HOPE Day 2 - Citizen Engineer
Posted by Eric Stein - July 22, 2006 CE @ 20:48:51 UTC
Lady Ada of Adafruit Industries gave a talk about all the hardware hacking she's done and the history and recent resurgence of it. You may know her by from her Altoids tin MP3 player that received a good deal of publicity online. As the panel was starting, I recognized Phillip Torrone by his laptop. That isn't something that happens to me every day. It only happened because his powerbook has a tarsier laser-etched into it. The two continued to show off cool hardware hacks, including a rotary-dial cellphone that definitely outdoes the classic cellphone handset over at ThinkGeek. To top it off, Phillip gave a copy of Make magazine to the first person to call the phone. I want that phone.
Modding existing proprietary hardware isn't the only hardware hacking out there. Lady Ada reverse-engineered a famous (and recently, expensive due to lack of supply) sound synthesizer and published the plans online. Her version, the x0xb0x (pronounced zocks box), is availabe as both a kit and full plans under an open source license! Hundreds of peope have made them from the plans since, and there have even been contributions of improvements!
Some links for aspiring hardware hackers (courtesy of Lady Ada):Well, I've got to go attend the panel on password cracking and the time-memory tradeoff. That's all for now.
Modding existing proprietary hardware isn't the only hardware hacking out there. Lady Ada reverse-engineered a famous (and recently, expensive due to lack of supply) sound synthesizer and published the plans online. Her version, the x0xb0x (pronounced zocks box), is availabe as both a kit and full plans under an open source license! Hundreds of peope have made them from the plans since, and there have even been contributions of improvements!
Some links for aspiring hardware hackers (courtesy of Lady Ada):Well, I've got to go attend the panel on password cracking and the time-memory tradeoff. That's all for now.
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