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Hardware Hacking Build Technology

Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack? 258

Posted by timothy from the my-water-into-wine-machine dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Another Slashdotter recently 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?
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Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack? More

Ask Slashdot: Your Most Unusual Hardware Hack?

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  • The ultimate hardware hack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by halivar ( 535827 ) <`moc.liamg' `ta' `reglefb'> on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:11PM (#49824507)

    The paper-clip CD extractor. I keep one in my desk at all times.

    • Do you have any extras you could sell ? I misplaced mine sometime around June of '97 and haven't been able to find one since.

      • June of 1997? Ain't that about the time bill gates started giving away free coffee cup holders? That's probably why lost it. You were excited about the gifts.

    • Re:The ultimate hardware hack (Score:4, Funny)

      by disposable60 ( 735022 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:38PM (#49824719) Journal

      Ah, yes - the Ejectrode.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by TimSSG ( 1068536 )

      The paper-clip CD extractor. I keep one in my desk at all times.

      I thought of my most unusual hardware hack and it used a small nail bent just right and a pair of vise grips to open locked file cabinets. I used to work at a place that sold file cabinets; so, a dozen or so times the user locked the keys inside the file cabinet. Tim S.

    • I used to keep one for the Dell Coffee Cup Holder (tm). Newer computers don't have those anymore. I wonder why.

  • RS-232 WattsUp, Humidity Sensor, RPi 1, WiFi, GPIO (Score:5, Interesting)

    by jddj ( 1085169 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:15PM (#49824533) Journal

    Put it all together for near-real-time track of how much it costs to keep my basement at a given humidity.

    The Raspberry Pi caches readings in a local database in case it can't connect to the web, then stores in a database on my web server. The database ingestion also keeps a 2-hour running average to smooth things out a bit.

    When I set it up, I thought it wasn't working right - I saw sawtooth-like patterns in the humidity data. Turned out, it was working perfectly: the resolution of the humidity sensor was good enough that I could watch the humidity in the room rise until the dehumidifier kicked on!

  • computer/mini golf hole (Score:5, Interesting)

    by james_shoemaker ( 12459 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:16PM (#49824543)

    A company I worked at used to have an annual mini golf hole contest. I hollowed out a computer and ran the ball through it in some 1/2 pvc pipes with the cd tray popping in and out (a batch file from a boot floppy) as a moving obstacle.

  • Guy at work used his laptop as a holder for his wobbly wardrobe. With the expected result. He's now... cough, cough... the director of the workplace.

  • HP28C infrared input (Score:4, Interesting)

    by descubes ( 35093 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:18PM (#49824551) Homepage

    The HP28C had an infrared output, e.g. For printers, but no input. a friend of mine published a book explaining how to connect an IR diode to trigger some unconnected keyboard lines in the calculator. That made it possible to upload programs to the calculator faster. Of course you also needed the matching hack on a PC to send programs. The 48 had IR in both directions.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by PRMan ( 959735 )
      Really? I have an HP 28S. Programming on it was always a pain because there was no way to back up programs. This sounds pretty cool. Wish I had it 20 years ago.

    • That reminded me of something - maybe not really a hack per se, but some creative problem solving. I was at a Mac User Group meeting around 2000 or so, and somebody was supposed to do a presentation. Unfortunately, the presentation was on one laptop, and the projector was on another. Now, in many cases over many years, this is basically a non-issue - there are usually several ways to transfer files. Unfortunately, because of the laptops involved (maybe a PowerBook 5300 and a PowerBook G3?), the options were

  • Sometimes even your hack gets outdated... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Captain Linger ( 869777 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:20PM (#49824559) Homepage
    Back in the early 90s my dad repurposed an old Tandy laptop to effectively act as a scheduled wall timer for a "VCR for tape decks". He used the parallel port to send current to a few signaling contacts on a cassette recorder in order to record Car Talk and a few other radio programs he liked. A patent was considered, but podcasts rapidly became a thing a year or two after he had it working nicely. Not a bit of that statement that fails to make me feel a bit old.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by JazzLad ( 935151 )
      Accidental hack, but in probably early to mid 90's, I took an old analogue VCR (it had push buttons, but if you pulled the plate off the front, there were dials to fine tune), connected it to at least 100" of speakerwire that I ran from my bedroom to the (adjacent) garage & around (the inside of) the garage ... after fiddling with the dials for a while (I was a bored teenager), I found I could occasionally pick up cellphone calls (a rare thing in my town at the time). I thought it was cordless phones a

