I'm not making this up.
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
Just hardware. I was about 7; we took the tubing from an old TV antenna and fashioned a hang-glider frame. I'm guessing it was about a meter wide. We painted it and while it was wet, draped a dry-cleaning bag on it using the paint as adhesive. Coat hanger wire for the crossbar and a G.I Joe and it looked awesome. At first it flew badly but we slipped a skateboard wheel bearing on to the back of one of the tubes for a balance - nearly perfect. There was a big construction project on the hill behind us. From about 75m high it made slow circles for about 5 minutes before getting stuck on the school rooftop below. Super basic, but incredibly satisfying as a 7yo.
http://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT
I once hacked a alarm clock up to fit inside a pencil box. It still needed mains power though, so it was weird when it went off in the middle of class.
My dad and I recently put the engine, transmission and manifolds from a totalled '94 Ford Ranger into a '96 Ford Ranger (to replace a cracked block). Despite the fact they were just 2 years apart, they were surprisingly different. Had to transfer all the manifolds and everything on the engine belt (e.g. power steering), because the '96 parts wouldn't mount on the '94 engine. Broke the '94 belt tensioner taking it off and the '96 that replaced it sat at a different angle, meaning we had to find a longer belt to compensate. Rewired the whole thing. (Except for lights) Even the wires that had a 1-to-1 match (about 80% of them) had to be extended or shortened, because the control unit was on the opposite side of the engine. Took about two months of combing through manuals and schematics to get everything wired up right. Once everything was together... Turned the key and it purred. There were a couple engine codes (I forget what they were, but we determined that it was basically the control unit saying "WTF Is going on!"). Gotta love the feeling of a hack JUST WORKING. Had to replace the drive shaft and a few cosmetic parts, and then drove it 200mi home the next day, costing me 9 gallons of gas. I've been driving it for a month since. I've heard of more impressive motor replacements, but prior to this, the most difficult repair I'd done is replacing my brake pads. Also, we broke a chain fall and "2-ton" wince, dropping both motors right after pulling the chassis out from under them. Luckily we had tires set under the good one, so it didn't crack, and neither of us were dumb enough to be underneath. That was fun. Also, I've learned I like driving a stick.
I had to explain it away by building a wind tunnel to get out of that one. NASA & the Air Force loved it.
I turned an old Tasco telescope that my grandfather gave me into a rocket launcher. I replaced the spotting scope with an old scope I had for my .22 and clamped the battery pack and launch button from the Estes pad to the tube. Once I figured out, it actually worked really well. On a side note 'D' motors are really loud next to the ear. Anyways, lots of laughs and a grounding ensued. I wish I still had it.. I remember it looking pretty cool.
Call me Ahmed.
#StandWithAhmed
You shouldn't be 'hacking' anything. You need to leave things like complex electronic circuit design to professionals. We went to school for a reason. All these DIY'ers (or shudder, makers) do is get drunk in college and pry well-built electronics apart into junk.
Electronics is not for fun. Kindly fuck off already before this DIY scourge destroys professional civilization.
> As an aside, it was a few years later when we got an actual IT staff (and before we hired the database wizard) who kicked out of my own server room. Again, I listened. That was why I'd hired them too. They, like the programmers, could do the job faster and better than I. I mean, yeah, I could make it work and did make it work but they were far more adept than I.
Sounds wise, uncommonly wise. I think I've recently called you a fool or a jerk. If so, I take it back.
Ematches are fun too.
Dear NSA, yes I do have a clearance letter from the ATF, so I'm legal to use ematches.
I did a CD-duplicator robot too. Mine gripped the discs via the center hole, using a wooden clothespin carved to fit in the hole.
The single most expensive component I've fried: $4k laser diode. The head of R&D told me to turn the power up all the way, so I did. It got very bright for a very short period of time, and then became a flickering LED. Turns out the EE who designed the prototype had yet to implement the current limiting feature that was supposed to prevent that. Oops.
