Cool Hardware Hacks

How do folks? And Uh, today I think we're going to talk about hacking, yes, and not as in that irritating cough that your coworker has its sitting in the cubicle next to you and you want to hit them over the head with a brick. Nor are we talking about traditional computer hacking where you hack into systems, where you create program hacks. We're talking about hardware hacking. Yes, And you know, hacking is not necessarily evil either. You know,

it's got sort of a bad reputation. Hacking is basically, you know, taking something apart, seeing how it works, and trying to do something different with it than it was originally intended for. Yeah, it's really just finding new ways to accomplish certain tasks. So it's not in a necessarily evil at all. And uh, yeah we should we should just go ahead and get rid of that negative connotation of hacker, so you're on out. Hacker means someone who

finds new ways of doing things exactly. So say I so say we all, I'll start galactical fans out there. So you want to go first, well, actually before yeah, before we get too far into it, I want to talk a little bit about what you kind of need to know in order to be a hacker. Um, you hurt yourself, Well, you need to know how stuff works. I mean you can't. You can't take something apart and improve it without knowing how it works in the first place. Um, or at least you can't do it and hope to

be successful. So there's certain things that a lot of hardware hacks require you to know before you really get into them. A lot of that is just things like basic electricity, UM, how circuits work. If you're doing something with computers, you need to know all about things like bits and bites. You may need to know about resistors, capacitors, diodes, transistors, um A. A healthy knowledge of how to solder is

very helpful. Yeah, just knowing how to use certain tools like wire cutters and you know, or even something as basic as a screwdriver. And I'm not talking about the drink um and you can have one of those after you're done. Yeah, don't drink and hack. So really, hacks are not meant for the average person. They really meant for people who want to get into the whole um. Uh, you know, let's figure out how this works. Let's let's see. Uh, I want to do some electrical engineering. I mean, the

average person can get into hacking. Yes, they can learn how to do this sort of thing, but you can't just jump right in and expect to be successful and or safe. Yeah, it might might be a good idea to start small and work your way up. Yeah, I've got a small one I can start with. Okay, So, uh I saw something written by Michael Berman, who had the Maxwell smart shoe phone. Yeah. Yeah, his hack was about as simple as it gets. Now, that's not that's

not I'm not trying to cast aspersions at Michael. I wouldn't have done this, and he did a great job. It was very funny and I appreciate it quite a bit, so the Maxwell smartphone. If you aren't familiar with Get Smart the television series and not the movie. Not the movie so much but the television series Maxwell had a special shoe phone that he could use to dial back

to headquarters. This was in the nineteen sixties before and you know, people had cell phones, so this was actually a novel kind of idea today, completely unnecessary but still funny. So what Michael did was he just he took it to the simplest level you can imagine. He took a man's dress shoe, he hollowed out part of the heel, and he shoved a cell phone into it. Thus you have a hacked Maxwell smart shoe phone. And that's really as simple as as it gets. I mean, a hack

does not have to be complicated. It can be very very simple. Now the complicated wants tend to get a lot more attention. But anyway, that's my first one. All right then, UM, I've got a couple uh that I picked that I thought were kind of cool, different different things you can do. Um and I chose two of my favorite sites that I know there are lots and lots and lots and lots of hacks on of all kinds, um and um. The first one I chose from instructibles

dot com, which which is an awesome site. UM and uh Basically the one I chose was someone had posted a way to use bluetooth, your bluetooth cell phone to make all the calls using your home's phone wiring. Yeah, it's pretty neat, um, and I'm not going to go into great detail on how to do all these different pieces of the puzzle, but you know essentially what you're gonna do. Assuming that your your house is already wired for a landline service, but isn't connected to a landline,

maybe you just have a cell phone to make calls. Um, you can actually take a cellular gateway and UM, you would plug like you go to the place where, if you will, like the terminus of all the the home phone wiring is and connect the cellular gateway and then you hook it up to the phone and uh, once you plug in the jacks, the phones into the jacks and you're in the different rooms. Uh, that goes back to the cellular gateway, which uses Bluetooth to make a

