What (non-PC) Hardware Do You Hack? 696
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?"
Not from a Pc but used with it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Rapid prototyping (Score:5, Interesting)
The ancient art of phreaking (Score:2, Interesting)
phones (Score:4, Interesting)
but phones are simple, and don't hold a big charge... although, there's nothing like a good 9 volt zap in the morning to wake you up.
Speedpass (Score:2, Interesting)
Routers (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Rapid prototyping (Score:1, Interesting)
Is that a dishwasher or a Welder? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Rapid prototyping (Score:3, Interesting)
How about... (Score:4, Interesting)
That periscope wigs me out. (Score:3, Interesting)
And it's nice to know that my dreams of Internet toast have been fulfilled.
Anyone with a little skill/determination (yeah, that's a slash, not an "and") can hack anything; I think a more interesting article would be about maverick hacks that actually turned out to be useful. Like, say someone turned a toaster into a door-to-door salesman irradiation device. That would be amazingly useful.
Cheap oscilloscope using sound card (Score:5, Interesting)
EFI (Score:5, Interesting)
Plus on 80/90's GM EFI cars, there's a cruise fuel saving routine that's not enabled from the factory. 29 MPG highway from a 350 CI V8 baybee.
Re:Tree hacking.. (Score:5, Interesting)
We built a fireplace and I wanted something cool for the kids so I took one of the kid-high rocks and drilled a hole in it then epoxied in a brass "peep hole". I put a geode behind the rock and ran some fiber optic cable to it then mortared the whole thing up.
The other ends of the fiber optic cables went to a hidden box which contains the guts of one of these fiber optic Xmas trees (including the spinning color wheel).
Push a secret rock near the peep hole rock and the whole thing turns on - cool crystally color changing happiness. The kids love it. Now on the other side of the fireplace I installed a "peep show" but that's a different story...
Several things, really. (Score:4, Interesting)
I've also interfaced a "radio controlled clock" to a PC to automagically set the exact time.
Turned an old CD-ROM drive into a hand-powered LED toy [fieldlines.com] for my son.
Latest interesting project was to convert a box fan motor into a permanent magnet for use in a wind generator... that hasn't worked out too well so far. [fieldlines.com]
Square Cucumbers (Score:2, Interesting)
so far all my attempts have failed, because these cukes were pretty strong, and they just push through whatever box i can find. maybe i need something completely sealed (from birth/manufactured) to achieve my goal.
Music Gear (Score:4, Interesting)
There are several reasons why this is cool. The components of a passive pickup system are real simple, allowing you to get started easily. As you build up your base of knowledge you can get involved in much more complex projects, like modifying amplifiers, building your own stomp boxes, etc.
Another reason this is a cool field is that you can approach it from different angles. If you're good with calculus you can design and calculate the frequency response of your filters before you build them and know exactly what you're doing. You can design a whole effect if you want and model it in circuit modelling software. In fact, with some programs I believe you can do that and use a wav file for input to get an idea of how the circuit will sound, although I haven't tried that myself.
If you're a physical experimenter kind of a person you can take existing circuits and see, for example, how a tone knob sounds different when the pot is connected to different values of capacitors. Plus, if your favorite part is building, not designing then there is a huge amount of free schematics for things on the web, kits you can order, etc.
It's loads of fun (pun intended?) and you can really individualize your sound (for better or for worse).
Grill (Score:4, Interesting)
a camera (Score:4, Interesting)
When the Hasselblad Xpan (makes 24mm x 60 mm panoramic frames on 35mm film) was first marketed, I drooled over the ads, but didnt have the budget for it.
But I did have a medium format Rolleicord TLR (which makes 60mm x 60mm frames on 120 film), and I knew that a 35mm film adapter existed for it, so I shopped around used camera store until I found one that had kits.
Now the full kit prevents you from not using the 35mm mask (to make 24mm x 36mm frames).
Luckily, the store manager had an incomplete kit, which I got at a substantial discount from a complete (collectible priced) kit.
So I used the two parts that serve to hold the 35mm film canister, and used some medical duct tape wound on either end of a 120 film spool to narrow the space for the 35mm film and voila!
Cheap "real panoramic" 35mm photos.
The only downside is that I have to rewind the film in a changebag or in a darkroom.
Kinder, Gentler Children's Toys (Score:5, Interesting)
Happy Trails!
Erick
Kiddie synths, toys, etc. (Score:3, Interesting)
See Reed Ghazala [anti-theory.com], father of circuit bending.