In the late 1980's, there were PGA monitors that used OCLI antiglare coatings (purple hues) on the CRT's. All the VGA monitors of the time used matte finishes on the CRT faces. I had two Princeton Graphics SR12P displays that had NEC CRTs with the OCLI face. VGA ran at 31.5 KHz and PGA ran at 30.5 KHz. Horizontal and vertical holds were very tolerant of the differences.
Observing the the sync polarity wrt display mode (640 x 350, 720 x 400, 640 x 480), I built a circuit using NAND (74LS00) and XOR (74LS86) gates controlling a binary to decimal decoder (7441) with open collectors driving three potentiometers spliced into the vertical size control.
What beautiful display! There were gaps between the scan lines in 480 line mode.
Not super impressive but in 1993 I built a keyless entry system for my Ford Explorer. Got a Parallax stamp, keyfob RF transmitter and a receiver and some 12V relays. Hooked into the electric door locks to lock/unlock, and my favorite part was that I made the parking lights flash (once for unlock, twice for lock) instead of the obnoxious chirp that all the other systems had.
Most recent project is a garage door controller made from a spark (now particle) core, relays and a reed switch to open/close/monitor my garage door from my phone.
Hurricane Sandy in 2012--
a foot of water in the basement and climbing.
Not a pump to be had-- hours of phone calls revealed that I was last in line at the sump pump store; even if I could have gotten a pump there was no electricity.
Realized that we lived on a hill; set up a gravity siphon using 200' of garden hose.
Woke up the next morning to a dry basement, power came back a few hours later.
1. I was told that Unix couldn't dual boot with MS-DOS... so I patched the boot sector to load an alternative version of itself into RAM before system start if an unused bit was set (thus enabling DOS to boot)... so I could reboot back and forth... sometime around 1985.
2. Built a box with a Z80, 2764 EPROM, A/D converter, speech chip and a hacked together telephone interface... had 4 inputs and read the voltages of each to the caller on the phone, twice... then hung up.
3. Wrote a Forth for OS/2 in assembler... because I was told you couldn't write assembler programs in OS/2.
4. Built a system out of solar cells behind a filter, to detect infrared laser, and help align laser CATV links, with a companion box to generate a tone to feed into the transmitting laser.
5. Used a bi-color LED as light and sensor to detect a beam break to a reflector. (Green light can be detected by the red LED, but not vice-versa)
I used a #2 pencil to hack my Athlon CPU to unlock it for better overclocking.
I used to design cochlear implant electronics. A particular recipient's implant had never worked for them: I rebuilt it 3 times for more current, more voltage, and electronic electrode usage because their cochlear was basically occluded with bony growth. (It's not an uncommon cause of extreme deafness.)
Got it working, eventually, and they were able to go home with it. Since it was the first time that blind person had been able to hear, either, in the last 30 years or so, I call that a good hack.Since I was paying for components and circuit fabrication tools out of my own pocket, and staying after work to build and test new circuitry, it was also one of those "10% inspiration, 90% perspiration" results that Thomas Edison talked about.
Back in the mid-80's IBM bought an OS for their mini-computers. LOL. It was not intended to be used as a full-blown OS but for data collection on their IBM Series 1 computes. Well, it the OS was really bad. Back then when OSs allocated file space it was not dynamic but all space was allocated at one time. And this was a problem since the OS had a serious flaw in that while it determined to find the 'best fit' for where to allocate space it never reserved the space that it wanted. If two or more users wanted to allocate files there was a good chance they would allocate the same space on the disk drive. I remember this so well after hacking the OS and determining what the problem was.
When I reported to IBM in Boca Raton they were all up in arms claiming that I couldn't have, I didn't know what I was talking about. Well, actually I had help because the MORONS at IBM had sent a could portion of the OS out to users along with the distributions. LOL.
