Who here has hacked / modified devices?

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That's a pretty good one.

"Alternative energy" means different things to different people. I've heard the term applied to things as mundane as setting up a windmill generator to things as wild-assed as extracting free energy from zero-point vacuum. Which end of this spectrum are you on? Practical, doable? Or perpetual motion in a bottle?

I'm interested in both learning how to reduce energy consumption as well as finding additional ways to supplement the usual means we each get our energy. Those answers will vary widely between us, of course, as our circumstances and means and skills will themselves vary widely.

Also, keep in mind that any particular solution you might consider involves a lot less about electronics knowledge (though that will be important at some point) and more about your knowledge in physics. You can design electronics with both hands tied behind your back and not be able to do the first thing, as a practical matter, with effective alternative energies if you haven't mastered the physics involved, first.

So what are you into?

Jon

That's good. There are five wires in an old IBM keyboard and clock and data lines, if memory serves, are open-drain design with a variety of specialized timing requirements to operate all this properly. In addition, USB is also pretty tricky requiring support on both sides -- Windows drivers, unless you can take advantage of some existing default HID driver, for example; and of course the necessary drivers on the keyboard side of things. I know about existing serial to USB driver chips that pretty much handle all the nasty details for that, but I don't know of an IBM keyboard to USB chip. Did you find and use one of those? Or did you use a microcontroller of some kind? Or what?

Jon

I've hacked a couple things

A Linksys WRT-54G (Added an opensource kernal and added higher gain home-made antennas.)

An old iPod (Linux)

A broken camera (made the flash circut into a remotley triggered flashing thingy), working on on a homemade webcam with the lens - although I doubt its going to work.

I have an old TV im trying to find something to do too.

Jon, I am into investigating some very basic physics and some work with electronics. I don't know if you've read about some of the problems that I have had, but I have actually built small microcontroller modules and then never quite completed the projects. It seems weird to have those "high hopes some day" and then the reality doesn't even come close. I get a lot of good insights when I read about some of the things that other people are doing.

Be more specific. I can't tell a thing from the above except that you've done something with small microcotrollers.

What do you mean "very basic physics?" Do you mean levers and wheels? Or do you mean quantum physics? And more particularly, what physics exactly as related to alternative energy.

What have you read about, exactly?

What "reality doesn't even come close" when you try? What exactly did you try to do?

You really do need to climb out on a limb here.

Jon

I mean that I don't get the simplest projects done, for the most part.

Okay, I think you started out saying roughly that. I'll take it at its face. Like building an AM crystal radio, I suppose, doesn't get done or done right.

Just to explain my reactions, I guess what made me interested was two facets you mentioned. One was microcontrollers, which I have a lot of success with and enjoy a lot and would very much like to discuss, if anyone were interested. The other was physics generally, which can be an interesting thing to discuss in the context of alternative energy sources, and since I enjoy thinking about physics and deducing it to specific cases, that was another possible interest point.

I get the point and won't press further. But if you think a discussion might help in any way, feel free to suggest it.

Jon

I should have mentioned that I'm not feeling very good lately, although it does sort of blur with the general malaise. Funny thing is that today I'm sick enough to stay home from work but I feel more able to talk. I'm sorry, this is like hijacking the thread with off-topic problems. I have trouble saying what I want to say.

I don't mind. Anything is fine with me. I will contribute if I feel I have something to say. I'm still recovering from the flu, myself. Luckily, though, I work out of the home and am self-employed, so I'm home whether working or not.

Jon

Make Magazine is a cool thing to read for project ideas.

I need to get where I work from home. I know I have the talent for it, but the discipline is hard to acquire. I think I'm just starting a bout of the flu. I had racking coughing, nausea, sort of an asthma attack, and feel a bit dizzy. An hour from now I might feel perfectly fit. The stuff I work with is hard on my lungs and skin because I am pretty sensitive to it. It's "just" common cardboard, which I suppose that OSHA presumes to be safe to handle the way that I do.

There is a good reason to hang on to threads like this. I feel that scientific and mechanical competence are absolutely essential to a civilization. Some people like me and others who are participating in this thread have minds that can find those answers that seem to elude everyone else, and those answers are badly needed. It took billions of man-hours to get as far as we have. A lot of that time was spent taking mechanisms apart and tinkering with them, repairing them, even modifying them. Things do gradually get better because we do this.

These days, can you even imagine actually buying a repair kit to rebuild a joystick for a video game? When was the last time anyone repaired a television set instead of replacing it? The kind of mind that can track down bad circuits in a television set is the kind of mind that can build and maintain spaceships. I think that a lot of us tinkerers dream of things like this. A lot of us dream of having a home business that we can make a lot of money from, too.

At the same time, I can buy, fairly cheaply, parts for the most sophisticated stuff. There are places online where if you have an extra hundred dollars you can have just about any metal part that you can draw made up for you. I think they also do plastic. It's about $25 at another place for a custom PC board with plated-through holes, and at about that price you can get half a dozen if they are small. Chips that cost around ten dollars can make hundreds of decisions per microsecond. There has never been a better time for a tinkerer who has an extra hundred dollars a month.