Coffee temperature? (Score:2, Interesting)
My Hack: Rice/Model car/Motor (Score:2, Interesting)
I took an old remote control car's motor and put it inot a model car to construct my own pulley system to make the car hop up and down just like the real cars on the road with hydraulic suspension setups.
So I took the motor and attached it inside the car (thank you hot glue gun and glue sticks) and hooked up a "T-model" suspension so that when the motor turns it would wind a string up which pulls the suspension "up" towards the car, thus making the car hop.
Then I took my mothers rice cooker power plug and spliced into it to attach it to the motor. Little did I know at that time in my life (9 years old), the value of toggle switches as well as 120v on a motor that was built to handle no more than a 9v battery. Needless to say, instantaneously after plugging in the rice-cooker plug the car hopped once and then the motor sparked like hell (exploded actually), caught on fire, and melted a hole through the floorpan of my model 1968 Impala.
So in the end my mother slapped me for ruining her power cord, I was out a motor and model car, and my room smelled like burning plastic/metal for 3 days. How I miss my innocent days of playing with electricity.
Re:Cars! (Score:4, Interesting)
Would it be hacking if you just took off the shelf (either stock or aftermarket) and installed them? Or would you have to kind of cobble together something that's rarely normally done for it to be hacking?
Xbox, the most efficient device to hack (Score:4, Interesting)
You can turn it into a baby Linux box - Thank God Linux doesn't need much hardware to run well.
You can turn it into a media center - Home brew applications allow for a/v playback of any codec you can think of. Now it even supports HD.
You can turn it into a portable Xbox (Instead of lugging around your games, just put 'em on a HDD)
You can turn it into a homebrew gaming system, with support for stuff like Stepmania (DDR simulator)
You can turn it into an arcade with emulation support for any gaming system that isn't current generation (sans maybe the Sega Saturn).
Well, you get the point. $200 Xbox + $50 mod chip + $100 HDD = $5,000 worth of entertainment equipment
How about the Italian Army rulebook? (Score:5, Interesting)
Within weeks he had his unit all wearing beards.
He arrested a senior member of the army who came back to the base too late after a night out.
And the best bit: In the army one's transport to and from home each weekend is paid for. He lives the other side of Europe from Italy, so they offered to fly him. But no - the rules state that it had to be by train (which takes what, a day? a day and a half?) so he ended up spending just a couple of days a week in Italy...
They sent him home soon afterwards. Nicely. Permanently.
Give this guy a system (of whatever kind) and he'll do scary scary things...
Why the Dremel? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Cheap oscilloscope using sound card (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:phones (Score:3, Interesting)
Damn that thing could move afterwards. I could spin tires from first to 3rd gear. And with that tranny had excelent gas milage for a carbeurated engine. Always thought I would blow the tranny... but the only thing that went out drivetrain wise was the throwout bearing.
That was a fun ugly car... never lost a street race in it after that... and everyone always wondered how I got that fugly car to move like it did
Re:My latest hack. (Score:5, Interesting)
Morning simulator (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm building a clock that includes a wall socket. You plug a lamp into the socket, and half an hour before your set wakeup time, the lamp begins glowing. It increases brightness gradually over a half hour so that by the time you need to wake up, you already are. It's not really a new idea, but it's fun. It uses a realtime clock chip, a microcontroller, and a triac for power control. Maybe not so much hacking...I guess it does "hack" a desk lamp into a wakeup alarm notification device.
Most of my other hacks are computer related; for example hacking a Sandisk 6-in-1 memory card reader to work with ALL CompactFlash cards, instead of only the new ones, with a single wire. I hacked a Nintendo R.O.B. into an internet-controlled pan/tilt webcam mount [macetech.com] in an hour or two. Also ran a small server in college which used fetchmail to check for new messages, and would flash one LED over my desk and one in the door's peephole, so I knew I had mail just by looking down the hall from a friend's room. Lots of random stuff like that. My most recent major project was a small CNC machine, the computer, power supply, and driver electronics housed inside the case of an old Yokogawa data analyzer.
Re:The gf? (Score:3, Interesting)
Jason
Re:Cars! (Score:3, Interesting)
On the other end of the spectrum. 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. He used the switched +12v line from his fog lights for power so he sould not have to run a different switch to the fan. Soo.. when his fog lights were on, so was the P/S fan. I would not have believed if I did not see it with my own eyes.
R/C cars (Score:5, Interesting)
Holy shit that thing was fast. It didn't last very long, was not wired to go backwards, and couldn't turn without flipping over, and took 3 battery packs, but it was fast!
