Who here has hacked / modified devices?

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I'm just wondering how many people just love to hack or modify their devices to do things other than originally intended. Whether it be that you hate restrictions on your devices, want to see your device show it's full potential, or just want to do it because you can (usually this is my reasoning for it).

I'll start. I'm more of a software person than a hardware person (translation: I am not that confident in my soldering skills), so most of the hacks / modifications I have performed on my devices have been software based. And here they are:

Linksys WRT54G v3: DD-WRT Custom Firmware (software modification)
Microsoft Xbox: Softmodded with NDURE, Xbox Media Center replacing the Microsoft Dashboard (software hack)
Sony PlayStation 2: Independence exploit on memory card along with HDLoader and a few emulators (software hack)
Sony PlayStation Portable: Firmware downgraded, then Dark_AleX custom firmware installed (software hack)
Nintendo Wii: Wiikey installed on DVD-ROM drive board (hardware hack)
Apple iPhone: Jailbroken and carrier subsidy unlocked (software hack)

Color Computer 2: Wired up by hand a card that would let me use the floppy drive and the serial card at the same time.

Wired up headsets to old tube radios for private listening.

Wired a surplus TI-99 keyboard to work with a Timex Sinclair micro.

I am a bit of an electronics nerd, both hardware and software. I've hacked nearly everything I own in some way, though in recent years as things have gotten fancier, I've been less likely to tinker with, just because I don't want to break anything and have to spend a lot of money.

Ah, so you were more into the old school modifications. I used to have a Commodore 64 and an Apple IIe that were given to me when I was younger (already extremely obsolete by the time I got them), however when I got them they actually ended up being the
computers I played with the most rather than the 486 I also owned at the time, and I first learned to program on these machines. The thing I really liked about the older machines was the fact that they heavily encouraged users to tinker with them, whereas a lot of hardware and software systems now tend to do everything in their power to lock users out.

I am unsure whether much of the complexity it necessary or useful for things other than creating security holes.

I am one of the few people here who has actually soldered memory chips to a board for an upgrade. If I remember correctly I soldered in the sockets and stuck the memory in the sockets of a Color Computer. I also found one flaw in about three different ones and repaired it. The non-polarized electrolytic capacitor on the tape recorder input seemed to die easily. A 386 motherboard I bought for $20 didn't work and I got lucky. It was a fuse to the keyboard, and that was some actual work with a soldering iron, and those boards could still be operated on that way.

A few years ago I experimented with some PIC MCU chips and I wrote a program with a very simple multitasking core.

I built my own Altair 8800, in 1975. The Altair 8800 was first mentioned in Popular Electronics, January and February of 1975 and I drooled over the idea. It wasn't until some months later that I accumulated the cash needed. I then had to assemble it and get a power supply (not included.) The case was also extra so I did without for a while. It came with four sockets for static memory (single ICs that you could plug in) but because of the cost of those chips they only supplied one with the kit. That gave me 256 bytes of memory. Yes... not kbytes... bytes.

You can see the ad here: Popular Electronics, Jan 1975

Later, I bought two 4kbyte dynamic ram cards for it. And assembled those. And they didn't work, of course. I spent more than a month figuring out the problems and fixing them... just in time to get a letter from MITS telling me that their 4k dynamic ram cards weren't designed right and needed fixing. By then, I didn't need their help. But what a pain.

Since that time, I've assembled a number of computers soldering parts. Including a Sinclair. About 5 years later, I researched, designed and built something I needed -- my own printer. I had an IBM Electronic Typewriter Model 85, which was a huge mechanical beast but used electronics to sense the keys and drive the printer mechanisms. I used an oscilloscope to measure the signals from the reed relays underneath the keys and codified that data into a program I wrote in 8051 assembly language. I then wire-wrapped a board I designed for all this and used a ribbon cable to go from a nice box I made for the 8051 unit to go into the typewriter device, soldered in the wires to the reed relays, and hooked up my computer via its serial port to the 8051 (the 8051 I designed to accept, with flow control, data over RS-232, buffer the data internally in ram, and drive the associated reed relays with the required timing to generate signals as though I were typing, instead.) It all worked the very first time!! And I was very happy. I used that printer for many years afterwords, by the way.

I've also hacked various game controllers I liked (mostly from Nintendo's) to work with the IBM PC. And I do some modest analog and digital design, professionally, now. Not much, though. I'm primarily an embedded programmer with extensive training in mathematics and physics, not a hardware designer.

Still, I love studying and hacking fun devices.

Jon

I really have to become some kind of professional. I may have the mind of an uber geek, but I didn't train very well. Potential doesn't mean much when I'm simply not used to using it. I just build a few things then never get around to doing more.

I didn't do that much as a professional, at first. Most of the time was just personal time I applied. Sometimes, I had a little help. But I'm not the kind of person to ask, so most of the time I just studied and tried things on my own. I would go to the library and read by myself, then go scavenge parts or just sit and work a little or else just do some programming on my own. I have never had a single class on programming, for example, yet that is my profession. My training at the university level is entirely in physics, mathematics, and chemistry.

To make some money in the middle of this, around the time in fact when I bought and built that Altair 8800, I took a job running a film booking system. It paid me, initially, $525/mo. My responsibilities were to make a few changes to the program, if needed; run the program each day with the orders from the schools being sorted and prioritized; then print out the picking slips; break them into individual pieces; go into the back room and bag up the films to go out the next morning for each school; and that was about it. But the computer had complete source code listings, in assembly, for the HP 2000F timesharing system that also provided time share services to the schools. So I read through each and every line of code and learned how it all worked and then I wrote my own assembler and linker and modified the operating system to support time shared assembly and some other services. It worked nicely and I learned a lot from the time. It was on my own time, but it was fun. And that got me a start of sorts.

A lot of it is just siting down and struggling. At the time, things were simpler, though. Today's products are a lot more complex and that makes a lot of things a kind of "higher barrier" to climb over, for someone starting out. But on the flip side, there are also a lot more readily available and cheap tools to play with and to learn on. Complete systems costing less than $10, for example. And the cost of power supplies, oscilloscopes, good voltmeters, etc., are all much cheaper by comparison and more easily come by. So perhaps it is more just the much larger number of choices to make that tends to make some folks stand there like a deer in the headlights, when in my day there really weren't that many options.

What is it that you'd like to take a crack at?

Jon

I'm not at all sure anymore. I think that I want to get into some world-shaking inventions like new space drives.

took an original nintendo motherboard, built my own video amplifier circuit (theirs is a modulator amplifier, and it is giant and creates a lot of heat, I just did a composite one that is tiny and makes no heat)

Put it in a radio shack project box, added an LCD screen with speakers from a PSone (it was cheap), used a laptop power supply and bam, a portable nintendo.

There are actually quite a few people who have done this though.

wrt54gL with dd-wrt, ipod linux, many others....

Wow, Dude.

ok, 2 major projects (that were a success)

1) reflashing the BT Home Hub (an evil white box) to work with ISPs other than BT (it's based on a Thomson Speedtouch 7g router, so was reflashed with that firmware)
2) DSLinux (but not with a DS I own, with a broken one that someone gave me, was able to ressurect it and do this with it)

Well, there is your problem. Need to set sights a little lower, at first. Blink an LED today, and leave conquering the world for tomorrow.

Jon

It already is tomorrow for me.

OK, I'm sorry, I act like this too much. I'm into a lot of the alternative energy stuff and possibly have some ideas for doing things a little bit differently.

I done a hareware hack by turning a old IBM Keyboard[ At Type] into a USB.