What (non-PC) Hardware Do You Hack?

Lis writes "Mike Langberg at the Merc News interviewed Scott Fullam - Scott wrote the book 'Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks' which includes things like a video periscope for your car, an Internet toaster, Cubicle Intrusion Detection Systems, and talking Furbys. (Instructions for the toaster and coffeemaker are up on the O'Reilly site.) Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do. Ok, you'll probably void your warranty in the process, but you could end up with something even better than the original. Or not. But it's just gotta be interesting. So what have you hacked, and into what?"

Lately, furniture...

[bc90021]

...with all the people I've helped move lately, I've become somewhat of an expert on taking apart and putting together beds, desks, entertainment centers, large tables, small tables, etc...

The gf?

[Gr33nNight]

Does 'hacking' into my girlfriend count?

Aibo

[PseudoThink]

I hacked my Sony Aibo into its component parts. Worthless f'n robot.

Furby's

[TubeSteak]

I performed surgery on my Furby and created a secret stealing super agent. Muhahahaha...

Tree hacking..

[BigZaphod]

I once painstakingly hacked a rotating fiber-optic Christmas tree and removed the parts that made it rotate. Does that count?

Cars!

[Matey-O]

I know a distressingly large amount of trivial about what USED to be my 1989 Corvette. Just about the only stock part left is the distributor _shaft_.

Once I hacked an old cd player...

[Anonymous Coward]

...into a million peices with an ax.

Re:The gf?

[irhtfp]

Yes, yes. We all know you've built a girl robot for the prom. Haven't we all? But it's not really hacking if you built it yourself. Now can we stay on topic?

Let's just say ...

[burgburgburg]

nitrous-oxide powered nose hair clippers and leave it at that (and way over there against the wall if you know what's good for you).

Is it staring at me?

Re:The gf?

[Cruciform]

*cough* She wasn't that secure in the first place.

Re:The gf?

[w3weasel]

DUDE, include some hints... I wanna hack my gf so as to disable the "bitch and moan" mode

my coolest 'hack'

[JeanBaptiste]

its non-technical, but i think it counts for a hack.

When i was in high school there was a particular big dumb jock that would pick on me. It was a catholic high school. So I stole some official letterhead paper from the guidance counselor's office and an official envelope with the school info on it.

I proceeded to type up an expulsion letter on the letterhead paper, saying he had been caught masturbating on campus, and as a good catholic school we could not allow that. I made it sound much more official. Had my friend forge the dean's signature, and that if they (his parents) had any questions about it, feel free to call (phone number included).

Then I mailed it.

he never found out it was me that did that, and he did still pick on me... but i'd say I got even.

Re:Animal...

[ALecs]

Actually, they've already used a monkey for "Managing the Windows NT Registry".

No - I'm not joking either. :)

My latest hack.

[IvyMike]

I had some cobwebs up in the corner of the tall "cathedral" ceiling of my apartment. I zip-tied my Swiffer to a mop handle, making an extra-long Swiffer.

If you don't think this is a good hack, you have no imagination.

Does this count?

[zhrike]

Running solar ignitors to a couple of bottle rockets mounted to the grill of an old Buick Regal, connected to a switch panel in the front?

Ok, maybe not, but it was fun to have bottle rocket launchers in the front of the car.

Once in a while, they actually went where you wanted them to (the rockets, not the car).

Possibilities

[Faust7]

Almost any kind of consumer electronic equipment can be modified to do things it wasn't intended to do.

*eyes electric massagers*

You don't saaaay....

Re:The gf?

[kfg]

Only if she's a RealDoll.

KFG

Wall mounted alarm clock...

[gertsenl]

It's easy, with just a standard quad-NAND integrated circuit, to make your alarm clock wall mounted.

1) Hold clock up by power cord, against wall
2) Position IC over power cord
3) Apply hammer to IC, driving pins 1-16 into wall.
4) Connect ground, Vcc, and inputs as desired.

Re:The gf?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see getting rid of the bitch subroutines, but isn't moaning good? Oh hell, I forgot that I'm a geek; it makes no difference either way.

Re:phones

[operagost]

phone's are my personal favorite, they are easy to do and you don't get shocked too hard

That's my primary criterion before beginning a hacking project - will the electric shock cause permanent injury or death?

Re:xbox

[toasted_calamari]

I don't see why it wouldn't, it certainly qualifys as hacking.

I hacked a Dakota digital camera.

10 bucks for a blurry 1.3 mp camera, how could I not hack it?

Re:Lately, furniture...

[pangian]

I don't know that following the IKEA directions counts as hacking.