Re:Cars! (Score:5, Interesting)
Foreign hardware (Score:5, Interesting)
This was a fairly sensitive unit, so I wanted to be careful about the voltage. A decent step-up transformer for 110-220V is around $70 here. It's also not as easy as one things to find a decent priced 5V/600mA adaptor (most are about 300mA, and not all that "stable").
I eventually came to the bright conclusion that computer power leads have a 5V connector, so I made an adaptor for the front of my PC. I then removed the original 200V adaptor and simply connected the power lead to a plug that fits in the PC. Viola, my MP3 player now charges nicely and plays tunes while I'm on the go.
Macintosh SE (Score:2, Interesting)
RFC 2324: Coffee Pot Protocol (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite a hack, but crashed a gas pump (Score:2, Interesting)
It was a fairly new self serve gas pump and I had selected the type of gas that I wanted, but then realized that their labelling was confusing and that I really wanted a different type of gas.
Naturally, I applied my problem solving skills to the situation, deviated from the process shown in the illustrated instuctions printed on the side and attempted to re-select the type of gas that I wanted. There was no response! In fact, ALL of the pumps at the station stopped and the operator's terminal inside of the store locked up too!
They had to reboot the system to get everything working again. They told me that nothing like that had ever happened before and we were all just lucky that the manager, who knew how to restart the sytem, was on duty at the time.
I hack my building's elevator (Score:5, Interesting)
After hours, the desk attendant is replaced by a rent-a-cop. These rent-a-cops, to make things convinient for themselves, are in the practice of comandering one of the elevators so that it only moves when they put their key in.
Similarly, the cleaning people, when moving from floor to floor, leave their wheeled carts on the elevator and disable the movement of the elevator to save them the trouble of waiting on an elevator and moving their carts out of the elevator.
This has, at times, annoyed me. So I figured out that if I enter the elevator and [b]hold down[/b] the floor button, the elevator door will close and I will move to my floor.
This mischief of mine is mostly directed at the rent-a-cops because when I enter the building it is easist for me to just grab their elevator and ride it up, leaving them thinking that they didn't set it right.
However, the bigger impact is on the cleaning people, for when I take their elevator, I'm also taking their wheeled carts, and it must be a pain in the butt to try get back that elevator (one of three). I mean, they push a return elevator button, and it's 1:3 chance that it will be the right one.... every time! Because of this, I'm much less likely to hax0rz their elevator.
Re:Why the Dremel? (Score:2, Interesting)
KFG
My MuVo2 for a 4GB Microdrive (Score:3, Interesting)
The other half of the hack was to get my old 1GB microdrive working in the MuVo. It required a reformat of the drive, and a re-flash of the firmware to get the magic files back on the drive.
silly putty timers (Score:5, Interesting)
Hacking rainbows (Score:2, Interesting)
Fix it (cat proof!) in a southern window and you get a large rainbow that sweeps across the room on sunny days. Very nice for improving the mood. (You could buy one, but it wouldn't be a hack.) Great for bugging anal managers at the office.
Re:My latest hack. (Score:2, Interesting)
Bounty may be the quicker picker upper, and thus the superiour technology for spills, but in any application where you are prone to reach for a Handiwipe, rag, dishcloth, etc. Viva is unbeatable.
If you're going to spray Pledge on it, Viva is the one you want.
Even in paper towel technology the right tool for the right job applies.
KFG
Answering machine (Score:5, Interesting)
Until the night when I got someone who just kept redialing the phone to hear all the outgoing messages. (Back in the day when telemarketers did their own dialing, would note interesting answering machines, and then call them up again outside work hours and share them with friends.)
hacked christmas lights (Score:2, Interesting)
now for something completely different (Score:2, Interesting)
A lot can be found by google search.
The traditional applications still stand -- dry ice bombs, sodium thrown in water or on ice (potassium can make some nice explosions), and liquid nitrogen experiments.
Liquid nitrogen can be poured on hydrocarbon based compounds, and as it condenses liquid oxygen the hydrocarbons are oxidized. When everything evaporates, you have a small amount of primary explosive. Liquid oxygen makes fire interesting all by itself, too.
There are less violent chemical hacks. Nothing's better than playing poker with "gold" pennies. Just cook some copper pennies up in a sodium hydroxide solution with zinc, then amalgamate 'em with a blowtorch. Viola, brass plated pennies.
Also, nothing gets rid of hard water deposits like a 50% nitric acid solution. (Hydrochloric acid solutions work, too, and don't eat copper; then again, they don't produce nice red smoke, either.)