connection to your phone. Um, and then it sends the call out to uh you know, via the cell phone network. So it's a very very elegant situation. Of course, you have to again went back to what you were saying, you have to know a little bit about the wiring. You have to know uh something about how the different kinds of cables work. You might be working with a couple of different kinds of phone cord um, but it's

pretty neat now. He posed an interesting conundrum, however, So what happens if you step out for a while and someone's house sitting for you or you know, and it needs to make a call, say, I don't know how's on fire and they don't have the cell phone? What are you gonna do? Then? Well, were you're going to

answer that? Okay? Well, they were saying that A simple, a simple way to get around that is you can actually add a second phone, like a paid uh like um when the prepaid minutes phones, you know, put an hour or worth of minutes on there and put it as the backup phone, and it will automatically channel UH to the other phone, and it will allow you to do that because the cellier gateway can handle making the

switch from one phone to the other. You know, you could prioritize the phone one versus two, or if you have a plan, for example, if you and your wife were at home and you're on different carriers and one of them gets free weekend minutes. You could say, okay, well on Saturday and Sunday, we want to use this phone to make our calls. And all you have to do is pick up the you know phone jack phone at the local handset and it would make the call for you. So it's a pretty nifty, pretty nifty hack,

I thought. Now Chris said, uh, specifically that it was a pretty elegant solution. Here's an interesting thing. Hacks don't necessarily have to be elegant. Um, some hacks are really not elegant. It's just that they work. That's the most important part of any hack is that it works, not that it's pretty or that it aesthetically pleasing, which brings me to a very specific kind of hack. Um, it's a specific you know category, I should say, the Rube

Goldberg device. Yeah, these are the devices where it's incredibly complicated and it just accomplishes a very simple task. So it may be something as simple as pressing the toaster lever down on your toaster and um, and cooking some toast. But it may turn out that you use you know, an erector said, and a coffee pot and a host of action figures and a fishing rod and all sorts

of things order to accomplish this. Uh. The idea here is to try and make as complex machine as you possibly can that's really interesting to look at um and has a lot of different moving parts that looks like there's no way it should work, and yet it does work. And if you've never seen one, actually, YouTube has tons and tons of videos on Rube Goldberg devices. I recommend checking some of them out because when they work, they're really fascinating and and you chances are you have seen one.

I mean, there was a big car commercial that uses a Rube Goldberg device to turn a car on at one point, um or Peewee's Big Adventure. There you go. His breakfast machine was a big Rube Goldberg device, yea. And it was named for the you know, someone who is fascinated with these, um the drawings used to hear in magazines. Yeah, yeah, he would draw these these really weird contraptions, and it was that same concept. And of course Rube Goldberg was his name, and the device is

course named after him. And it's so funny to call something a Rube Goldberg device. It's as generic a term as you can imagine. Because it can look like anything, and it can take up an entire house worth of space. I've seen some that went multiple levels and through a yard, and I mean, they're really fascinating things. And I recommend playing Raymond Scott's Powerhouse as you're listening to that. That's the song was Dun dun d you know. I have

a classic hack to um. I'm thinking of John Draper Captain Crunch for those of you who who may not know. A long time ago, there used to be a whistle, a plastic whistle in a box of Captain ground and U. John Draper figured out that they hurts tone that the whistle made when you blew through it. If you blew it into a phone, it would let you make long

distance calls for free. And even when he was in the Armed Forces stationed overseas, people would call him a long distance and he could blow the whistle and it would basically erase the call from the you know, because they had played the tone during that. That's that led to a lot of people learning how to hack um, you know, making these what they call blue boxes, you know, because people like Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak used to

make them for their classmates apparently in college. From what I've read, Yeah, the was was has quite the reputation of being the phone freak. Oh yes, yes, And and soon he will probably be voted off of Dancing with the Stars, if he hasn't already by the time this place that may have already come to pass, it hasn't even shown yet. Yeah, anyway, I hope he comes on a seg. I'm voting for him anyway. So I've got