      • Yeah, any UHF TV (the second knob tuning channels 14-83) could pick up cell phones back then. You had tuned the vcr (you had to program the channel buttons then on cars since there were commonly only 10 or so buttons) up into that range. The speaker wire made an extremely poor but just good enough antenna for you to hear something! From the fading description you were hearing the phones themselves as they drove past your house as opposed to hearing the tower. Had it been the tower you heard they wouldn't ha

  • Commodore Hack (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jim Nickel ( 4135239 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:22PM (#49824579)
    Back in the '80s, I was in Highschool. We had Commodore PETs that we used for our computer class, and being a geek/nerd, I was regularly abused by the cool kids. Well...one year, I got back at them. They were taking the computer class I was in. Commodore gear was "smart" - each peripheral had a small CPU and could be programmed. So...I hacked the code for the floppy disk drives (in assembler) and when it saw a file coming across it would look at the user. If it was me or someone I chose, it would work normally. However, for those unlucky few individuals whom I had decided to take revenge, it appeared to be working, but actually it was formatting the floppy disk. Those bullies lost their year end projects and all their work. I have to admit that I felt no guilt about this incident.

  • There is a story I remember reading once, but can't seem to find anymore. It was about some space probe that was regularly shutting down. The space engineers finally figured out that it had lost a panel, so the sun light could enter inside and that was enough to corrupt the memory that was hit by sun rays. So NASA modified the program so that it "walk around" physical memory, copying its code and data around memory so as to avoid solar rays. I don't know if that story is true, but if it is, it looks like a

    • Re:Memory erased by cosmic rays (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Rei ( 128717 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @04:33PM (#49825305) Homepage

      Oh, god, space technology is full of brilliant hacks. For example, New Horizons' radio. It has two amps connected to one dish, designed as a primary and a backup. But while it was en route, an engineer hit upon an idea to have them both transmit at the same time through the same dish, doubling the bandwidth. Normally that wouldn't make sense, except that the amplifiers have signals with different polarization, and these can be separated back out on Earth.

      Great, except for one problem. The second radio was designed as a backup, they weren't planned for simultaneous operation - so there's not enough power to run them both and everything else at the same time. There's barely enough power to run just the radios - and I mean, it's not like you can just shut off the flight computer to free up more power. Well... actually, that's exactly what they do. When have a ton of data accumulated that they want to get to Earth and no critical science to do, they spin the craft up like a bullet to keep it stable and the dish pointing at Earth. Then they shut down the whole guidance and control system and pretty much everything else on the craft not essential for reading and transmitting data. It stays in this mode for days for a week or two, until all of the onboard data is transmitted, then they spin it back down so that they can do things like take pictures once again.

      • That's pretty neat... I wonder if it would be feasible to just design the whole thing such that some large fraction of the mass intentionally acts as a gyroscope in normal operation?

  • A Fan of Security (Score:5, Funny)

    by LinuxSneaker ( 528349 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:26PM (#49824631)
    I was deployed to Iraq, and we had to download a very large file. Unfortunately, we were working on laptops that would lock the screen after 15 minutes, and then the laptop would loose connection. Considering that the file was going to take 8-10 hours to download, this was not acceptable. I found an oscillating pedestal fan, and I duct-taped a yardstick between the fan and a mouse connected to the laptop. Since the laptop would not lock due to the mouse movement, all I had to do is to place a few books to limit the moment area; the next morning the file was downloaded. I realize this might not be the hack for which you were looking, but since it involved duct-tape I thought it would count.
    • Seems like a great hack to me.

    • Re:A Fan of Security (Score:5, Funny)

      by HornWumpus ( 783565 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:44PM (#49824771)

      Back in Pentium 66 days Intel shipped a bunch of mother boards that made it impossible to disable power management.

      We were shipping a 386 mode extended DOS batch application (long story). To keep the machines from powering down during a run we suggested a workaround. A thermal water cup pecking bird with a paper clip attached to hit the shift key on every peck.

      I sent a copy of the 'tech bulletin' to a friend who worked at Intel, thinking they should make it an official workaround. They never did.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dj245 ( 732906 )

        Back in Pentium 66 days Intel shipped a bunch of mother boards that made it impossible to disable power management.

