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?

Comments

Hole Punch - Double Sided Floppy

[Rob Riggs]

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.