another one from also from instructibles. Okay. The neat thing about instructibles is it's not just that they show you a hack, but they will show you how to build it yourself, step by step, and in some cases it's not that difficult. Now in other cases it takes you know, a steady hand, especially when it comes to soldering things or taking any sort of potentially expensive piece of electronics apart, because you never know if you're gonna be able to

play back together again. So um, I don't recommend you just rush out and try them unless you have a real, you know, kind of a background with the source of stuff already, or are completely willing to ruin something that may or may not be valuable to you. Yeah, you also have to remember that whenever you open up any electronics,

chances are you've just voided your warranty. So um, you know, anytime you're doing a hack, you know, you don't expect you'll be able to return it to the store and say, hey, my, my such and such broke because they're gonna say, yeah, you broke it. Um. But this one was a Game

Boy DS that UH was charged by solar panels. So in this hack, the hacker used four sixty millimeter by sixty millimeter solar panels that perfectly covered the outside case of the DS and was able to wire those into the battery pack for the the DS, and it can

charge the battery. Now, the only thing that was missing from that particular version of this was a a chip, a circuit protection UH chips, so that would prevent over charging because otherwise, if you left the DS on the sun for too long, it would overcharge the battery, which could be bad with a capital by but UH and and they hackor acknowledge that said it said that he got the chip and now he's redesigning the hacks so that it can incorporate the chip. So yeah, look for that.

It's an interesting little way that you can recharge your DS just by leaving in the sun for a couple of hours. That's that's that's awesome. Yeah, and you know my next hack is a is a Nintendo related hack. This one came from Make TV. Actually it's Make magazine, which is O'Reilly's. Um. You know, I think this is sort of classical hacking because they tell you how to do all kinds of things. But um, they love taking

stuff apart. Um. In fact, they have sort of a motto that essentially, if you haven't taken it apart, you really don't own it. Um. And uh, you know a lot of stuff when I was a kid, Yeah, and how much of it works now. I was about saying I owned stuff that wasn't even mine. Well, um, the one that I thought, well, I I the one that I picked. There are tons and tons of cool ones, and um, the one I picked was actually from the TV show. Uh. They have a podcast which is not

quite as cool as ours, but pretty cool. Nonetheless, Um, you know I have to plug us, you know. Um. Anyway, they had someone had made a personal flight data recorder, if you will, um, using a we nun chuck of for those of you who are familiar with a Nintendo WE that's probably just about everybody on this podcast. Um. You know that the controllers are have motion sensors in them. Uh, there's a little chip inside called an accelerometer. And UM, it turns out that you don't even have to take

the nun chuck apart. Um. There is a little piece of electronic equipment that you can plug into the end of of the plug and uh it allows you to access the information in the accelerometer. So, UM, what they did was they got a micro controller board. UH. And this is a piece of electronic gear. Essentially, it's a a circuit board with chips in it. And you know it's the kind of thing that you that you probably

find in all kinds of different electronics. It takes user input from dials and knobs and translates it into instructions for the different electronic components. Well, if your input is coming from the WE nunchuck, you have a power source in this case, some double A batteries UM, and an l C D screen. All it takes is a little instruction UM from a laptop. You give it some very basic programming. UM. And they made a little plastic box.

They took a a a Pelican case which is very h well known waterproof divers use these to protect different things.

Because there they locked down in their waterproof um. They cut a hole in it for the l c D screen and put all the guts inside except for the nunchuck, and uh, what it would allow them to do once the board was programmed with the information was they basically said, look, tell me what the accelerometer is sensing and so uh they got it to tell them exactly what kind of gravitational force was was pulling on them at the moment.

