Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks

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Introduction

I was inspired in my youth by two early “hackers”: Thomas Edison and

Ben Franklin. These men were constantly looking at the mechanisms

and machines around them and seeking ways to improve their operation.

Franklin saw the open fireplace and how it made rooms smoky with little

heat to show for all the wood it burned. To fix this, he built an enclosed

burning box known today as the Franklin stove. When Franklin grew tired

of carrying two sets of glasses around, one for reading and one for distance,

he hacked together the first bifocals. Edison was a prolific inventor and

hacker. He took devices like the telegraph, stock ticker, and telephone and

improved upon them. In his lifetime, Edison had over 1,000 patents to his

name.

As a child I was always taking things apart to see how they worked. I used

to build my own toys by taking apart ones I already had. Later, when I was a

student at MIT, I lived in a dorm that had shared showers with a first-come,

first-served usage policy. The only way you could tell if there was someone

in the shower was to stand next to the door. Like most college students, I

enjoyed sleeping in as long as possible. And as I did not want to stand in a

cold bathroom waiting for the shower, I hacked up a sensor to the shower

room door with an indicator in my room to tell me when the door was open.

When I woke up, I would look for a flashing LED next to my bed indicat-

ing that the shower was occupied. This allowed me to wait in my warm bed

until the light went off before walking to the shower.

At MIT, my interests included robotics. I built a number of autonomous

machines and helped teach a class in robot design. After graduation, this led

to a job as a toy designer. Over the course of two years I built close to 100

prototype toys. Many of the prototypes I built were hacked together from

existing toys. It was great fun to have a job where I had to think up new

things to play with and then build them.

Preface

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