        We were shipping a 386 mode extended DOS batch application (long story). To keep the machines from powering down during a run we suggested a workaround. A thermal water cup pecking bird with a paper clip attached to hit the shift key on every peck.

        I sent a copy of the 'tech bulletin' to a friend who worked at Intel, thinking they should make it an official workaround. They never did.

        Because you made it all up? Anyone who has actually played with the drinking bird [wikipedia.org] knows that they can't generate anywhere near as much force as the keyboards of that era required in order to register a keystroke.

    • Re:A Fan of Security (Score:5, Interesting)

      by karniv0re ( 746499 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:45PM (#49824779) Journal
      Beautiful. I too was deployed to Iraq. Some Major got bit by the Good Idea Fairy and wrote an Access Database to store all of our flight data. It took him half the deployment to write that. Meanwhile, we were storing all the data in Excel. Once it was ready, he wanted us to import the data to his Access DB. And of course, it wouldn't just import because the table structures were too different. So we were to import all 15k records by hand. As you know, military PCs are all locked down, but AutoHotKey has a scripting language and does not require admin privileges to run, so I spent a week writing a script that alt-tabbed between the Excel sheet and the Access DB and copied and pasted each cell into each form field until the damn thing was imported. Not a hardware hack, per se, but definitely a hack. Got an ARCOM out of that for saving everyone a shitload of time and their sanity.
      • Hmm...

        Out of curiosity, why couldn't you just reformat the records to match the table structure for access then import conventionally?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by plopez ( 54068 )

      Reminds me of a Simpson's episode when Homer used a Dippy bird to monitor the plant.

  • But a bass (Hohner The Jack) modified with two lipstick guitar humbuckers (which I can split or set in series to make it a humcanceller instead of a humbucker). So far nothing too special, right? Well, add a volume and tone control for each pickup. Also not too uncommon at all. Add a blend potentiometer. Yes, lots of controls, but still not a hack.
    The actual hack was an active/passive switch. The active switch switches the output to a battery (two batteries actually, one for the filament, the other to power

    • I modified a fm transmitter for a walkman and a fm radio kit to connect and use the power from my peavy distortion pedal to make a guitar remote. I was 14 or 15 when I did that.

    • I do not doubt your last sentence. Sub-mini tube circuits are often more gimmick than performance. I can see the transistor passing a lot more bandwidth with smaller components.

  • During the age of the "CB" radio craze, I made an antenna out of a fiberglass whip flag that was on my bicycle, mounted the radio on a bracket on the handlebars, used a magnetic mount for the microphone. Rigged up a generator out of one of those bicycle light thingys, to kind of trickle charge the 2 6 volt lantern batteries mounted where the water bottle went. Worked pretty good. Use to get truckers going back & forth across the state on U.S. highway 50 would call me on the radio wanting to see it if

    • I made a remote lock for my bedroom door and a do not disturb sign with an led out of old rc car parts, a broken 8 track player, and random bits I found in my Dad's garage I was maybe 12 that would have been early 80s.

      When I was in college we modified a tampon dispenser with parts from a straw dispenser and other random stuff from an out of business gas station to dispense cigarettes for 10 cents, a pack of smokes was $1.09 back then.

  • Plug in monitor, throw off roof.

    Pretty....

    .
  • Parallel port interface for a SNES control pad. Very usefull for using with SNES and NES emulators
  • I'm not mechanically inclined but I'm looking forward to some of the response. Speaking of APS units, I had to tape a piece of cardboard over the switch to keep the cats from turning it off by stepping on it. :\

  • Normally the game is played with repetitive button pushes, which is dumb. I linked the game, running in an emulator, to a PC based controller, and jury-rigged the wiring to an appropriately disemboweled step counter of a step machine. In general, I'm fascinated by the idea of linking the trappings of compulsion-inducing behavior (a.k.a. computer gaming) to things that are useful IRL. Or in modern lingo, I gamified a useful but otherwise incredibly boring exercise, or sportified an interesting game.