Now if you used all of the leftover pieces that for some reason you didn't "need" in the rebuild to create pulley system that saved you some trips upstairs (or an IKEAbot to do the work for you)... now *that* would be hacking.

you mean like...

[nineoneone]

I hacked several functioning consumer electronic devices into fully-working doorstops?

Re:Furby's

[Anonymous Coward]

Mmmm, I had one of those annoying Macarana Gorillas, shaved all its hair off, to form a far more macabre Macarana Bits of Randomly Moving White Plastic, scared the bejeezus out of my cat.

Re:Rapid prototyping

[SethJohnson]

This pulled directly out of geek42's ass. Avoid the smell by moving on down the page quickly..

I suppose it could be true if you weren't too specifc about what 3d shape you ended up with at the end.

Re:Women

[flewp]

I usually find it to be the opposite. After I hack some women in a dark alley under the cover of night and shadows, her limbs become detachable.

G.I. Joe centrifuge

[lone_marauder]

It was my first electric motor. I was about 9 years old and had extracted my first electric motor from some doomed toy, and figured out how to attach wires manually to the brush leads and a battery and make it run. Unfortunately, as with most things I played around with at that age, I didn't know much about cause and effect.

I believe the motor was originally driven by two 1.5 V AA batteries, and I was using a 9V. (Hey, it's easier to connect!) My plan was to use it as a climbing winch, enabling Snake Eyes (tm) to sneak up on the evil Destro(tm)'s clifftop lair. I tied one end of a 3 foot piece of sewing thread to the motor shaft, and the other to Snake Eyes' left hand. I wedged the motor under a book and connected the battery to winch him to the top!

Little did Snake Eyes know what kind of evil Destro had in store for him. Little also did I know - it happened so fast that I am still fuzzy on some details. At some point, Snake Eyes stopped standing on the ground at the base of my dresser and entered into a state where he was spinning at insane velocities about the motor, attached by a tangled 6 inch piece of thread. I have no memory of a transition between these two states.

The moral of the story - if an evil overlord leaves an electric motor conveniently located for you to winch your way up the cliff face to his mountain fortress, don't use it!

My best "hack"

[rongage]

The best hack I did personally, was to recode the eprom on a Tranz-330 Credit Card terminal. Was able to get the terminal to constantly display the following lines:
Answers: $1.00
Answers w/thought: $2.00
Correct Answers: $4.00
Dumb Answers still free
Visa/MC Accepted...

Sold it on ebay a few months later for like $80.00.

Re:my coolest 'hack'

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I have a situation with a particular arsehole at work who actually complained to higher management about me using *his* coffee up, so I take revenge when ever I feel like it.

I hack into his Windows machine and kill the WinLogon process. Then I jump up and go make coffee - looking all innocent! It takes 5-10 seconds before the machine just reboots. He's reinstalled Windows 4 times so far and changed most of his hardware. I let it go for a week or two between reboots to give him the impression that a rebuild actually helps things.

I try and time these events with his lunchtime game playing or when he's lecturing a junior on how good his software is. (During his good programming lectures I selectively kill OLE processes, causing his app to fail with access violations.)

Pathetic I know, but boy it cracks us all up.

Re:my coolest 'hack'

[mtpruitt]

In a similar vein, I had an Indian friend who, even though he was a literary genius, had difficulty with the more mundane features of life such as paper work. The kids in the college dorm forged an email from the university's Dean of Students saying that, unfortunately, his student visa had been revoked because he had not completed the forms properly and to report to the consulate as soon as possible to avoid being deported.

He screamed very loudly.

Re:The gf?

[errxn]

So it's hard coded? Figures...

Re:The gf?

[Mmm coffee]

Well, the fastest way to a girl's heart is through her ribcage...

squirt gun

[doofus1]

When I was in college, my friend and I mounted the nozzle from a squirt gun into the grill of his honda civic. We attached that to the windshield wiper supply line and installed a valve under the dash to swithc from windshield wiper mode to soak unsuspecting pedestrian mode. Not very difficult, but man was that good for days of stupid fun.

Re:The ultimate hack....

[kin_korn_karn]

rumor has it leia did once

Re:my coolest 'hack'

[3waygeek]

Another good Windows hack -- delete/rename the HKLM/Software/Microsoft/Windows NT/CurrentVersion/WinLogon/Userinit registry value.

This allows the user to log in, but he'll be logged off immediately since userinit.exe is the program responsible for launching the Windows Explorer desktop. The only way to repair it is with a boot disk or by editing the afflicted machine's registry remotely.

