I mean legal “hardware” hacks of stuff you bought that you made better by hacking it. That’s probably a misnomer because usually these days a piece of hardware is hacked through software - but still I mean legal stuff not related to compromising computer networks and such.
If you’ve hacked anything you’ll probably get my drift.
Mine:
Tivo… I was one of the first to get a Tivo and I’m still using the same one… the first thing I did was add an extra 80 hours… then tivoweb… then caller ID… then weather maps… changed the basic/medium/high/best settings to be DVD compliant and archive certain things to DVD… etc…
B) I just picked up a “one time use” CVS digital camcorder that records in DIVX, built a sweet USB cable for nothing from an old parallel printer cable (got to use my dremel woohoo!), downloaded the open source GPL software to access it, and boom! nice $30 digital camcorder. I also changed the resolution from 320x240 @ 30fps to 640x480 @ 24 fps.
iii) Please keep the morality issues out of this… the hacks I described are completely legal… please start another thread if you must.
So what have you “hacked” to get extra functionality from?
It doesn’t have to be a tech item… even toasters count if you make it do something cool a la Homer, and you you didn’t have to invent it, either. If you found instructions somewhere, that counts.
By this I mean that my homebuilt kegerator also counts…
I “hacked” a dorm fridge by cutting a hole in the top and adding a two tap faucet tower. I then “hacked” the tower by cutting a hole in it and adding a third (stout) faucet, and I acquired a “hacked” 5 gallon pepsi keg that had the center cut out and was welded back together to make a 3 gallon jobber that fits on the compressor shelf.
I hacked my Hitachi M12V router by cutting off the aluminum wings on the base allowing me to use larger router bits without fear of them hitting the wings.
I am thinking of a hack for the same router that would allow me to build a poor-man’s router lift that lets me still use it free hand.
Hacked together an unholy fusion of a spare floorstanding speaker, an old portable CD player, an IC amplifier and a couple of mains adapters to make a music system for my kitchen.
Built a homemade shutter release cable for my digital camera (canon digital rebel, which, I’ve just remembered, has the firmware hack installed as well)
I’ve written a fair number of Perl scripts that it wouldn’t be unkind to call hacks…I remember wasting an afternoon on this
I bought ten 8-year-old Gateway P2 300mhz machines for $15 apiece, scavenged six of them for parts, put all the memory into the other four along with spare hard drives, and networked them together so my son and his friends could play 4-player Starcraft, Unreal and Diablo II games.
I spliced two-prong plugs on my speaker wire and put two-prong outlets on the back of my home-made speakers. I was just goofing around, but it’s pretty cool and messed a few of my friends heads when we were setting up the stereo for a barbecue.
Eupod is a free hack that let me up the volume on my iPod (3rd gen iPods weren’t very loud), you could also change the battery level indicator and a few other things.
I have a Apple II style color monitor (that is, has a video in)
I took a black and white TV, and tapped the video signal out of it (emitter of the video amplifier IIRC) a resistor and capacitor and bingo - color TV!
(later I just used a VCR as the TV tuner - I still use this in my bedroom - my monitor is 20 years old)
My Corvette has a 16 year old shell and frame and internals that have less than 6000 miles on it. It required hacking the ECU to handle the new motor, a signal converter to recalibrate the speedo, and a completely home-fabricated cooling system for oil and tranny fluid. (http://www.millertwinracing.com/coolers )
I got so good at fiddley soldering that I helped the wife wire up some of the halloween stuff…step pads to activate props, blue LEDS to make the skull’s eyes light up
I’m on experiment 2 of 300 in an electronics kit I picked up for the heck of it.
But my favorite is one you can do in ANY car, for free, and will make you a safer driver:
You learned how to adjust your mirrors wrong. Get your seat positioned, look out the rear view mirror to the left most thing you can see about 15 feet behind you…then adjust your left mirror to juuuust pick up where the rear-view mirror leaves off. You will now have a nearly 180 degree view. As a car passes you on the left, you can see it in the middle mirror first, then see it cross to the side view mirror, and you’ll pick it up in your pheripheral vision just as it leaves your side view mirror.
If you like putzing around with stuff, you MUST go check out makezine.com
I de-region locked my DVD player. It was nice to finally be able to watch the DVD’s I’d brought over from Canada!
