Who here has hacked / modified devices?

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Actually, I suppose even that is asking a lot. Looking back over the posts and thinking for a moment, I've got the following points about you (I'm rather a recent member and you've been here since near the beginning):

• You've done some real electronics hacking and you are aware of the availability of low cost of boards and so on
• You have a day job, so school may be a burden you can't take on
• You've posted somewhere before about some of the problems you've had with PIC boards, but I've not read about that so I need to do that to save you time restating what you've already said

I wish I could say something useful to all this. But there isn't any easy path and I'm in no position to say much of anything about your situation. All I can do is talk a bit. I'll see about looking through past posts by you and see if I can find out what you have tried and the problems you went through. Maybe some ideas will come from doing that much. Sorry about my own ignorance -- you've been posting a long time here and probably I could learn some things reading back, before running around spouting thoughts here. I'll see if I can remedy my ignorance a bit before saying more.

Jon

That's pretty interesting -- the 120GB drive thing. Did you use one of those specialized drivers that some of the drives come with for that purpose? Or did you actually write your own 16-bit or 32-bit VxD to support the low level I/O? Oh! I see it was SATA. Hmm. So the motherboard didn't support SATA already and you had to make your own SATA adapter? Was this ISA? Or PCI? (I think ISA is easy to design for, but PCI's reflection wave approach instead of incident, and tight specs on clock skew and the like, make it very hard to do without some expensive test equipment.) I'd like to hear more details, I guess.

Jon

Okay. The search thing under WP is crap. No way to search for keywords, since that is too much of a burden and Alex has shut that feature off. No way I can search for your posts under a single heading, since although it gives me the first page that looks right and limits itself appropriately, but when I then want to click for page 2 (or hit next) I get ALL posts by Remnant (which is 100 pages and more) and suddenly page 2 has a mixture of many posts from other areas. So that pretty much means I can't look for keywords and I can't just scan over posts by one person to a selected topic area.

I'd recommend that Alex spawn searches as a low-priority background task under Linux and allow us users to re-attach to the job after it comes back later on, but I suppose that would be a lot to ask. If he did that, though, at least he could control the cpu time consumed a bit and balance the workload so that keyword searches aren't crushing his computer. We'd need a way to kill old search jobs, too, I suppose. Oh, well. Get's complicated. Anyway, doesn't matter. It's non-functional now and it wouldn't be much good if searches crippled the cpu, so unless Alex gets around to doing the complicated stuff needed to make it smooth and controllable, we are all out of luck.

If you've a mind, Remnant, to either point me to old posts or else just repeat yourself about the PIC MCU projects or other microcontroller projects you've started and not finished, I'd be happy to think about what you say and make a comment or two. Otherwise, I think I'm stuck.

Jon

It's OK, I don't think I've said anything important about projects that I've started and not finished before this thread. I meant other kinds of problems.

I try to do just about any project and often when I actually sit down to do it I just sit there staring into space.

Let's see...

My first hack was upgrading a CoCo's memory to 64k. That indirectly led to online chat and games (multi-user).

Since then, much of the professional work I've done has fallen under the heading of hacking. Sometimes I've reverse-engineered software or hardware. Sometimes I've modified existing systems to work under unusual circumstances. It's all great fun.

About 2 years ago, I repaired/hacked a television. Its power supply was emitting excessive RF, interfering with the Comm radios.

As for FPGAs, last year I bought myself a Xilinx MP403 board (Virtex 4 FX). It's got a PowerPC hard core and runs linux!

If you want to learn to play with FPGAs, both Altera and Xilinx have free software that will compile and simulate their product lines. I've got Xilinx ISE installed now.

Yes, there's a problem with our education system. That's not the whole story, though. Part of what's going on is that what we're building is becoming incredibly complex.

My current work project is a piece of avionics built around an FPGA. I know the theory behind all the lower level pieces, but the work of actually building them would take many lifetimes. In each piece I use, I'm gathering up years or decades of work and placing them on a schematic.

I suppose it would help if there were someone around to break the log jam up a bit for you. Once you get past a certain point, it's easier to move forward. What forced me, and there was no way I had anyone to help and I just sat there too not knowing which way to go, was having spent several months' salary on some 4k dynamic ram cards for my Altair 8800 (which only had 256 bytes of static ram in it, beforehand) and having them NOT WORK after soldering them for a few weeks. It really, really hurt to the point of crying, you know? I somehow got my motivation to just sit there and force myself. Took days to even get going. And two months to solve the problems. (Bad design, actually, and it wasn't even my fault!) After that trial by fire, so to speak, I had a little more willingness to dig into things and less willingness to just let things go to waste. And there were a lot of failures, too, where I never did figure things out and things did go to waste. So I had my share of just not getting anywhere or not knowing where or how to start.

Of course, in that context, the idea of alternative energy sources or rockets to the moon is a bit far fetched. Every long journey starts with the first step and there is no avoiding that first step. It must be taken. And it always comes first. There is no way to get somewhere by taking every other step, or every tenth step, or just jumping there instantly. It begins with the simple things.

Jon

Well, I know that like anything, it takes practice to actually get the habit of sitting down and doing the work. That is probably all that I need. People who let their personal problems get in the way often do so as a habit, one that they hide from themselves. This is my problem.

I have a hacked XBox. It's loaded up with SNES and NES emulators and load of games on it.

This isnt really something I hacked but I think its a cool thing none the less.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nswJiLknRk[/youtube]

This reminds me that I need to complete an LED reading lamp that I started to build a couple of years ago. I even have a solar panel for it, cheap at an import shop.

A solar powered LED reading lamp!

Jon

It would save a lot of electricity even if I charged it from the mains. I have actually tested it and it provides more than enough illumination at half a watt.

Ah! You didn't mention the energy storage component before. That changes things!

Jon