    • When I was a student, I came across some blueprint and made a monitor cable that allowed the use of less expensive, commodity IBM PC compatible monitors on Apple computers, and created a little company to commercialize it. As I lacked funds, or a PC, a monitor or an Apple computer, I borrowed a large CRT monitor from a distributor and brought it to an Apple retailer for the demo via public transportation. So much about budgeting for proper testing and QA. I was lucky with the soldering and it worked straigh

  • We had a server at a co-lo that was locking up on a regular basis. It had a phone line that it used on an infrequent basis with a modem to send faxes. When it would lock up, usually at 4 am, I would have to drive 45 minutes to the co-lo in order to press the reset button. I took an old 1200 baud modem, and cut the traces on the PC board where the off-hook relay connected to the analog phone circuitry, and instead brought those relay contacts out to a set of wires. I hooked those wires into the reset switch

  • MagSafe laptop power supplies (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cerberusss ( 660701 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @03:53PM (#49824845) Journal

    At one time I got a broken MagSafe power supply, the ones that Apple ships with their laptops. Since I was curious how these switched-mode power supplies work, I cracked it open and somehow shorted the big capacitor. These temporarily store up to 400 volts but it wasn't that much left. I still got quite a zap, though :-)

    Anyway, I got a big crate of broken ones from a local Apple dealer in town. I found out that they usually didn't work because the wire would break close to the adapter. eBay sold replacement cables and I started fixing the power supplies. Cracking them open, replacing the cord, testing them, glueing them shut as neat as possible, then selling them for 25 bucks.

    It was fun but with a kid on the way, I had no room for a separate table for my soldering iron, electronics stuff etc. and I stopped doing it. Cleaning up every time you want to do something small isn't fun.

  • Hard Drive Bracket (Score:3)

    by jbeaupre ( 752124 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @04:00PM (#49824941)

    I was missing the hardware to mount a 5 Mb hard drive (yes, 5 Mb) in my XT. Didn't want it sitting directly on the case (cable length, vibration, possible short, etc), but really wanted that upgrade. My French-English dictionary was sitting nearby, so it became the support "bracket".

    My mom used that computer many years for checking email (she did upgrade to 2400 baud), but one day it needed a repair. She said the guy was a bit surprised to find a library in a PC.

  • The gasoline heater on my VW Camper wouldn't start consistently - it used a small Kettering type driver and coil for the spark igniter. It didn't have enough dwell to create a strong spark, and no real way to adjust it. So, made a driver using a PIC, trimmer potentiometer, a transistor, protection diodes and some passives. I read the pot with the a/d, and used that to set a PWM duty cycle. Adjust the pot for enough dwell to get a consistently strong spark. Once working and adjusted, the whole thing was pott

  • I get a lot of crap at yard sales, thrift stores, etc. Eventually the stuff makes its way into projects. Got some of those NHT transducers out of some toy cardboard guitar amplifiers. Used one of them to make a lunchbox into a speaker, it sounds a little tinny... Got a LCD backup mirror with a broken mirror for $10, nice source of a backup camera (with range marks) and a 4.3" LCD. $10 later and I've got a touch panel to go with it, I plan to attach them to my R-Pi soon.

    Outside I've made a table for my (yard-sale acquired) lathe out of pallets and I made a 4x8 table saw by making a wooden frame for a portable jobsite table saw I got for ten bucks missing the extending fences and whatnot but with the pusher.

    I don't depend on this stuff for livelihood, it's just a hobby, but you can live better on the trash in this country than you can on normal wages in some others. There's just valuable shit going to hell everywhere. If you could line up end-to-end all the cars that people would have liked to fix up which have been parked in people's yard and just rusted away, they'd probably reach across the country.

  • Or rather I disassembled two broken power drill and used the parts to make one functioning one. The hardware hacks I did on my VW bus were too numerous to mention.

    • A friend bought an old VW Bus in the 80s we went on a weekend camping trip and painted all kinds of stuff on it.

  • I have lots of junk and not much money, so... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smellsofbikes ( 890263 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @04:14PM (#49825133) Journal

    Old HP GPIB-based XY plotter with laser diode in place of pen, does a nice job of cutting gaskets for steam engines.
    Broken 8 track player in ginormous am/fm/turntable cabinet, replaced with beaglebone, so when I hit the next track button it plays a 'clunk' sound and then fires up a random streaming internet radio station. (That one made hackaday [hackaday.com].)
    A nearby company went out of business and sold all their stuff and I scored an electronic balance with an RS232 output. Some arduino code later, and I now have a fuel injector flow tester: force known-pressure fuel in for a known amount of time and measure how much actually comes out, tare, repeat. It's neat to be able to characterize just how narrow a PWM signal the injector can register and react to.
    My current work project is even a hack: I'm repurposing an abandoned semiconductor automated test system into an evaluation board characterization system. The test guys don't want it because it's too slow and limited, but I'm all "whoah, 192 arbitrary waveform generators? Let me at it."