That one, and hacking the Burroughs 6700 to run more than one application from an old teletype at the same time, even though it shouldn't have been possible. :)
I was young, didn't know that it was a flash bulb - just saw a light that had a lot of filament in it. Maybe 7 or 8 years old. Grabbed a trusty 9v, and thought I'd check to see if the bulb was any good. Of course, I'm holding it in one hand, less than 1ft away from my face, as I touch the contacts to the 9v. FLASH. Dark. Total Darkness. I thought it had exploded and my eyes had been damaged. I started thinking maybe I'd gone blind. I tried to stay calm. I thought, apparently that was a flash bulb. I still couldn't see. I was convinced that I probably just blinded myself. Then, I could faintly make out a trace of something. I thought, OK, I can deal with that, if that's all I get that's better than nothing. That trace got better, and I could make out shapes...still everything brownish-red. Still getting better. Over the course of the next 10 minutes, my vision started coming back.
That was the last time I tried doing anything like that.
Does liberating electricity by bypassing the meter from the utility company count?
(||) Nehmo (||)
Worked at a computer repair shop in the Packard Bell days. A person brought in a 486 Packard Bell with a bad motherboard. I had a PB motherboard from a different system that would fit but the riser card, specific to it, was too tall for the case. I told my boss it wouldn't work because the riser card was too tall. The Riser card had 3 ISA slots instead of 2 like the old one. My boss said just cut the top one off. He put the riser in a vice and cut off the top ISA slot with a Skill saw. I put the newly shortened rise card in the case. Turned on the computer. And the tested out the 2 remaining ISA using an internal modem. Some how that motherboard and cut riser card worked.
My worst fail would probably be the time I (many years ago before I understood computers as well as I do today) used glue to attach a CPU heatsink and fan to the CPU. That plus the decision to use the heatsink and fan from a Pentium 166 MMX on a 300MHz Cyrix part is probably what eventually killed the CPU.
These days I only use proper CPU thermal gunk and I use the heatsink and fan that Intel supplies with its chips (or if the chip didn't come with one, I buy the one that Intel tells me I need)
Can't think of any other hardware fails since I am not really a hardware guy.
Once upon a time I locked myself out of a running car and needed to stall it while I walked home to get the spare (pre-cell phone era). I reached under the bumper - unlatched the hood - removed the airfilter - and using a large glove in the carb slowly smothered it (and no - it didn't suck it in - but that was a worry along with a backfire). Neither happened and the car quietly died.
I've also started a car using only a screw driver.
had a southwest technical products 6800...or was is 6809?
it booted..something called fdos off an 8" floppy
had two serial ports, one going to the terminal and one going to the modem. took some 60hz noise off the power supply and got it down
to ttl levels, and put in on an unused interrupt. cloned the OS state (indirection or page swapping?) and had two completely independent shells that would
flip back and forth. everything worked surprisingly well. a user could dial in and use the system at the same time I was from the terminal. i think
we set up some kind of chat. i doubt i added any kind of locking around the filesystem, so was probably just lucky.
Calling this one awesome might be a bit far-fetched, but it sure was a lot of fun.
My friend and I used to visit this pub every day after work. He has a background in electricity, I myself am a software developer. Arduino was new and hot, and ever since we'd both bought one we spent a lot of our evenings at a corner of the bar coming up with new projects and filling every beer coaster within range with schematics.
One night my friend arrived wearing a baseball cap reading "1 beer please", and when he wanted to order he called the bartender and pointed at the text. The bartender smiled, and then commented that the cap was not much of use whenever he wanted to order more than one beer. We all laughed about this at first, but as the night went on he continued to make the same remark, up until the point where it started to annoy us. So we went to our imaginary drawing board and started discussing how hard it would be to "improve" the cap. We ended up betting the bartender a crate of beer that we could add the necessary electronics to be able to order anything between one and nine beers, or a round for the entire bar, using only parts we had available or could salvage from old equipment, and that we would do so within a time frame of two hours.
So a few days later we arrived with the tools and parts we needed. A 7-segment display was duct taped over the "1" on the cap, and soldered to a stripped CAT5 cable. A regular led was inserted at the top of the cap, and soldered to a stripped RJ11 cable. Both cables went through the back of a sweater, and were connected to an arduino which was in the sweater's pocket. We used a basic 12 digit keypad as input, and made it so that pressing [1-9]# would display the number on the display, 0# would cause the top led to start blinking (indicating a round for the entire bar), and pressing * would turn all the led's off.