Now that DVD players seem to be being sold without region coding (my gf’s came without and it’s a name brand model) it’s not so much of an achievement, but at the time it was very neat.
That’s very interesting. Care to give more details about it? I was thinking of doing something similar.
As for me, I built two serial cables for my HP 48 resuing two old serial mice, and drew a few plans for a wearable PC (but couldn’t build it, I had no money).
Okay, this is a pretty cool software hack I think.
back several years ago when I was in school, there were a bunch of ‘qwerty organizers’ around… little gizmos like sideways overgrown calculators that had miniature screens and full letter keyboards on them. My brother gave me one for christmas that had a translator function in it, pretty cool, but nothing special.
Then I found out that they were coming out with models that would ‘interface’ with your PC, and I thought that it would be something pretty cool for writing on the go, so I bought a sharp model from the local business supply store. Once I opened it up, it said that it would save and restore ‘backups of your personal data’ to the computer, and had a form for you to enter in phone numbers on the PC and transfer them to the organizer, but claimed that there was no way to write memos on the organizer and transfer them to a word processor on the PC, which was what I really wanted. “The backup files CANNOT be opened up by any program on your PC, they are just black box archives of your data that can be transferred back to your organizer in case of battery failure.”
Well, I’m a stubborn computer programmer, so I went - “Oh really?” The text that I’ve typed into my memos has to be in that backup file in some format – all I need to do is decode it. At first I was working with visual basic… but annoyingly the backups frequently used some character in the middle of the file that VB interpreted as the EOF. I switched to C++, figured out the basic schema, (there was a binary inversal going on, which had the effect of turning each numeric ASCII code x into 256-x,) also a few special characters and breaks between distinct memos to be worked out. But my converter was worked out and I have been using it for about five years now – I’ve probably written a hundred thousand words on that organizer, easy.
Not bad for a function that was supposed to be impossible!
Now, apparently, QWERTY organizers are no longer being made because PDAs and PDA-ripoff organizers have taken over the market. I’m a big PDA fan, but I love the style of my sharp organizer, how it’s portable and yet bigger and easier to use than any other keyboard device I’ve seen that I can put in my pocket. Not sure what I’d do if I have to replace it. (Might be able to find something similar on ebay.)
I paid $20 for the demo Atari Unit from my store. They paid $1000 for the demo package. The demo unit had a place for the TV and video game like controls built in, and over 40 game chips plugged into the motherboard. I set the jumpers for normal play, added in two buttons to allow selecting all the games on each chip. The demo only played the first game on each chip with out the modifications. The last add on was a ribbon cable and home made socket to allow the play of any cartridge you had. My sisters and brothers were in grade school, so the unit was played continuously for years. That was the best hack I did, not the only.
I had an old PC KVM switch that was set up for VGA and PC-style mouse and keyboard cables, but I had Macs which (back then) used ADB. Raided the discard bin for a couple old broken PC mice and snipped off the cables, cannibalized a pair of ADB cables, and stripped insulation off, did voltmeter testing, and ended up with Mac mouse and keyboard going thru ADB cable, signal passing through spliced-on PC mouse cables, plugged into KVM switch, out the other side via PC mouse cable, and back to ADB to continue on to one of two Macs.
Worked as well as the Mac-specific switchbox I’ve got nowadays. In fact, the only reason I bought this one was that it is an A-B-C switchbox and the old one I cannibalized was just an A-B, and nowadays I need to switch between 3 Macs, not 2. Still have the old switch doing occasionally duty at home.
I wasn’t the one who posted it originally, but just google the CVS camcorder and hack and you’ll find all sorts of tutorials on how to do it. I think, though, that CVS has released newer ones that aren’t as easily hacked, but I’m not entirely sure.
This is a really trivial hack, but way back when Commodore64s first hit the market, I took the TV output from my C64 and ran it to a Radio Shack plug that converted the twin antenna leads to a coax plug. Then I plugged that into a splitter. I plugged one cable from the splitter into a TV monitor, the other into my home VCR’s video input plug. I used some C64 sign software to create large text images, and then recorded the text onto a tape. Voila, I had a title generator for my tapes waaaay before they were affordable. OK, a very primitive title generator, but it was so cheap…