    • I have an 86 Mustang with the EFI 5.0 modded extensively, including a full on tuner (TwEECer RT with Binary Editor/EEC Analyzer). I've changed injectors, which offered me some insight to the topic. Though I don't have an injector test rig myself, most of the specs are available for them and close enough. Interestingly, there's a few parameters in there that are critical.

      Additional 'offset' to compensate for battery voltage A static delay that it assumes the injector isn't doing anything A low and high "s

  • Well it was not a USB battery but does running through a dark forest with a UPS-powered stroboscope count?

  • Half a clothespin (Score:3, Funny)

    by RJFerret ( 1279530 ) on Tuesday June 02, 2015 @04:19PM (#49825193)

    Yes, half of a clothespin (sans spring), saved having to order a hard drive mounting assy for my laptop's second drive port, perfect size to keep it snug. That'd probably be my most unusual, all the others were relatively mundane.

    Oh wait, as a kid, not allowed to read after bedtime, I ran a wire from a train transformer to the room door frame wrapped around a metal tack, a matching thumbtack on the top of the door with wire going to a spare 12v auto parking light bulb and back to the transformer completed the circuit. I got away with reading at night for years just needing to hide just the book, not flashlight too, if Mom checked on me from seeing light spilling out under the door.

    But I don't consider turning my door into a knife switch unusual.

    The day she pounded on my ground floor window from outside shouting "go to sleep" did make me jump and lay awake a long time though!

  • I live in a house over 100 years old with original heavy wood frame windows. The windows have rope that goes to counter-weight anchors inside of the window frame to balance the weight while the window is open. On one window, the rope broke...

    I now open the window and place an old AT keyboard from the '80s on the side to prop the thing open.

    • I live in a house over 100 years old with original heavy wood frame windows. The windows have rope that goes to counter-weight anchors inside of the window frame to balance the weight while the window is open. On one window, the rope broke...

      I now open the window and place an old AT keyboard from the '80s on the side to prop the thing open.

      I have a feeling you're not kidding.

      Listen, it's really an easy fix. I'm one of the least handy people around and I was able to fix a broken sash rope. It's like a half

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by darkain ( 749283 )

        +1 thanks for the tip! I've just been lazy all these years. Never bothered to look up the fix, but now I've got a project to do the next time I have a sunny weekend!

  • My father has space on a farm and built a rotating roof structure on the ground, with about 20 panels that are highly sensitive to light directiion. There are two light detectors: one is an ambient photoreceptor, in order to detect that the sun is shining. If it is above a threshold, it activates the rotary motor (salvaged from a washing machine) that turns the contraption until another light sensor measures bright light. This second sensor sits deeply in a slit, therefore it only detects bright light if th

  • Everything I do is a hack.

  • You can recycle a lot of parts from printers and scanners into a desktop CNC or 3D printer (RepStrap).

  • I turned an old shopvac motor into a ping-pong ball cannon for, uh, cubicle defense.

  • Way back in the 70's I encountered a bug in software I only had hardcopy source for. A device would not initialize due to too short a timeout in the code. Timing on the device was controlled by a RC delay circuit, and soldering a resistor in parallel to the one on the device made it all good.

  • I used two old 5 1/4" floppy drives to build a pan/tilt control for a webcam. Those drives used nice little 5V stepper motors to move the read head back and forth. I used one drive fairly as-is, connected to a push rod that tilted a platform up and down that the webcam sat on. I removed the stepper motor from another and used it to rotate a turntable that the whole thing sat on.

    That was all hooked up through some transistors, driven from an 8-bit shift register, hooked to the LPT port and controlled thro

  • I adjusted my ejectrode to jumper the OBDII port on my car and add a new remote to the keyless entry.

    But more fun was to buy a remote case/flip key fob for it. And then find a locksmith that would cut the keystub for me. Now I have one of those flippy-key things like the VW and MB owners have, and saved about $35,000 on the car.