Nothing cleans grease like hexanes (often mixed with isopropanol or toluene), so bike chains, etc. become much easier to clean.
As long as you're careful, you can usually get better results than commercial products.
photo hacking (Score:2, Interesting)
PS2 "OK" button presser (Score:2, Interesting)
...which is more than I can say for my /. karma...
What I Hacked (Score:2, Interesting)
3D Scanner (Score:5, Interesting)
Slowed down recently due to house-hunting, but nearing completion. The hardware is ready to go, just need to write the drivers & integration software.
Some other hacks I have done.. (Score:3, Interesting)
* Hacked into the school PA system on the last day of my senior yearof high school. Took an old Peavey 400 amplifier, tied it directly into the 70v speaker line for the schools PA system (having unquestioned access to the theatre at school really helped). 5 minutes before the end of first period, weird noises start coming out the school PA system. Best part was the school principal approaching me later that day and asking HOW I did it, not IF I did it! THAT was fun!
* Probably doesn't count under the PC limitation, but I also hacked TRSDOS on an old TRS-80 Model 1. I discovered an undocumented command in the Disk Basic Interpreter (CMD"#"# if you wanted to know). Not being content with this - and TRSDOS Disk Basic had no way to pull a directory of a disk drive, I took the disk directory command from the TRSDOS system library and grafted it onto the code for the above found command. Result, I had a version of TRSDOS Disk Basic that could do something that Tandy/Radio Shack said was impossible to do - I could call a disk directory from BASIC without exiting the BASIC interpreter.
That was back in the day - truely fun times!
Re:Not from a Pc but used with it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Car LED clock module becomes coffee maker (Score:5, Interesting)
My most recent hack was to make up a short lead that runs from a universal (90-250v) multi-voltage 2A DC power supply. On the 'output' side of the lead is a 12V car 'cigar lighter' socket into which I can plug a Belkin 12V 'car' to 5V USB socket adaptor - now with the relevant leads I can charge my phone or PDA or use anything else that normally takes power from a USB port - this means I only have to take one power unit with me on holiday or on business rather than one PSU for phone, another for PDA, another for digital camera, NiMh battery charger etc.
Microwave Oven (Score:5, Interesting)
So one night, with more free time than is strictly healthy, my friend Steve Roche and I were sitting around microwaving things, when one of us decided to set the time on the clock to "6:66", just to see what would happen.
Fortunately for us, the programmers of the firmware didn't include any validation code, because it let us set the time to 6:66. We sat there for a minute, debating what would happen next. Would it change to 7:07? 6:67? 6:07? 6:67 it was. What would happen, then, after 6:69? Again we debated -- would it go to 6:70? By that time we sort of assumed it would.
Well, it fooled us but good -- after 6:69, it invented a new number . The display read "6:6^", or something like that. We watched with fascination as it made up five more brand new digits, before changing to 6:70.
Damned if it wasn't using hexadecimal.
Then we microwaved some wormy flour, which stunk up the house in some awful, indescribable way, and ended the microwave experiments for the evening.
Re:How about the Italian Army rulebook? (Score:2, Interesting)
"Hacked" my Acura (Score:2, Interesting)
There are a few electrical mods here and there... a power antenna control switch, and lots of security (hacked the power lock module to keep the doors locked, even if the thief has a key). Those damn Fast & Furious kids are always eyeing the thing like they want to steal it, but they wouldn't get far.
I take this car racing a lot (SCCA stuff), and it was a good car to begin with, but now there are many performance "hacks". I have added a turbo and to "overclock" the engine from 140hp/126tq to 220hp/209tq (which is a lot in a 2600lb FWD car with short gearing), upgraded the cooling system, swapped in some stiffer springs, adjustable shocks, sticky tires, a bunch of other stuff, and I'll be installing a custom-built race transmission in a day or two.
I don't even want to add up how much money I've put into this, but it is a lot of fun to drive around a race track... It's pretty satisfying to pass Porsche 911s, and other highly respected sports cars, when they have it to the floor.
Oh, the things you can do with a Grand Caravan... (Score:3, Interesting)
In short: The page is one I wrote up detailing the efforts I've put in, over the last three or so years, to "hack" our minivan into a heavy-duty comms vehicle. Can you tell I take my amateur radio hobby pretty seriously?
It also has an onboard computer with GPS and mapping software, which has saved me from getting hopelessly lost in new territory more times than I can count.