This is a sore point with me, I suppose. I tend to agree. Let me put something not quite this, but similar, into my own words.

When I was growing up, I designed and built my own rocket nozzles along with the rockets and the fuels I used. Doing this required me to go to the University library, to the 5th floor where the science stuff was, and read a lot. Partly, to learn how to do things. Partly, to learn how to be safer doing them. At the time, it was possible to get a small metal lathe for almost nothing and no one stopped me from ordering chemicals from Boulevard Labs, in Chicago. I could get Picric acid shipped to my door, and that's an explosive material and I was only 16 years old, too. They only informed me that I needed to ship it by train. That's all. I made potassium nitrate and sugar fuels, sulfur and zinc fuels, and so on. The KNO3 and sugar fuel was tricky, because the melt point and the flash point are within 100C, so I needed a double boiler. But the only cheap fluid I could get that could melt the stuff was sulfuric acid (100%), and that stuff near boiling is pretty dangerous to be around. So I used sand bags to isolate me from my "stuff" I was cooking up. But it worked out and I had a lot of fun and learned a lot.

I also built three telescopes. Two, I designed myself. More math to learn. But I had friends and they had dads who also did this kind of stuff, and there were 5 periodicals in publication at the time just for people like me. Today, there are zero such publications. None. Not one. There were also lots of sources of various kinds of hobbyist quantities of glass I could buy from. Today? They want to know "How many tons of that do you want?" if they will talk with you, at all. No one sells hobbyist qtys of glass, anymore. The only place I know that does anything at all is Wilmann-Bell and they are like the first Ford car -- "any color you want, as long as it's black." They have just one or two choices for mirror blanks. That's it. Nothing for lens making, at all.

When I first wanted to get into HAM radio, a basic license required 11 words a minute at Morse Code (Class C). And getting a class A license required 20 words/min (I think) plus you had to be able to repair, on the spot, an intentionally "broken" commercial transmitter system at a radio station to demonstrate proficiency. Today, that is zero words/min for whatever is the same as the old Class C, and the Expert license (I think that is the old Class A) basically requires you to _recognize_ a transistor symbol, if you see one. Okay, maybe a little more than that. But you get the idea. The whole thing is silly. You don't need to be able to design or understand much of anything for any license. They couldn't get folks when the standards were still higher, so they dropped them down until they could see some folks passing, again.

What's happened?? Where have the folks gone? I don't know a single person making their own telescope, anymore. And there is no way someone just buying one can truly understand optical errors if they haven't had to personally go through the issues of testing, finding, and fixing them and seeing how they operate, first hand. It's one thing to have a mathematical understanding of them. It's still another to have a visceral and instinctual knowledge of the details. And most folks I know with a telescope have neither, let alone both. HAM has gone down the drain, though at one time it was the older HAM folks who pushed the whole spread spectrum technology forward or the earth-moon-earth stuff, as well. It was HAMs pushing the 16GHz and beyond frontiers because (in part) they were pressured into it because the commercial folks were stealing the "easier" bands to use and now those higher bands are being used militarily and commercially because of HAM efforts. But these folks are dying out and taking their training and knowledge with them. And the folks coming in can barely find a front knob, let alone push some new frontier.

Engineering schools, and I've read the missives by engineering school department heads from a variety of important universities, are desperately seeking US citizens to take their course work and finding that, often, more than half their student body is foreigners, not US citizens. Others are learning, while our own people just buy and consume and have little or no idea at all how to actually build things, or maintain bridges, etc. The knowledge is moving abroad or going to the grave. And that does not bode well for any of us.

Education is a treadmill a civilization cannot afford to get off of, or slow down on. Every person dying takes with them a world of knowledge, which leaves us permanently. Every person born takes into the world exactly zero knowledge. If we just want to hold steady and do nothing else but maintain our position, we have to pass along all of the knowledge we lose to those dying, on into the heads of those entering the world. Just to keep our place, we have to do that much. And if we want to advance at all, we have to do even more. There is no getting off, unless you want feudalism and/or anarchy and a dramatic drop in the population, as well, and a lowering of standards of living. No other way to go.

It is part and parcel with the necessary education about the world around us. You can sit at a simulator or read the internet all day long and that will teach you nothing about the world we live in, not really. To know a bird, for example, you need to get outside and watch them for yourself. See what they so. Make a hypothesis about it. Test the idea. Some program sitting in a computer to simulate a chemical titration will just teach you what some program calculates as reality. But it doesn't actually SHOW you reality and if there are some unknowns to be found, you will NOT find them in some idiotic simulation. You need to get your hands dirty and see what nature shows you, not what some programmer was told by some theorist about the subject.