So uh, you know, they rigged this up and went on a roller coaster at the Mall of America and uh, it's really great because they're talking about it and he said the the the person into the podcast says, look, you know, I'm pulling two g s Um. It's absolutely cool because you know there's no movie. You know, it's just the we nunchuck. UM. It doesn't require very very you know, it's it was probably uh, you know, forty

worth of plastic and uh and circuit boards plus the nunchuck. Um. You know, very inexpensive and fun little project to do and not something that you would normally find, but really cool to see it something like the nunchuck used in such an unusual way. I thought, well, moving from very inexpensive hacks to incredibly expensive ones, um I have. Actually

it's another broad category steampunk hacks. Now. I wrote how steampunk works and if you're not familiar, steampunk is kind of a well started off as a sort of a sub genre of fiction that kind of attaches to fantasy and science fiction. UM. Now it's almost a cultural thing, you know, a subculture. It's gone beyond just literature. The idea is that it's, uh, it's exists in a world

that never was. It's kind of this Victorian age world where steam technology um continue to develop beyond things like the steam engine, so that everything seems to be steam powered and that we, the people who inhabit this world, have access to technology comparable to the the kind that we have today. But it's all steam powered stuff. So there's lots of brass and copper used, and there's lots of rivets, and everything looks really industrial and um, it's

got a very unique look. If you're not familiar with what steampunk stuff looks like, you really need to do a search because it's very unique and um, I think it's gorgeous. Have you've ever seen the Wild Wild West TV show? Yeah, you know they would always pull these crazy gadgets out, you know, from behind the link in the in the train cars and you're going, you know,

they didn't have that kind of stuff. That was sort of a I'm guessing probably an inspiration for some of the steampunk type stuff because it's sort of in that same well, they didn't really have that kind of technology that well, you know, it's anachronistic like that. It's it's and and it also draws a lot of a lot of inspiration from the works of Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Those are kind of the two patron saints of steampunk. So you think about like twenty Leagues under the Sea

and you look at the Nautilus. The design of the Nautilus, Yeah, totally steampunk, I kind of get it. Or the time machine from H. G. Wells, those weren't to burst your bubble, I forget I said that anyway. So there are lots of people out there who do steampunk hacks where they take modern stuff, they tear it apart and they rebuild it. So it looks like it kind of has this old, tiny look. Retro futurism is a good way of putting it because it looks old and yet futuristic at the

same time. And there are tons and tons of artists out there, and a lot of them are really really talented. Um, but I was just gonna talk about Data Manswer. Now this guy is really really phenomenal. He he will build out a steampunk keyboard for you if you want, and you can tell him what what materials you want and what style you want. And these things range from like they're really expensive, mainly because you're talking about workmanship, you're

talking about materials, because copper is not cheap. Um what is if you, you know, go into the street lights and stealing. Well, that's sure, but he us not do that, I would like to think. Um, actually, I'm sure he doesn't do that. Everything has to be on the up and up. But he also gives them all really interesting, fanciful names. That's kind of part of the culture. So, for instance, he has a steampunk computer that is called and I'm going to butcher this name, but the Nagy

Magical movable type pixel O Dynamo Tronic computational engine. Alright, then that's his computer and it looks awesome. His keyboards are amazing. He's got tons and tons of stuff. If you go to data manswer dot net you can see it. It's a and and he he agreed to UM to let me use some of the images for the article. So he's top aces in my book. You know, how about you got anything else? Now? You know I had my my too big in my classics. Okay. The only other thing I can talk about is that there are

hacks out there that are dangerous. Dangerous hacks not just if you don't know what you're doing, but they're dangerous even if you do know what you're doing and you end up with them. You're not like talking poking yourself with a hot soldering I mean, that is dangerous, yes, but that's not what I'm talking Sucking yourself with a monitor that hasn't discharged the electricity from then also dangerous,

is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about things that are dangerous once you build them and they're working properly, like spud guns. That would be dangerous. But some one talk like Chris, come on, work with me here about

things like spud guns or pneumatic rifles. There are a lot of these out there and their hacks other and most of the people who make the hacks will tell you, hey, this is really dangerous stuff and it's neat to do, but you've gotta be really, really careful because one, if you put too much pressure in these things, they will blow up and you will be hurt too. If you pointed at someone and you pull a trigger, that person

will be hurt. Um three. In most in many places, it may be illegal to construct such a device, So be careful when you are looking around at hacks that you want to tackle. Make sure that you know you're not going to be violating any laws. You're not gonna get any trouble, and you're most importantly, you're not gonna hurt yourself or someone else. Right. So that's advice we should all live by, don't you think. I think? So you know what that brings us to? Oh yep, well,