Yes, I have been "first responder" in a couple of traffic incidents. This is why I keep a trauma kit in the back. Haven't had to dig into it seriously yet, and I pray I never really have to, but it's nice to know it's there.
I hack flashlights (Score:2, Interesting)
Some examples:
McGizmo [dmcleish.com]
Mr Bulk [darkgear.com]
candlepower forums [candlepowerforums.com]
Darth Vader Toy (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.cityhall.com/projects/darth/darth_pe
-Monta at cityhall.com
Chapter 2 in the book is my aquariums! (Score:3, Interesting)
Woo Hoo!
Anyway, my aquariums are here [techquarium.com].
The plans Scott used for his book are here [techquarium.com]. They are kind of old and busted (there's no link to them any more on my site) and I think the author did a great job.
Re:Cars! (Score:2, Interesting)
I had the misfortune of driving a late 70's Corolla that had seen far better days. The last time I took the head off (to replace the gasket) I noticed that a couple of pistons had nicks out of their top edges, and some pretty nasty cavitation in their crowns. Not surprisingly, it still blew a lot of exhaust gases out through the crankcase after I got it back together - so much so, in fact, that it blew the oil filler cap out at high revs.
This was remedied with the patent-pending Mr. Roadkill "Moto-Bong". This consisted of about four feet of garden hose running from the top of the engine (where the breather hose used to go) into a four litre oil bottle tied behind the right-hand headlight and about 3/4 filled with water.I managed to get another couple of thousand kilometres out of that car before it finally died.
How about an unlicenced transmitter?
The car after that, a '67 Corona (with the 12R instead of the stock 2R, in case anyone is interested) needed new ignition leads, and I had no money. No problem - Air-spaced TV coax can be hacked to suit. I used Dick Smith W-2082 (as I worked there at the time and got it cheap). Pull the outer sheath off carefully, take the foil and braid off the dielectric, and then slip the dielectric back into the sheath. Sparkplugs have those screw terminals for a reason, and you can make connectors into the distributor and coil easily enough by wrapping the centre conductor around the sheath a few times, and maybe making the end oval with a pair of pliers to increase grip in the sockets you wedge the ends into. The neighbours always knew when I was about to get home, because of the snow on their televisions.
IKEA sponsors furniture hacking (Score:3, Interesting)
This is the most interesting way I've seen a company try to unload their broken bits and pieces.
Some little hacks (Score:2, Interesting)
The rest of these might not be considered hacks per se, just projects.
A project that never got finished would have put a high-power subwoofer amplifier in my car, complete with an authentic '60s fluorescing vacuum tube [xs4all.nl] as a level display. Much classier than the usual LED-bargraph arrangements popular with the kiddies these days. Unfortunately, in the middle of building this I got offered a job and moved 'cross-country, but didn't have room to pack the unfinished bits+pieces and all my electrical test equipment in my little 2-door.
In my college years, I had the position of running an underground student newspaper. An issue was released 'every few weeks' when its dedicated editors were free/bored enough to put one together, but one thing everyone thought would be nice would be to commandeer the University (dorm) cable system after-hours for a student-run movie and wierd footage channel. Starting at about midnight or so, this would replace a lame "information channel" text marquee (which was always several weeks out of date and advertising events whose deadlines had come and gone), that was currently occupying a perfectly good cable channel.
We had obtained keys to the main hub room (also the cable feed room), so inserting the signal was not a problem. The student TV footage was intended to begin late at night, when university officials were guaranteed not to be watching, and would be pre-recorded. This presented a minor problem, however: everyone on the 'staff' had early classes and poor memories, and could not be counted on to get into the hub closet after hours to insert the day's programming and press 'play'. Also, while some students (volunteering for the Computer center) did legitimately have access to these areas, students going in and out of there after hours would arouse unnecessary suspicion from campus security.
It was decided that the best solution was to equip the VCR with a 'remote control' of sorts that would allow it to be controlled over the dorm network via the abundant Ethernet connections available in the room. This would allow for automated starting and stopping as well as manual intervention as necessary; footage could then be loaded during the daytime hours at the convenience of those involved.
Making a VCR Internet-ready is not has hard as it sounds. I simply built a board [cexx.org] with eight simple Darlington transistor circuits (corresponding to 8 data pins on a parallel port) to drive the important VCR function buttons via this port. A simple Web server (disposable '386) running a perl-based CGI interface allowed Web-based control of the parallel port bits, which in turn operated the disposable VCR with wires soldered into the appropriate front-panel switches.
The tricky part then became finding controversial/interesting/non-stupid, but legal, student-produced content worth displaying, but that's another story.