We finished well within our time frame, had lots of fun showing off the end result, and the sulky look on the bartender's face when he gave us our crate made those the best free beers ever.
I jailbroke a PS3, back when that was possible, while high on Ketamine. Maybe not the awesomest hack on the absolute scale, but it sure impressed my friends.
I've got one of those in the bedroom right now. She's even more fun than the ematches that the ATF worries about. Except not this week - I'm not into the whole vampire thing.
One of my servers made just this weird vibration noise from the combination of spinning discs and fans. I put a piece of the end of a cut off zip tie under one corner of the server. This raised just the one corner of the server by about 2mm, just enough that the vibration sound disappeared!
Friends were chucking out a washing machine so I pulled off the controller board and started reverse engineering it. At first, getting nowhere because I was using a digital multimeter and it just wasn't spitting out enough juice. So I thinks "let's make an AC circuit tester" and went to the junk store and got nine identical light bulb sockets for a couple of bucks. Then to the $2 shop for light bulbs. Could not resist the upgrade to coloured party light bulbs. Hook up a socket - switch on the juice and viola ! Light !
Discovered that there were 5 live circuits: hot water, cold water, water pump, main driver and spin driver. Awesome. Also - there was a sensor circuit for detecting whether the tub was full or not full. I wired it to be both full and not full at the same time, so that the controller wouldn't wait for the tub that no longer existed to fill up/empty out.
The thing resembled an electric octopus on acid, so I drilled nine holes in an aluminium bike wheel and bolted on the light sockets and attached the controller underneath. Found a chain, hook, mounted to ceiling - and bam - laundry time is party time.
(in the jolly days before digital switching)
Friend was diagnosed with cancer and was recovering from chemo in New Jersey some 1500 miles away. She ran a local ballet company for 30 years and it was to be the first time she had ever been away for their Spring performance. I was sound technician at the theater and we cooked up a scheme to telecast the performance to her. There were a several payphones outside, and I grabbed my butt-set and discovered their pairs appeared in the basement. I put a temporary jumper from one across to an unused pair of the theater's Bell 1A2 key system so it would appear up in the sound booth, put a single line phone on it with a simple phone patch (just a 600 ohm transformer, resistor and capacitor) to an output from the mixing board. A co-conspirator drove 30 miles to the house in New Jersey in which she was staying to install another phone patch into a good Hi-Fi amp and speakers. That night just before the performance I hung an 'out of order' sign on the payphone and we dialed an 800 number in the payphone line from the booth and Blue Box 2600/MF'd the call over to the New Jersey house, and patched in. During the performance one of the dance instructors sat in the house whispering into a microphone with commentary on what the dancers were doing, which went into the private mix. Cost of call: $0. It was all in place and ready minutes before the performance began, a real high-five moment because we came up with the idea to do it three hours before.
Also lots of explore sessions which I'd do from an empty conference room at the University because there were two phones there and dial-9 local toll restriction was so easy to bypass (it was 'supervised', inject quick local digits before telco dial tone). One call I made in stages: into New Jersey (Atlantic path) -> France -> Tokyo -> Hawaii -> local number (knowing it would return via Pacific path), then finally ringing the extension of the phone next to it. Literally a call manually routed around the world. Quality was awful, my 'Hello' was audible bit it sounded like 'helawk' some 2+ seconds later.
Also various random numbers to confused persons in Moscow, in Cold War days before USSR direct dial was permitted from the USA. So you bounce through France. Bouncing between UK/France a couple times then back home was loud, echo-y and strange sounding, the Brits liked their trunks piping hot.
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I once soldered two safety pins on my Remco crystal radio science kit and poked them in to the phone wire leading down my parent's house. Found what I was getting for Christmas. Felt guilty and never did it again.
Then there's the intercom feature I added to my 5 tube superheterodyne radio. Speaker also acted as a microphone.
I won't get in to that.