listener mail, I wish I could hack that sound. Yeah, keep wishing. So today's listener mail comes from Dale Johnson and this actually came to us via Stuff you should know that's a sister podcast of ours, and they wanted us to kind of tackle this one because it had the word hack in the title. But I don't think they read the email very carefully because it's totally different kind of hack. This is the hack hacks, the famous

hacks from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Oh yeah, these are the These are not hacks in like the computer hacking sense or or really the electronics hacking sense. Basically, they're hacking their campus. These are practical jokes that they play, and no one ever seems to know exactly who's responsible for them. But uh, they make some headlines from time

to time, opears to be more outrageous. One. There's been some really some really really great ones, And I've just got a few all run down to give you an idea of what kind of hacks were talking about and the sick twisted mines behind them. Brilliant, brilliant, sick twisted lines. No, I have nothing but admiration for these people. Uh So,

for instance, here's one. Imagine waking up on m I T campus and you're walking toward the h was known as the Great Dome building has a huge dome, okay, and you look and you notice there's something flashing on top of the Dome and you look more carefully and there is what appears to be a Chevallet Cavalier cop car Campus cop car sitting on top of the dome. That night, students had assembled uh the shell of a Chevallet Cavalier around a wooden frame and they put working

lights on it. There was no siren or anything, but they put working lights on ran and then they dispersed, and the next morning people will see this car on top of the Great Dome. It was a pretty cool And they've done other things to the Great That's actually a really popular place to to pull a classic hack because it's such a you know, it's such an iconic

part of the m I T. Campus. Yes, uh so, for instance, in to celebrate the release of the Star Wars Episode one prequel, how little we knew back then, Um, they turned the Great Dome into our two d two. And one of the important things about these hacks is they m I T. People don't want to do any permanent damage now, so vandalism is out. Anything that would cause lots of headaches for someone to fix, that's right

out the door, because it's considered bad form. Yeah. I think that's uh, you know, I haven't really talked to anybody personally who's been involved with these, but I think that's part of the challenge, is to avoid doing any kind of damage. Because sure you could drill holes or you know whatever to make things stick or prop them up. But if you can do it without doing any damage, that hard, you know. And in this case, they use brick to make the R two D two panels, so

they didn't, you know, there was no permit. They didn't paint the dome or anything like that. And there's several others. There's tons and tons more. I'll just give um two really quick ones, uh, and then we can conclude. But in two thousands there these both of these captain. In two thousand and eight, Uh, the M I. T. Students play several do not signs around campus do not something something, and uh. They were all jokes that were based upon

the location that do not sign was left at. So, for example, on the Department of Mathematics bulletin board it said do not divide by zero. On the window of the campus grill, it said do not has cheeseburger. But there were other ones, like in the hallway says do not do cartwheels, and uh, there's one that was upside down and placed way up on the walls as do not walk on ceiling. Lots of just silly little stuff like that, and they were all over the entire campus.

And the other one, which I love because of my love of zombies. Two thousand and eight during the campus preview weekend, so this is when students prospective students are coming to the campus to take a look at it. Some students installed emergency zombie kits in a couple of buildings and it was a big case with a glass panel that had a chainsaw in it and it said in case of zombie attack, break glass. That's just awesome. And these are just a small list. There are there

are tons and tons of these hacks. I mean, m I T is famous for them. Yep. And you know, of course that we are going to get at least one listener email from someone at cal Tech. He's going to point out that cal Tech has its own and they that may spawn other listener emails because there are some fantastic hacks that have happened all over the country. Harvey mud has has pulled pranks on Caltech in the past. Yeah, this is this is one of those proud, proud traditions

of various engineering and technologies colleges throughout the United States. Um, it's just m I T is particularly famous for them. Well, that's a great disc sussion. I guess we can wrap this up. If in any of you have any suggestions or comments or corrections for us, you can write us at tech stuff at how stuff works dot com. And remember we have blogs now blogs he blogs, and you can read those blogs at blogs dot how stuff works

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