Electric Magnets

[Anonymous Coward]

This was sometime in 3rd or 4th grade when we were taught how electic magnets are made. So I came home took a wire, wound it around a nail and then connected two ends of the wire to the power outlet. Poof. We lost current in the whole building (we were in the second floor of an apartment complex, the owners lived downstairs and there was only one fuse for both the floors).

Re:Tree hacking..

[tgeller]

Man, I wish you were *my* dad.

Re:The gf?

[goldmeer]

I heard that she was already in promiscuous mode when you met her...

Re:my coolest 'hack'

[stratjakt]

It's FUN working in an office full of old time "techies" and "programmers" who don't know shit about a modern PC..

My old standby is "NET SEND * ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!" or a "WILDCAT IS ON TEH SPOKE" or a "CRAMAK GONNA FIX IT!" or other such geek in-joke nonsense.

Noone knows where the messages came from (I change my computers ident to something like "CPU-CORE" to make it look official).

The best use of it was when a kid who worked here for about a month was fired, I changed my PC's name to his login ID, and started NET SENDing messages like "FIRE ME, WILL YA? YOU'll BE SORRY MOTHERFUCKERS!!!"..

They pulled plugs out of the T1 demarq spot, unplugged all the modem lines, disabled the WiFi module we use to test our mobile apps, but the messages persisted!

I could hardly keep a straight face as people were bursting into my office, panic stricken, saying "He's in our computers!! He's going to delete all our files! How's he getting in! How do we stop him?"

Re:my coolest 'hack'

[Anonymous Coward]

If I had mods point...

Tools

[phorm]

Possibly, though it seems you might need a bigger tool for this job, or so I've heard...

Re:Possibilities

[mangu]

"eyes electric massagers"

I once hacked a sybian [sybian.com] into a sanding machine.

Re:G.I. Joe centrifuge

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, talk about bringing back memories! Now here's what I dealt with -- knowing those AA batteries made the motor run fast, and a 9V battery made it run faster (and a tad hotter), I thought -- imagine how frickin' well it would work if I plugged the wires to a wall outlet!!! Hey, as a kid, these things made perfect sense -- don't even deny it!

Posting as AC lest the mom finally finds out why there were burn marks and a smell of burnt wire in the living room wall that one day a loooong time ago.

Re:phones

[youngerpants]

Slightly OT

I once bought an original Pole Position II arcade off ebay (about 120). After a few months the screen went a bit screwy, so i found a newsgroup concerning acade repair.

The people on the group were really helpful and were talking me through fixing the problem... however I kept the arcade plugged in so I could see the results. FZZZZZZPT! I get knocked about 5 foot, manage to crawl to my laptop and type very slowly "brb, ambulance"

my gf was first shocked, then scared, then calling me "pathetic"

Re:phones

[Richard_L_James]

That's my primary criterion before beginning a hacking project - will the electric shock cause permanent injury or death?

Hey, so what permanent injury's do you have? As clearly your not dead.... erm are you?!????

Re:The gf?

[StarfishOne]

Please, let's skip the jokes about 'port sniffing' here... /. is about stuff that matters after all ;)

Re:Tree hacking..

[JRootabega]

I did that for my kids once, too. Lessons learned: 1. Don't put the peephole on the inside of the fireplace. 2. Kids are fuckin whiners.

Re:Does this count?

[sharkey]

Once in a while, they actually went where you wanted them to (the rockets, not the car).

Yeah, not much chance of making a Buick Regal go where you wanted it to.

Speak like the Devil

[Chagatai]

I saw a comedian the other day on Comedy Central who made fun of the good ol' Speak & Spell. He could almost duplicate the voice from that wonderful learning tool and said things demonically like, "A, B, C, D, E, F, G... I will eat your family." Very funny skit, but it also reminded me of a "hack" I did to my Speak & Spell when I was 6 or so that awakened the true demon of the dictionary.

I had one of the original Speak & Spells with the raised-button letters (unlike the later models that were completely flat). On all Speak & Spells there is a "Code" mode where up to 8 letters can by typed and transposed into a code that only people with other Speak & Spells could decipher (ROT13, or something else very weak). One day I grew bored with this mode and leaned on all of the buttons at once. This caused the multi-directional character LEDs to all light up like 8 little boxes. I then started pressing the apostrophe key. Each box would turn into an apostrophe. Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop... Boop...

As I pressed the apostrophe key one more time to erase the last malformed chaacter, I awakened the demon within the Speak & Spell. All of a sudden the Speak & Spell went into the "Say It" mode where it would teach particular words. Normally, it would show a word like "OCEAN" and the speaker would state, "Say it... OCEAN." But in this crazy mode I had put it into, the speaker would shout incoherently. "Say it...HUGAXCKHUAAAHRETA!!!" It would keep on doing this, screaming incoherently until the enter key was pressed, at which time it would pick a random word and shout it out. "MOTHER!"