It was a software hack to use macbook touchpad as pressure input device. I could discern 22 different levels of pressures which was more than enough to carry out deformation of free form 3d shapes. I read somewhere that the these days touchpads can easily detect 1024 different levels of pressure which is quite amazing if true.
My potato gun hobby started with: a small drainpipe, a PET bottle, butane gas for refilling lighters, and a big ol' CRT for providing a high voltage ignition spark.
The CRT was eventually slaughtered for parts, and the flyback transformer, a transistor and some resistors now sit on the gun itself. The trigger is a doorbell button.
Sending high voltage through an argon-filled incandescent lightbulb with a broken filament is surprisingly pretty. I used to do this using a transformer form an old oil furnace.
I melted nails and such with the arc from a few 36V power supplies from an old switchboard system. They whistled angrily, but still took the load without crapping out.
I used fabric from an old worn-out pair of pants to construct a vibration-canceling cradle for some noisy harddrives.
Fire fire fire...compliments of bnb... Here beavis...
Goodwill here in Portland gave me a clear plastic slipcover for a sofa for free. I transformed it into a full length hooded clear plastic raincoat that lets my beauty shine in the rain! Clear Plastic Slipcover For A Man Hardware Hack
Most Respectfully Yours Mrs. Cleara Plastique
I took my headphones and spliced them into an rca cable so I could listen to porn audio in privacy from my vcr when I was younger.
At the first pc repair shop I ever worked at, I came into work a little too baked one day. Spent over an hour trying to find a hardware issue, then fumbled my screwdriver and dropped it on the live motherboard. One tiny spark, and that mb was done. Replacing it solved the original problem, so no harm no foul.
I build a geiger counter based on old Russian geiger tubes, and hooked it up to an Iridium satellite transceiver in a mobile unit. Loads of fun!
https://glowingcircuits.wordpress.com/
I built a C64 expansion card containing 256KB of EPROM and 256KB or RAM that I could use via bank switching. As I had no fancy layout tool back then, I had to draw the layout in a paint program (taking into account that the nine needle dot matrix printer had a 216x256 raster!), matching both sides manually, print it, find a photocopier that actually reduced the size by 50% without bending it totally out of shape (I learned the hard way that photocopiers back then had the habit of being a bit fish.eyed when it comes to resizing), make the PCB, and drill a gazillion holes with a hand-kranked drill. Most vias were placed wherver there were wired elements or sockets, but quite a few vias had to be made by soldering a bit of wire on both sides. A horrible hack job in retrospective, but it worked flawlessly from the beginning!
I used my Tandy 1000ex as a tire chock for a number of years. It made an excellent weighty wedge to keep my trailer in place.
And by doing so made it quite usable
I made a SCSI chain with 2 masters (pc and synth) and a zip drive in between. Worked like a charm provided that they didn't access the zip at the same time, which would freeze everything up.
Another time, installed debian on an old alphaserver starting from a boot floppy that was 3 versions behind and made an update of two versions in a single pass, no probs.
- A hardware boot selector knob wired to joystick port (the four buttons input pins) with a diode mesh to encode the 12 knob positions into binary combinations of grounded pins. Along with view bytes of assembly in MBR to boot the right partition and a .com file for DOS to chose wither to start the GUI (Win95/ W3.11) and a shell script under linux reading /dev/port to choose wither start X11 or not. That was a nice hack that allowed me to position the knob to the configuration I wanted at startup and reboot the box without the need to wait for the boot manager menu to popup so I could do something else.
- Rewiring a pin on an ISA modem card to use the IRQ6 (floppy) instead of IRQ3 or 4, this allowed me to serve one more line with my fax server
- The most epic one: I was handing around with older folks who were trying to debug a DOS program protected by a sentinel dongle connected to a parallel port the problem was that the software was using interrupt vector bytes to store the variable so as soon as it started, it was overwriting the adders of the IRQ handler used by the debugger. What I suggested was to to take a pin from the parallel port and connect it to an IRQ pin of the ISA bus. Thus when the software tried to communicate with the dongle (well, actually a couple of hundreds of cycles later), they could trigger a memory dump and analyze the code that was encrypted in memory the rest of the time.
had a MacPlus, wanted to add an Emachines BigPicture (17 inch screen).