My Kitchen Sink (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:My latest hack. (Score:3, Interesting)
Details here (?) (Score:2, Interesting)
UIUC acm SIGarch project [uiuc.edu]
OK, really long time ago... (Score:3, Interesting)
First step was the sensor. I taped a wire to a small piece of aluminum foil on the inside of the door near the doorknob, then another wire to the doorknob itself with a wadded ball of aluminum foil at the end of the wire. I bent the wire so that the two pieces of aluminum foil would touch as long as the doorknob was in its normal position, but if you turned the knob the contact would be broken.
This and an AC adapter that produced 9vDC were connected to the relay in a Radio Shack 200-in-1 electronic project kit, and wired such that the relay would remain on as long as the circuit was closed, but switch off and remain off once the circuit was broken.
To the other side of the relay I connected a battery pack holding four C-cell NiCd batteries, and the tape recorder for my Radio Shack TRS-80 Model 100 laptop computer, such that when the relay switched off, power would be applied to the tape recorder.
On the computer (with its own AC adapter) was a BASIC program I wrote. The first thing it did was attempt to read a file off the tape. To do so, it would switch the tape player on, wait until it found the file it was looking for, read the file, and switch the tape off.
Let's review. Normally with the doorknob in its normal position the relay remains on. When someone turns the knob, the circuit is broke and the relay switches off (and remains off until it is reset, regardless of the knob). When the relay switches off, power is applied to the tape recorder. The computer has been waiting to read a file off the tape. The first thing recorded on the tape is the the file the computer is looking for. The volume is turned up on the tape recorder so that when the tape is played, it makes a really obnoxious screeching sound for a few seconds - this serves as an alarm. Think of the sound of a modem handshaking; same idea.
As soon as the computer has finished reading the file off the tape, it logs the occurrance and displays a message on the screen with a timestamp. It then switches the tape back on. After the file on the tape is a recording of my own voice saying something - I don't recall what. The computer waits an appropriate amount of time for the message to finish playing, then switches the tape off. The computer then beeps, and keeps beeping every few seconds for awhile, then shuts up.
So there's the alarm. Now I just have to be able to get in and out myself without triggering it. Getting out is easy - since the relay circuit is only broken by turning the doorknob, I simply open the door, reset the alarm, and close the door behind me without turning the knob. To get in, though, I need a way to deactivate the alarm from outside (before turning the doorknob).
So, I make a keycard. I use a small piece of cardboard, with more aluminum foil and masking tape. I tape non-touching strips of aluminum foil over one edge of the cardboard, connecting two of the strips together and leaving the others not touching. I now have my keycard. The card reader involves more of the same materials, mounted on the wall outside the door with a piece of telephone wire running to it. When the card is pressed against the reader properly, each strip on the card should touch a strip on the reader. The two contacts on the reader that correspond to the two that are wired together on the card are wired in parallel with the doorknob sensor, so that holding the card in place will maintain the relay circuit while opening the door. Some of the remaining contacts on the reader are wired in parallel with the other side of the relay so that if they are shorted together, the tape player will come on - the idea being, if you try to forge my keycard by shorting random contacts, you'll trip the alarm instead of disabling it. I don't recall how well I actually got this working, but since nobody forged my keycard, it wasn't an issue.
So there you have it: my burglar alarm hack. One of many, actually, but this was certainly the most interesting.
HP Photosmart 618 Camera (Digita OS) (Score:1, Interesting)
Hacking cars - from a Car Nut (Score:4, Interesting)
On the other end of the spectrum. 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.
The power supply fan would do very little, since it drives so little air. Most throttle bodies and carburetors are rated in the hundreds of CFM, most small fans like that are rated in the dozens of CFM. If anything, it would reduce the engine's peak power.
At partial throttle, the fan will drive a small amount of extra air into the engine meaning that the throttle won't have to be open as far for a given amount of power.
At wide open throttle, the engine's vacuum would massively outstrip the fan's flow, and the engine would end up dragging the fan. The energy required to spin the fan would be coming from the fast-moving air trying to enter the engine. The restriction and turbulence caused by the fan would reduce the volumne of air drawn into the motor, and therefore reduce the peak wide-open-throttle power.
People who do stuff like this - and, in fact, try to "tune" a Honda or other silly front wheel drive car - almost universally know nothing about cars, then try to take on Mustangs and Camaros which are, by virtue of large displacement V8 engines and rear wheel drive, far more suited to the task of stoplight confrontations.
