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Programming Hardware IT Technology

Hacking Major Appliances For Fun And Profit? 53

Posted by Cliff from the workshop-of-the-budding-inventor dept.
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?"
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Hacking Major Appliances For Fun And Profit? More

Hacking Major Appliances For Fun And Profit?

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  • I wired my chainsaw... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 20, 2003 @10:44PM (#7266670)
    I no longer have a hand, but I now can turn that thing on from any internet connected computer. Just don't make the mistake I did... firewall it.

  • When the internet was young.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Nathan Ramella ( 629875 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @10:47PM (#7266696) Homepage
    There was no DNS and people passed around a text file full of FTP sites and nobody had come up with the idea of a URI or a URL.

    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

  • Are you and your wife really that lazy? (Score:3, Funny)

    by DAldredge ( 2353 ) <SlashdotEmail@GMail.Com> on Monday October 20, 2003 @11:36PM (#7267142) Journal
    Are you two so lazy you can vacuum your own home? Damn, it's not that hard.
    • I agree. People should get up, turn off the TV and computer and clean. Maybe they should go outside too.

      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.

    • 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)

    by rsfpc ( 717694 ) on Monday October 20, 2003 @11:39PM (#7267164) Homepage
    What would you mount on it? Like maybe PEZ dispensers? I mean, come on! a camera at that level is only good for one thing... up skirts!

  • Well, (Score:1, Troll)

    by cybermace5 ( 446439 )
    There goes all your family time.

    *thwack* Bad geek!
  • The CS House [rit.edu] at the Rochester Institute of Technology [rit.edu] has hacked a drink machine [rit.edu] that can dispense drinks via the internet.
  • Maybe you should spend some time with your family instead of putting a camera on your robotic vacuum cleaner?
  • Most with an LED display have them. Usually it scrolls some 'buy me, I can do blahblahblah' msg, and a clued store will set it on. But you can do it to your friend's new microwave oven if you want to annoy them. The manual will tell you how to do it.
    But your friend is too stupid to RTFM, right?
  • I wired my video remote upto my parallel port and setup a web front end so I could set my video remotely. And yes I know videos have a timer.

  • blackbird (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Dragoon ( 10644 )
    I wired in a wireless camera to a model of a blackbird that I have, it has a gas engine, and kicks some serious speed ass.

    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 :)

  • Geez (Score:2)

    by phr1 ( 211689 )
    Your family time is more important than your money, so instead of vacuuming so your wife appreciates that you're helping around the house, you buy another techno-gizmo and get wrapped up in it so she becomes a computer widow even more than she is already.

    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)

    by YrWrstNtmr ( 564987 ) on Tuesday October 21, 2003 @02:00PM (#7272863)
    Not a hack, but something to do with old appliances.

    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)

      by anubi ( 640541 )
      hehe.. lemme tell you the washing machine eats socks and lingerie too.

      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.

  • Has everyone forgot about the "Billy Bass" and his friends. You can reprogram these things to say whatever you want them to.
  • ...to the "Roomba Community" [roombacommunity.com] that details some of these hacks!

  • Put a VCR on the internet (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BillX ( 307153 ) on Wednesday October 22, 2003 @01:40AM (#7278706) Homepage
    Well, it looks like this topic will be overrun by second-rate jokesters cracking wise about the Roomba's name, laziness, etc. In blatant disregard for the Slashdot community, here is something actually relevant to the topic.

    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.

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