I put in a Mac SE logicboard, a HD drive, and PC power supply, and a 200 megabyte harddisk. Attached a 17 inch Big Picture. The Mac hid partly behind the big screen , just poking out enough to provide acces to the floppy slot. Totally awesome combo!
Gaming was great too, since the slowly decaying phosphor made for smooth graphics.
http://users.softlab.ntua.gr/~...
The server...
It also required soldering to access the board's serial port - all in all, very useful tinkering :-)
I was 16 in, 1988-89? Too far back to remember. One of my mom's favorite punishments was to take the phone to work with her. Through trial and error, I found that a 6 inch speaker, wired into the wall will act as both a speaker and a microphone. Also if you have a quick hand (what 16 year old boy doesn't eh?) you could tap wires and dial numbers in a rotary fashion.
I used parts from discarded scanners, dot matrix and inkjet printers to make a Mendel90-style RepStrap.
I rewired a clock radio and a spare spring reverb box to run into instruments that I ran into a guitar amp for use at a noise show. Does that count?
I have 5 of them, all softmodded. They play games from Atari 2600 all the way up to Playstation. Uses XBMC (now called Kodi) to play almost any music and video format. Plugins to aggregate web video. So far ahead of it's time I can't bring myself to disconnect it even though other devices have come along with more power. I still have a modded xbox on all 3 floors of my house, one on every TV. Oh yeah, it plays Halo too.
Chemically speaking electronics are mostly rocks. Silicone and copper are both rocks.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
No I don't speak about fans that like me, I have none.
I made a circuit with a microcontroller (PIC18F4550) that connects to my computer's USB.
My computer reads the temperature of my processor and determines how fast the fans on the CPU radiator should go. The software then sends a byte (0-255) over USB that signifies the fan speed (0 is off, 255 full speed).
I'm pretty sure this feature already exist in some motherboards, but I found it more interesting and fun to do it the "hard" way.
Back in the mid '90s playing Doom and Quake using mouse look, I had a problem that my left hand would cramp up horribly from trying to handle all of the keyboard buttons.
So I took a few old mice, a copping saw, hot glue gun, and soldering iron, and made my own left hand controller.
It resembled two mice going at it. The upper mouse my hand rested on and the first segment of my pointer and middle fingers controlled the top mouse buttons, and my finger tips controlled the bottom mouse buttons. Thumb and pink controlled side buttons.
I ran the mice wires into an AT keyboard (this was either pre-USB or really early in the rollout) and solder them in as a secondary path for assorted keys.
It was the greatest thing since sliced bread IMO. These days you can get quality made left handed controllers like the Nostromo 52 and other ergonomically designed devices, so I haven't been hacking up mice any more ;)
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
USB powered Personal Massage Device
Back in 2009, I lived in a very rural area and the 250 KB/s internet (with ping times that indicated the satellite was somehow further away than the moon). My neighbors that were .4 miles away had a better internet option as they were just around the bend of the mountain.
Anyway, my dad picked up a 7 foot satellite dish for a hobby probject and I got the idea that my 3rd gen iPod touch might be able to pick up the neighbors wifi (802.11G) might be able to pick up their signal.
Sure enough, I boosted my .25 MB/s with Lunar ping times up to to 3Mb/s with maybe only 150ms ping times to the closest speedtest server.
To be fair, propping up a 7 foot satellite dish and holding the ipod touch in the focal point wasn't the best solution, but it was fricken awesome.
I once took an axe to an iPhone 3gs. I was quite a hack.
I had an Aoc LCD computer monitor that I managed to put a gouge in the screen while moving. The gouge stayed there for years while I painfully ignored it. Eventually, I get the bright idea that I might be able to lessen the visibility of this gouge if i took a heat gun and gently melted the gouge... My theory is heat would melt the frayed and roughed up plastic into a much more smooth and transparent surface.