If the guy were serious, he'd install a very high volume fan. Vacuum cleaner fans have been used as "electric superchargers" but require 120V in your car. Turbochargers and superchargers are far more reliable.
If he were really serious, he'd yank out that cute little 4 cylinder engine and transaxle and sell them. Then he'd cut out the rear suspension, weld perches onto his roll cage to attach the leaf springs or ladder bars. He'd stuff in a nice differential and rear axle (probably a Ford 9"), and stick a big V8 and automatic transmission driving the rear wheels. Personally, I'd stuff a big block Mopar V8 in there, but an early 1980s Buick 3.8L V6 would keep a Civic street drivable, getting over 25MPG and turning reliable low 12-second 1/4 mile times.
If he did that, then he would have a serious car for stoplight confrontations.
Hacking cars? Check this out, it's my buddy's 1986 Chevette [glowingplate.com]. He cut off the back end of the car and welded on the tailfins of a 1956 Dodge Custom Royal. Together, we built a Chevette Targa [glowingplate.com]... it had started out to be a hard-top convertible, but we never finished it.
Me? I do engine swaps [glowingplate.com]. Then I go drag racing [glowingplate.com].
Re:I hack my building's elevator (Score:3, Interesting)
That's the way "service" mode works on pratically all elevators.
On a lot of elevators, you can do something else similar: hold down the button to the floor you want to go to (the whole time) - it will bypass floors with people waiting. I believe this is intended to be used for emergencies...
People build 400whp 1.8L hondas. Stickers optional (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.honda-tech.com
I'm in the process of connecting a fan to a civic engine - a nifty fan called a turbocharger that spins at around 100,000 rpm, give or take. Estimated wheel horsepower at 10-12psi of boost is 210-240 from a 1600cc D16Y7 engine. Starting horsepower was 107 on a good day.
To accomplish this I'm using a secondary fuel system running a custom intake manifold with 4 extra injectors. The injectors are controlled by a atmel AVR microcontroller programmed with the port of GCC. (avr-gcc, www.avrfreaks.net). How's that, a little piece of GNU in there even. Ignition retard under boost is being handled by an aftermarket controller until I get that figured out.
Obviously the engine internals have been upgraded with forged components that are designed to handle more load. The total cost of the engine and related parts is under $5000 though - with me doing the labour.
Ultimately I want to do my own EFI system based on a real RTOS like QNX. I have done smaller EFI systems for less complicated engines. People have reverse engineered the honda ECU, although in my experience, it's more trouble than it's worth. Check out the systems offered by Hondata, and it's open and free friend, Uberdata.
Anyone can make big numbers with 5 liters of displacement. It's a little harder with less than two. The reason you want more power from a small package isn't just elegance though; lighter cars handle much, much better than heavier ones.
There are very, very fast civics out there. Be careful who you laugh at if your girlfriend is riding with you.. but oh wait, this is slashdot.
Apple II Printer to Linux Parallel port. (Score:2, Interesting)
Some day I may try to get the code to actually compile so I can run the game on my Nokia - but I'd have to mess around with getting the graphics files over as well if I want to build the game.
Amazing to me that 25 year old floppy disks - and all the hardware still work - including my Amdek Color monitor. As best I can tell, only the 16K expansion card has problems, and that might be fixed if I could find a 4116 (?) 16Kx1 chip or two.
Apple RULES!!!
Laser mouse project (Score:2, Interesting)
I want to set my box up with a projector so I can use the same screen to browse the Internet, email and watch films/TV. Saves space, looks cool, impresses the girls. Figured I'd use a wireless keyboard and mouse but then also thought maybe I could do better than a wireless mouse.
First thought was a light gun. ACT do one which works as a mouse with a CRT but they don't work on projectors. So that's out. But I have a cunning plan....
I'm intending to set up a small camera on top of the top of the projector, pointing at the projected image. I'll use 4 lasers to pick out the corners of the projected desktop image, which can then be used as reference points relative to the desktop. My mouse will be a modified laser pointer connected by USB to the wireless keyboard to give the mouse button information and power.
I'll need software to locate the spots, fix the 4 reference spots relative to each other and then use their locations to triangulate the projected spot from my pointer. It'll then need to use this information so that the pointer on screen moves wherever the pointer spot goes (ideally I'll put the on screen pointer down to a pixel so the laser spot *is* the pointer).
Anyone done this already? If so is there code available to save me some time? Any thoughts on improvements to the plan or problems I may not have thought of?
(Unsurprisingly I'm running Linux!)