It definitely made my parents laugh, and the same Speak & Spell works to this day with the same bug. Keep in mind that the Voyager space probe also had less memory than a Speak & Spell, too...

Re:Kinder, Gentler Children's Toys

[djh101010]

I took the toys apart and would find the right value resistor that would top off the speaker volume

Wow, that's a lot more work than putting a piece of tape over the speaker grille.

Re:phones

[simetra]

Yeah, you had me until gf. Nice try.

Re:The gf?

[Nykon]

I tried accessing his girlfriend but apparently it had exceeded the maximun number of simultanious connections :(

Re:Cars!

[G27 Radio]

I knew a guy with a Civic that put a 12v computer P/S fan in his air intake ducting to "increase" airflow into the engine.

This was a waste of time. Everyone knows that a big wing is the biggest performance boost for a Civic. Also, a Type-R sticker is even cheaper and adds 20HP as well as improves handling.

Washing machine

[JRootabega]

I stick a wad of paper into the latch on the washing machine so I can watch it fill up with the door open.

Re:The gf?

[Richard_L_James]

I tried accessing his girlfriend but apparently it had exceeded the maximun number of simultanious connections :(

Yeah unfortunately maxconnect defaults to 3 connections and right now I'm using 2 of them myself ! ;)

Re:The gf?

[nsebban]

No it doesn't ! Everybody knows how to hack your girlfriend...she nearly has her own man-page :)

Re:my coolest 'hack'

[RaymondRuptime]

Conversely, it can be fun to work in an office of old-time Win weasels, who know nothing about Unix, but manage to have much cooler workstations than I do. A simple amusement is to wait until they have someone in their office (or on the phone) to whom they are loudly bragging about their technical prowess, and then telnet in and run some nice .au like a toilet flushing.

BTW, our Sun systems have the flush.au installed by default in /usr/demo. I always thought this was very considerate of them, but I do wonder what the intended use for it was...

Re:Cars!

[robbleece]

I always thought it was the chrome spraypaint that made you go fast?

O'Reilly's "Girlfriend Hacks"

[Dogtanian]

The pentium flaw could be "fixed" by disabling the FPU in software.

This is akin to getting her drunk to suppress those pesky frontal lobe messages that counter the "I'm horny" feelings with "He's ugly and he reads Slashdot" reasoning.

Actually, this is a bad analogy. The Pentium FPU was disabled because it was giving faulty results. The girl-frontal-lobes are functioning perfectly when they report that you're (*) an ugly geek.

Even hard drive sizes used to be "hacked" bigger by using compression software.

The girl-equivalent being the wonderbra that makes the important things appear larger where it matters (i.e. where you can see them). Unfortunately, like the compression software, you'll eventually see that neither of these methods actually give you more.

(*) No, not you (the parent poster) specifically.... why do people say "you" instead of "one" in English...?

Ultimate hacker

[Popageorgio]

Wow. Heloise could totally own this thread.

Re:phones

[morkeld]

When I was younger, I was very much the mall rat. I spent a lot of time at the local arcade in the mall and got to know the people that worked there pretty well. I remember one of the managers telling me a similar story. This guy was an area manager in the NC area and would visit the various stores throughout the month. He said one of them (I forget which one) was supposed to have a dent in the wall where a repair guy had done the same thing. The dent was supposed to be autographed too! :)

Wireless Camera Trigger

[Calcbert]

Once made a wireless trigger/shutter release for my Nikon SLR camera with a hacked wireless doorbell.

I try not to bring it in carry-on baggage on airplanes. I think they might not like a remote control device with a weird wire leading out of it.

Re:The gf?

[DumbWhiteGuy777]

Only 3? HAH! N00b.

More of a practical joke, but could be hacking

[fatron]

Back when I was in high school, I had a friend who always left his old 1970's Mercury Capri parked at his place of work unlocked with the keys in it. He had just installed a new stereo, but didn't complete the job, so there were all sorts of loose wires hanging from under his dash board. One day when I drove past his place of work, I saw his car there and remembered I had an old ahoooooogah horn sitting in my trunk. I decide to stop by and see what kind of evil things I could do to him. I worked for about 20 minutes sticking the horn under the drivers seat, grounding it to a seat bolt, and connecting the positive lead to a switched terminal on his fuse box. When he got out of work that night and started his car, things got pretty amusing. At first he couldn't figure out what was going on, then once he realized what was happening, he started banging around on the horn to shut it off. He finally managed to get the horn to shut off by knocking the ground wire loose, unfortunately, since power was still running to it, it went off everytime he hit a bump. He drove about 5 miles home with that horn going off under his seat, needless to say, he didn't think it was nearly as funny as I did.