We know a lot, by theory. And it sometimes seems that's all we need. But if you are going to discover something new, you not only need to master and understand what has gone before, but you need to get out in the world and see for yourself what there is, there. Only by inane, repeated checking are you likely to uncover a new idea or an unexamined area to explore. That means getting out there and doing stuff.

Not watching TV.

Used to be tube testers in grocery stores, if you can remember. No more, and not only because TVs are passe or that tubes are rarely used anymore. Things have changed a lot. People don't know as much, across the board, as they once needed to. They can just buy things from a very wide selection and use the tools without needing to know anything. That's an advance of sorts in the product area and is a mixed blessing of sorts. But also, things are a lot smaller than before (resistors the size of a grain of salt) and more complex in many ways (microcontrollers in nearly everything) and so folks just replace, rather than repair. The tools you need to repair are no longer some knowledge and a voltmeter, but a logic analyzer, a good scope, a signal generator, frequency counter, specialized voltmeter and probes, etc. I have all this stuff on my bench, but few do. And barely anyone has the knowledge to use much of them, anyway. Plus, of course, no one is selling the specialized ICs and other parts you'd need in quantities of one. Some is available from Mouser or Digikey, of course. But that's just the usual standard stuff, not the kinds of very specialized, combo-IC dohickies that are used in a modern LCD or plasma monitor, for example. And the old monitors, their horizontal flyback oscillator transistors are getting nearly impossible to get anymore -- they require a unique combination of high speed and high voltage capability that is not easy to achieve and the manufacturers are looking forward to LCD, plasma, or whatever, completely removing the need to struggle in that area, anymore.

It takes treating this not as a job, but an avocation and love. I am studying all the time because I love this stuff, not because someone is paying me. I literally place a book on my steering wheel as I drive, to take advantage of that time to study, as well. I read to go to sleep -- technical books, science papers, etc. I hope I do this until the day I die. It's a lifestyle. It has to be.

A home business cannot be done just for the money, though. If it is for the money, there will always be ,periods of time when the money isn't there and you could make a lot more working for someone else. If you don't have some other driving reason for doing a home business, you'll take that job and the home business ends right there. So you need something else that drives you to do it, or you won't have the staying power. Simple as that. Money cannot be the main reason. You need something else. Luckily, for those of us on the spectrum we have other reasons of our own that may force us to consider it, anyway. So perhaps there are more of us doing home businesses, as a percentage, than the population at large might suggest.

I both agree and disagree with the above. Because so much is available for so little, the motivation to climb over the higher hurdles needed to learn to do it yourself is harder to come by. So it takes more personal steam, in a sense. Which means fewer do it. That's part of the price we pay for having so many good choices to buy from. Who wants to built their own Geiger counter (as I did) when they can pick up a really good one, calibrated too, for perhaps $150? Who needs to build their own oscilloscope anymore, when you can get a fantastic deal on ebay for $100? But at the same time, these great tools at good prices and widely available means that you really can get into the field for a lot less outlay, if you've a mind to drive yourself. So a mixture, to me. Also, TV and entertainment has gotten so much more sophisticated and it sucks away so much more time from people. Every hour spent watching TV, playing Nintendo DS, watching Netflix DVD, etc., is an hour you didn't spend learning and doing something. And there are a finite number of these in a lifetime. With estimates of something like 7 hours a day spent on crap like entertainment and not education, pretty much means there is nothing left over for learning at all. Too much of a good thing, is a bad thing.

If you have the focus and are willing to set aside the entertainment distractions of a world around you and get down and do things, you are right. There is hardly a better time than today. FPGA boards would have been a wet dream to me, 30 years ago. All that soldering of SSI gate chips and wire-wrap hours could have been replaced by a little typing of VHDL code, instead. I could have only begged and dreamed for such things. And yet here they are, cheaply had today. The problem is folks need to buckle down and learn, to use them properly. And that means managing to turn off the entertainment device and focusing on actually doing the boring, painstaking work of wiring something up and testing ideas against what nature shows.

Remember Galileo? Rolling little balls down inclined planes? Do you have any idea how much effort he put into learning the skills and then applying them to carefully linearizing and polishing those ramps to reduce the effects of friction or bumps? What did he use for timing? Water drops and his wrist pulse, both of which he later worked to calibrate against the sun and the year's cycle so that he could standardize the timing better. Now imagine sitting there rolling balls down, marking points of regular time as the balls rolled down, changing the ramp angle a little, doing it again... and doing this for two years or three years as an almost obsession?! What must the neighbors have thought of this guy? Who would imagine that sitting there over and over and over again with only tiny changes between, would be anything but the actions of someone literally insane and in need of serious help? But that is how you make discoveries and do things. It takes "nut balls" like this.

An NT would have gone off golfing or fishing, long since.

Jon

I'm certainly wasting most of my time.

Are you able to consider the idea of exploring different classes at a local community college?

Jon

i reprogrammed windows 98 to accept a 120gb hard drive. I also made my own adapter for it because it was a sata laptop drive. then i loaded it with pirated media