Hacking Major Appliances For Fun And Profit? 53
waynelorentz asks: "I've finally reached a point in my life where my time with my family is more important than my money, so I've given in to my wife's persistent urging and bought a Roomba robotic vacuum. While I'm waiting for delivery, I googled for additional information about it and found there is a fledgling community of Roomba hackers outfitting their Roombas with cameras and other equipment. So, it got me wondering - what other appliances have Slashdot-types hacked? I remember when the Internet was young, there were coffee and soda machines you could ping, and the fabled Jellyjet toaster. Anything else?"
I wired my chainsaw... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I wired my chainsaw... (Score:2)
Bruce Campbell [imdb.com] is that you?
When the internet was young.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wired soda machines and all that brain-candy didn't come along until about 10 years ago..
The internet's mid-life crisis perhaps?
-n
I think he means the web (Score:1, Funny)
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:1)
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:2)
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:1)
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:1)
A PIN is an acronym for Personal Identification Number. Referring to it as a PIN number (Personal Identification Number number) is wrong. I don't care if it is the "popular term", it's still incorrect.
Web is short for World Wide Web. There is nothing wrong with referring to it as such
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:2)
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:1)
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:2)
Try 20 years ago. 1982. Or Earlier. See http://www-2.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/ [cmu.edu]. See "Ancient History" at the bottom. This pre-dates http. I remember fingering the coke machine back in 1990 or so.
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:5, Funny)
Must... withstand... urge... to make... smartass... remark...
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:2)
<GrumpyOldMan>...and we LIKED it!</GrumpyOldMan>
Re:When the internet was young.. (Score:2)
Re:Search.pl is back! (Score:2)
Are you and your wife really that lazy? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Are you and your wife really that lazy? (Score:1)
Alas, what is my grandmother to do though? She has arthiritis (spelling, I know) and vacuuming would be difficult. She told the housekeeper to come once a month, instead of bi-weekly, and bought a Roomba. It saved her some money.
Re:Are you and your wife really that lazy? (Score:2)
I find that my hosuehold is better off if I spend the vacuuming energy throwing a stick for my dog. We get some quality time, and exercise. Vacuuming just scares both the dog and cat, and ruins my hearing. (Well I wear ear protection, but I'll bet I'm one of the few that bother)
I'm not too lazy, I prefer to say I have better things to do with my limited time.
what goes on top? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, (Score:1, Troll)
*thwack* Bad geek!
Drink machine at RIT (Score:2, Interesting)
Family time (Score:1)
Demo modes on appliances (Score:2, Funny)
But your friend is too stupid to RTFM, right?
Remote Remote controls (Score:2)
blackbird (Score:2, Interesting)
Full streaming at 20fps.. a little lag, but hey, i'm still working on it
Also I have thought of mounting a pellet gun to the end, and possibly trargeting it via the quick cam.. but thats just getting crazy
Re:blackbird (Score:1)
Geez (Score:2)
If you want to deal with your vacuuming problem by throwing money at it, do what anyone else does. Hire a cleaning lady/guy to come in once a week and tidy things up. Your wife will love that.
Retro hacking (Score:3, Funny)
Upon the demise of my last dryer (once you let the magic smoke out...), I said "well...let's take it apart. Maybe we can reuse some of the parts." (motor for a future Battlebot, maybe?)
Strip it down...take the drum out.
You know that drawer you have, full of odd socks that you wife is always yelling at you about?
Well..the dryer actually does eat them. I pulled a double handful of odd socks, and about $4 in change and bills out of the bottom.
Forget the fancy hack, and just hack it apart.
Re:Retro hacking (Score:2, Informative)
They will do one of two things: wedge themselves between the tub and basket, so that agitation is labored and the spin is piss-poor - and you would swear its a loose belt, or they will go wedge themselves in the water pump impeller and bring the whole show to a screeching halt.
Its a little aggravating to try to recycle a washer motor. They are about 1/2 horsepower, the one I recycled was capacitor-start, reversible, and had two speeds.
Singing fish (Score:1)
Here's a link (Score:2)
Put a VCR on the internet (Score:3, Interesting)
In my college years, I had the position of running an underground student newspaper. An issue was released 'every few weeks' when its dedicated editors were free/bored enough to put one together, but one thing everyone thought would be nice would be to commandeer the University (dorm) cable system after-hours for a student-run movie and wierd footage channel. Starting at about midnight or so, this would replace a lame "information channel" text marquee (which was always several weeks out of date and advertising events whose deadlines had come and gone), that was currently occupying a perfectly good cable channel.
We had obtained keys to the main hub room (also the cable feed room), so inserting the signal was not a problem. The student TV footage was intended to begin late at night, when university officials were guaranteed not to be watching, and would be pre-recorded. This presented a minor problem, however: everyone on the 'staff' had early classes and poor memories, and could not be counted on to get into the hub closet after hours to insert the day's programming and press 'play'. Also, while some students (volunteering for the Computer center) did legitimately have access to these areas, students going in and out of there after hours would arouse unnecessary suspicion from campus security.
It was decided that the best solution was to equip the VCR with a 'remote control' of sorts that would allow it to be controlled over the dorm network via the abundant Ethernet connections available in the room. This would allow for automated starting and stopping as well as manual intervention as necessary; footage could then be loaded during the daytime hours at the convenience of those involved.
Making a VCR Internet-ready is not has hard as it sounds. I simply built a board with eight simple Darlington transistor circuits (corresponding to 8 data pins on a parallel port) to drive the important VCR function buttons via this port. A simple Web server (disposable '386) running a perl-based CGI interface allowed Web-based control of the parallel port bits, which in turn operated the disposable VCR with wires soldered into the appropriate front-panel switches.
The tricky part then became finding controversial/interesting/non-stupid, but legal, student-produced content worth displaying, but that's another story.