If you don't like my hypotheses, what are yours? (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for your reply. You are assuming that I don't understand the American woman culture, but I do.
I learned by asking my women friends a lot of questions. I never found any American men who had much insight into women. However, women have insight into women, and I put a lot of effort into learning from them.
I got started when my woman friend at the time, with whom I was living, told me that there was a man in one of her college classes that was extremely popular with women. I asked her, and she said that he was not especially good-looking. I asked her how he did it. I spent a lot of time thinking about the answers.
I never used my knowledge for negative purposes. I always thought I would like to get married, and I was looking for a wife. Obviously, to find a wife it is useful to be popular with women. However, there have been at least 100 women who wanted to go to bed with me for every woman who was serious about wanting a life partner. It is a compliment the first 30 or 50 times a woman wants sex with no relationship, but then it gets annoying. It was either Chuck Berry or Jimi Hendrix who began to try to discourage women by saying, "I can't make your body feel as good as my music makes your mind feel." I'm not a musician, but I sympathize with the problem.
Along the way I learned a lot about things in which I really never had any intention to know. I learned about the inside of the modeling business from two women friends who were models. I learned about the beauty queen business from a woman friend who was a Miss Texas contestant. (She didn't win the Miss Texas title.) I learned how to cure yeast infections. Once a woman friend called me and told me that she had gotten pregnant by a man who was not her husband. (Not me.) She asked me if I knew of an abortion clinic. You know that you are being accepted by women when they treat you as a sister or as another woman friend.
After many years of looking for a wife in the United States, I began to think it was impossible. There were many women available to marry, but none who had the necessary skills or commitment. I spent time with Thai women, but most of them were too silly. I spent time with Iranian women, but they weren't nice enough to men. I found an interesting French woman who was not serious enough.
Finally I found and married a Brazilian woman. She's sleeping a few feet from where I'm sitting. (I slept too much yesterday and woke up early, and decided to check Slashdot.) I am very happy with her. Like most Brazilians, she likes to joke, but she can be serious when it is necessary. Unlike many Brazilians, she is careful with money, and good with details. She is, in some ways, better than me at repairing computers, because she has more patience. She's studying C++. She's good at web design, but doesn't have much time to do it.
It is interesting to note that my comment [slashdot.org] (#8380610, grandparent to this one) was modded up to +5 during the time Europeans and Asians were reading Slashdot, and is now at +4 now that American men are awake. People from other countries generally recognize that all is not right in U.S. society.
If you are a scientifically-minded person, you will realize that, if you reject my hypotheses, you must then try to make your own:
If everything is okay in the U.S., why is the U.S. the most obese nation in the history of the world? Eating when not hungry is an indication of unhappiness.
Why can't the U.S. government find a way of living in the world that does not involve violence?
Why does the U.S. government spend more money on weapons than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Why does the U.S. government spend more money on spying than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Why does the U.S. government have a higher percentage of its citizens in prison than any nation in the entire history of the world?
Somet
Re:How to hack the American woman culture. (Score:3, Interesting)
> what is the average U.S. male like?
Confused. Most don't realize the women are playing with them because it is exactly what they see on TV. Take average American TV shows -- take about 85% of the TOTALLY unbelieveable crap out and what is left is the common view of reality. Far from the truth.
> Does he play mind hockey with emotions?
Not usually, but there are many who do, of course.
> Does he realise that the average U.S. woman is trying to unbalance him?
The women sometimes don't even realize this because (again, TV) they get a constant input of B.S. on "how they are supposed to act." What is even worse than television are the countless magazines that tell women they have to dress like whores to get attention from men. Total crap. You (err, not you, unless your female) can be wearing dirty, smelly smeatpants with huge holes and a Cisco T-Shirt, and some men will still drool. These magazines also seem to stress that sex is the answer to making anyone happy (except themselves, but that is never mentioned). They have articles, written by women who know nothing about it, telling other women how to "keep a man." WOMEN, IT'S NOT THAT HARD TO KEEP A MAN HAPPY!!!
> I find it hard to believe that people would stay together with the women you describe
So do I. That's why about 25% of American marriages end in divorce (the commonly thrown-around statistic of 50% is completely bogus and unattributable, but 25% is still pretty bad).
> Where are the intelligent emotionally-strong hard-working women who are upfront and honest?
Women are certainly not upfront because they are told that it makes them pushy & unattractive. Bull. There are probably about 200 of the "good ones" you describe in the country. They are married to the redneck guys who are assholes, but stay with them because they keep thinking that they will eventually become nice.
America is a very scary place for the lonely.