About 4 minutes into the heat treatment, I remembered what happens to LCD screens when you leave them in a hot car. I remembered completely black calculator screens... then I touched the spot on the screen where I was 'melting' and I recoiled in horror from the temperature and imagining I had ruined my screen permanently.
I hit the power button and there is this big black spot in the screen. So I let it cool hoping the color will go back to normal. Slowly the color came back... but the monitor still has a piss colored stain in the middle of any white screen.
A few weeks ago, I made an electronic clock in a small pencil case. My school wasn't very impressed but I still managed to score a bunch of free stuff from Microsoft and Obama wants to meet me. #successkid
He was frustrated that his $2 Mater couldn't two $2 Lightning, so I drilled a few holes and added a tow hook and hitch made from paper clips. He was happy and I had fun. I've made other hacks and fixes since then to get extended functionality out of his toys, or to make non-toys into toys. It's quite rewarding.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
I made a TI-86 (& later a TI-92+) display multiple colors despite having a black & white LCD (picture here of the TI-86). I was sitting in an airport in Alaska trying to program it to do grayscale (by switching between black & white fast enough...many have done that before), but since I did not know how to program interrupts on the Z80 at that point, I just used a delay loop. I found that, for certain values of delay (depends on the remaining battery charge), it produced flashing red & green instead of black & white. More fiddling later showed that it is apparently caused by writing to the framebuffer at 100 Hz (whereas the screen refresh rate is quoted as 50 Hz), & that it was possible to get it to stop switching red & green around between flashes, but apparently not to remove the flashing effect entirely. This is probably because it has to build up stress (like when you poke a bare LCD & it makes that rainbow effect), & then it bleeds out & must be replenished periodically (although I might just have the timing slightly off, even though I switched to interrupt-based timing).
See subject: Done by changing the oscillator/clock crystal from 25mhz to 33mhz (made it 33mhz from 25mhz), then putting on the AMD 486 Dx/4 133mhz chip + adding 256k of L2 cache (was initially 64k only).
* Made it into a MUCH faster system...
APK
P.S.=> Circa 1991-1993 iirc was when I ran that machine & did that... apk
Way back in 1984 I discovered that as long as you were using a monochrome text or graphics adapter (Hercules) you could replace the 14.318MHz crystal with a higher frequency ( I think I got as high as 22MHz for 7.33MHz CPU clock). The software clock would run fast, but it was worth it for the speed boost. About 9 months later companies started offering turbo mother boards that would operate at 4.77MHz or 8MHz switch-able.
Soldered a rather large capacitor on the power side of an amplifier on a circuit board and reversed the polarity accidently.
Plugged it in and hit power. Destroyed the rest of the components around it and stunk up the house for a week
no matter how good it is, it is human nature always wants to make things better
I kludged together a 10 position hard reset controller for a friends multiline BBS in 1991, complete with heartbeat and multiple paths. Any node could reset any other node, but only if a third node agreed the heartbeat had flatlined.
Parallel port -> 5v reed relay -> reset header on motherboard.
I have to say, it looked like an insane spider had decided on an early version of "the web", but it worked for years.
my new pellets stove had broken down. As all the mechanical parts seemed to work, it had to be the electronics. Called in the repair man, who changed the flame sensor. Thing still didn't work. After 2 days, temperature in the living room had dropped to about freezing point, with my partner huddling on the couch in blankets and jackets. So I took the fucking thing apart, checked everything meticulously, discovered that the fucking flame sensor had been mounted with wrong fucking polarity. Fired up stove, called repair man, who apologized and had a crate of beer delivered.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
I had one of those old iBook laptops that had the white paint you could remove by soaking in alcohol, which left the case transparent. But the naked electronics were boring to look at. So I lined the case with some of that thermal sheeting that changes color when it gets hot. My iBook became a a mood ring, changing color depending on how hot the internals got.
I used to drive a Heisenberg, but every time I glanced at the speedometer, I'd get lost.