    • I can't wait until it turns into the flippy floppy taped up two piece mess like the 09 Porsche I worked on today. But hey, maybe you care more about your car than they did, or I wouldn't be working on it. ;)
  • Making my 5 1/4" floppy disks double sided with a hole punch.
  • I made a laptop out of a Kodak easy-share picture frame and as Raspberry PI. And I made a digital picture frame out of an old laptop.

  • I once used "xor AL" instead of "mov AL,0x00", does that count? I think I was saving a cycle or two by doing that.

  • Via plugging the cassette motor relay of one into the joystick port of the other, and writing a simple serial protocol in basic. A few bps. I just wanted to see if I could do it.

    I couldn't - I was still too young to fully understand syncronisation issues. It would work for a while.

    I still remember the key command: OUT, port 720 decimal. That's the way to toggle the cassette motor relay.

  • Cut a couple of old HDDs in half, glue bits of platter to the head arms, add large-area photodiodes to sense position and a bit of hardware and software to read ILDA files. Works really well considering.

    pic. [hazeii.net]

  • This isn't much of a hardware hack, as FPGAs are meant to be hacked for various odd purposes anyway. Nevertheless, I thought it would be fun to play with a 100 MHz digital system as if it were analogue, using basic trig formulae to first adjust the carrier frequency, and then modulate it with sound coming from a computer via RS232. One general idea is that 1-bit channels are enough for a great sound quality (e.g. SPDIF), and the main limitation in these setups is usually the serial link.

  • I think the most complicated thing I ever did was install an ethernet adapter on a series 1 tivo (they had no USB ports either.) To do so involved using an adapter that had a female PCI form factor socket, which connected to an ISA protocol motherboard that had a male PCI form factor shunt. Then of course there was drilling a hole for an ethernet port on the back of the tivo.

    Andrew Tridgell of Samba fame wrote the driver for it.

  • I used a TRS-80 CoCo 2 as a controller for a ribbon winding machine (ribbons for dot matrix printers). I'd feed off a master spool through a tenson arm on to a smaller spool. An old tape drive motor was used for the winding which could be controlled as well. A button cannibalized from an old joystick was pressed by a small arm on the bottom of the spooler in order to count the revolutions so it could stop winding at a predefined number of revolutions. Then I could use a ribbon welder to close the loop.

  • I jerry rigged an intrabdominal pressure sensor by clamping a foley catheter and connecting the sample port to an arterial line transducer, then used it to diagnose abdominal compartment syndrome [wikipedia.org] in a cirrhotic patient.

  • Back in the 80s many of us shortwave listeners began using VCRs to record a specific frequency during times when we weren't near our radios. Unlike cassette tapes with VHS tapes we could record up to eight hours of audio and review it later. Early form of time shifting out entertainment.

  • A friend's kid aged about 3 used to love playing the game TuxRacer (controlled by arrow keys, which Dad had to work because he wasn't dextrous enough). So I got a plush Tux toy penguin, and fastened him on top of a small plastic box, in which I placed the guts of a wireless keyboard, and 4x tilt switches connected to the arrow keys. Now simply moving the penguin controls the game :-)

  • I recently had to open up my washing machine to fix a clogged pressure switch tube. Inside the control panel I found a wiring and timer diagram. I am mostly finished with writing some Raspberry Pi code to replace the timer with a Pi and a relay board. I installed a web server onto the Pi and put it on my Wifi network also. The ultimate goal is to allow Wifi control of my washing machine, as well as have it send notifications when it finishes, be able to check status, etc. I foresee those notifications

  • I've also got a wheat bag that you can heat up to relieve headaches. As it turns out, you can fix a USB TV tuner with it as well:
      - http://aarongnielsen.blogspot.... [blogspot.com.au]

    Apparently, if you took off the plastic casing and baked it properly in a medium oven, you could enact a more permanent fix. I haven't been game to try it, though.

  • I once fished a Quadra 630 out of a dumpster. It wouldn't power up. I fished out a Dell P3 low profile desktop out of the same dumpster. Its power supply fit the space of the old power supply pretty well. I was able to re-wire the ATX power connector to match the Quadra motherboard pinout. The tricky part is that the ATX power on signal is inverted sense from the Quadra. I found a hex CMOS inverter in a disused component shelf (no one used throughhole components any more) at work and soldered it in to u

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