Re:My latest hack.

[NotQuiteReal]

Real geeks have their mom clean the cobwebs.

Re:Coffee temperature?

[nizo]

Even better, a coffee pot that sounds an alarm and sprays purple dye on that person who always drinks the last cup and doesn't make another pot.

Re:The gf?

[aiyo]

Try again in a few minutes.

Re:Lately, furniture...

[buck_wild]

Nope, that would be manufacturing, not hacking.

Hacking, for example, would be more like modifying the tractor and stable to move your fiance directly from her milking station to your bed made of hay.

Basically, modifying something(s) to do something they were not originally designed to do.

Re:Lately, furniture...

[WhodoVoodoo]

I hack IKEA furniture to bits with a rusty hatchet after being hypnotised by the strange flowing shapes and fine swedish construction.

I'm told by my doctor that just talking about it helps, in case anyone else suffers similar symptoms.

Re:The gf?

[Yonkeltron]

Hey make sure it's not cracking into ur girlfriend. but then i suppose it matterds in regards to method of entry. BACK ORIFICE ANYONE?

Re:The gf?

[Luigi30]

Did the girl robot cost $20,000?

Re:The gf?

[dokutake]

It's not good when her mother hears it!

Re:Cars!

[ticklish2day]

You know those demented motorists who drive at 40mph in the fast lane on the interstate? I was looking for a way to get back at those pseudo-maniacs. I found a cute LED display (BetaBrite [betabrite.com]) in Sams. Picked one up, googled a bit and found the protocol. Put together a Java program to interface with the LED sign through RS-232. Placed it at the rear window/windshield, plugged it into my cigarette lighter socket and connected it to my laptop. Stored a few choice messages into the sign's memory.
Now, depending on the situation, I display the appropriate message on the sign. It's fun to see the looks on people's faces! Good to know that if you are a geek, you don't have to take road-abuse.

Re:Medical or automotive N2O?

[Ralph Wiggam]

Why do they sell "medical" N2O at the porno store? I don't see any doctors there, just naughty nurses.

-B

Sorry, but

[ajlitt]

it's not a hack if you followed directions.

You need to hack the sound insulation.

[Behrooz]

You need to hack the sound insulation in the walls around er... wherever you are.

Let me be the first to say it... "OMFG wallh4x!!!"

US Navy Hardware Hack

[danwiz]

When I was in the Navy we were grouped 25 guys to a living compartment. After a drunken brawl, the speaker on the (shared) television got broken. Well, I noticed that there was a speaker mounted on the wall/bulkhead with a four channel selector switch - apparently for selecting one of 4 music channels. Being a very old ship, and the fact that that no one had never heard any sounds come out of it, I thought it was a defunct system.

So I jumpered the TV output into the speaker using some scrounged wire, and a bic lighter to solder the connections. Worked great, however ...

A week later I was walking through one of the other sleeping areas aboard ship and heard moaning and grunting coming from somewhere (disturbing on an all-male ship). It seemed that the guys in my compartment were playing a porn movie and the audio was being broadcast on "channel one" of every box throughout the ship!

It took lots of explaining when I when I ran back and disconnected the sound from their porn movie!

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Disposable Camera Stun Gun

[heff]

I don't know if it's a hack or not.. but on an East coast trip in HS a friend and I decided to take apart our disposable cameras for the sake of shits and giggles. After unwrapping them and exposing the circuitry we discovered by accident that if you charge the flash and then touch the two metal rods going to the flash it delivers a nasty jolt that makes your arm shake - all off a little 9v battery.

Needless to say, we carried that thing around everywhere "stunning" people until we were caught and it was taken away.

Re:I hax0r3d my pacemaker.

[Thomas Shaddack]

Do pacemakers come with a lifetime warranty?

Re:You know...

[Goth Biker Babe]

I just ignore it. It just means that a lot of ugly men with small penises read slashdot. But heh, this is geek culture what else do you expect.

Re:Darth Vader Toy

[Radium_]

Wanna see Darth's head spinning _really_ fast ?
Post your IP address here !

My Amplifier

[Anonymous Coward]

You see my amplifier used to only go to 10, but now I've hacked it so it goes to 11 for when I need that extra boost.

Re:Cars!

[Myrcurial]

Yeah... and you've got a "turbo boost" button and big fluffy 80's Michael Knight hair.