My best hack was closing the window curtains to get a mouse to work. It quit working one weekend and I bought another one for a few bucks. Next weekend the same problem came up. I thought about cleaning it, but remembered it was brand new. The old cheap mouse had a thin casing and a ball tracker moving wheels with spokes. It worked OK at night, but during the day the sun hit the side of the mouse and lit up the motion sensors, making it unresponsive. Can you imagine phoning a help desk complaining about a mouse problem and they tell you to close the drapes.
Back in the 80s, I had a BBS running on an old XT machine... problem was, every few days the machine would lose its mind for whatever reason, and had to be reset. I had a push-button on the front of the machine, hooked to the NMI pin on the motherboard for this. The problem was, I had to be there to do it.
So, I designed a reset circuit for it. An EE friend of mine helped design a circuit that would detect the voltage spike from an incoming ringl, and increment a counter for each one. If it reached a certain number of rings without the BBS software picking up (settable on a DIP switch), then it would pull a TTL line level down, which I put in parallel with that front-panel switch. A 555 timer would reset the counter after a few seconds, if the call was properly answered.
After putting that circuit in the case and hooking it up, I forget how many months went by before I had to do -anything- to it, it was always up and ready after that.
Like many slashdotters at one time I unintentionally collected a lot of old obsolete computer hardware. I've cut it back a lot in recent years, but it was fun for a time to have a bunch of really old systems and to try and use them for something...
So two hacks:
The first was I got an old laptop from my grandmother (which I only threw anyway this past year lol!). It was an old 386. It ran GEOS. for useful things I did all my COBOL programming in university on it (don't need a lot of power for that), I also did some C coding. Anyway at one point I decided that I wanted to try and throw Linux on it. The problem was that the HD on it was TINY. I can't remember exactly but it was probably something like 5-20MB in size. The smallest current distro of Linux at the time was DSL (Damn Small Linux), however even that was a monumental 50MB in size, far too large for the HD... However I DID have old parallel Zip drive collecting dust also. So I managed to hook it all up and install DSL onto the Zip drive across the parallel port. I tried to boot it, and it was successful. Sort of. Two things, one was that the boot time was 20+ hours until it managed to work its way through the boot process and post an active command prompt. Second was while you could enter commands, and it would process them, each entry would take a couple minutes to work (was probably more like many seconds, but seemed like forever), It was if anything like a simulator of remotely computing on the moon with a time delay. Anyway I was kind of please that I got it to work and I thought it was pretty funny, though it was pretty unusable for any real purpose so it didn't really last very long. Though DSL was probably still loaded on that Zip disk when I finally threw that anyway also.
The second thing was again using obsolete hardware that I just had hanging around. This time in comparison a massive P3 800mhz processor attached to an anchor of a computer in a DELL 4200 Dimension (back when Dell actually made over engineered quality computers). Anyway being one of the guys that was more technically capable I had a friend that had an old computer that had died, and wanted me to grab all their photos and such off the two hard drives and dump them on a newer 1TB external drive. I said sure, thinking it would be easy, I'd just unhook the drives, connect them to my new computer (a Core 2 Duo E4200 at the time I think), and Bob's your uncle transfer the files and done. However of course the drives in question were ATA not SATA, so that wouldn't work. However the old Dell still worked, so I figured I would just do the same, I forgot that I had also messed around with Linux on it as well using the new to then LiveCD's... So I actually didn't have an OS installed on the thing. Not wanting to bother installing an actual OS on the thing, I just hooked up the drives, and booted to the LiveCD. Two things to note, the dives in question were actually pretty large for the time, one was probably 160GB and the other a huge 320GB and they were more less full of crap. The other is that my Dell had (with an upgrade) 256MB of RAM, which combined with probably a 2x CDROM LiveCD OS didn't help much. Anyway, I booted it up, set up the copy process, and waited.... and waited... and waited... and got sick of waiting. So it had a progress bar (two, as I did both at once, also probably didn't help), that very very slowly progressed. I kept waiting for it to fail, but it didn't. I would check on it when I got home from work. In any case about 48 hours later, it finished successfully... So again I was kind of pleased with myself and had a bit of a laugh at the same time and my buddy got to recover whatever crap he had on his old PC...