Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks by Scott Fullam.
O’Reilly has built up a good reputation of publishing interesting and original books. When I heard about Hardware Hacking for Geeks I was intrigued and had to give it a read. I was at first surprised by the absence of O’Reilly’s trademark animal on the cover of the book, and the inside design departs from O’Reilly’s layout of recent years. A sign of a different series or a new format for O’Reilly publications?
The first page of the book starts off with why the author is really a hardware hacking geek, not surpringly including the ‘used to take toys to pieces as a kid’ piece, but you are soon convinced that the author is well qualified as a hardware hacking geek.
Rather than including a CD with all the supplementary material, it can be found at the URL noted in the book. Not having a CD drive on my laptop, I much prefer it this way.
Not having a background in hardware hacking I wondered how easy it would be to get into the book. The second page put me at ease. “If you have no background in electronics, you may want to first read through Part I, Basic Hacks, Tools, and Techniques. It will help you become familiar with the tools of th trade and basic soldering techniques”. Moving to the introduction of Part I, “The projects in this section require you to use basic hand tools, read schematic diagrams, use a multi-meter, and know how to solder”. The tour of the author’s toolbox may be a bit overwhelming for any hardware hacker beginner. I skipped over this for the time being assuming that my first chosen project wouldn’t require all of the tools and that later parts of the book would help me understand the jargon here so I could pick up the relevant parts from a nearby 100 yen shop. A later chapter covers “advanced hacks, tools and techniques…to tackle the more complicated hacks”.
As with all O’Reilly publications the book is well organized and clearly laid out: “Each project begins with a duration scale representing how much time the project will likely take to complete, a cost scale…and a difficulty scale”.
The book contains the following projects, one chapter for each: how to build a portable laptop power supply; how to build an aquarium inside a Macintosh; how to hack 802.11b antennas; how to build a PC water-cooling system; how to hack a furby (and other talking toys); how to hack a video periscope for your car; how to build a digital video recorder; how to hack a building size display; how to build a cubicle intrusion detection system; how to build an internet toaster (…that can be commanded to toast a pattern on the bread based on the weather or any other web-based data); how to build a home arcade machine; how to build a remote object tracker; how to make RC cars play laser tag; how to build a wearable computer; and finally how to build an internet coffee maker.
After taking into account the hacks, tools and techniques chapters, the book is probably worth the price even if you just want to do one or two of the projects. Each chapter contains full, detailed instructions and lots of photographs and diagrams, even including ‘a quick overview of assembly language and C’ in the furby hacking chapter. The final two projects sounded most interesting and useful to me so I immediately skipped to those chapters and will focus on them for this review.
Looking at Chapter 14, How to Build a Wearable Computer I found that it ranked very highly on the cost, time and difficulty scales. Still tempted and and having skim-read the detailed instructions in previous chapters, I was not fazed and read on. After the overview the required components for the project were listed and then a detailed explanation of the requirements and availability of each item followed. I learnt a great deal about wearable computers just from reading this. A lot of different alternatives are explained giving you plenty of ideas that you would never have considered or thought possible yourself, for example taking a viewer from an old camcorder. Useful links are used sparingly and effectively, including information on where to buy any parts you need. Given that the system is componentized there was not a lot of information on putting everything together but there is enough information in other sections to ensure that you get coomponents that work together. The latter part of the section gave an overview of the different operating systems to choose including information on options available for free. This project left the reader with a lot of choices and options to work with but didn’t make things sound as difficult as I had imagined. I’ve yet to try the project but the prospect of being able to check my e-mail through a headmounted viewfinder powered by a CPU in a waist pouch, replying using a one handed input method is very tempting. The availability of low priced, flat rate wireless data cards in Japan means that you could turn yourself into a walking internet and e-mail terminal.
Having gone through a ‘very difficult’ chapter I was glad to see that the internet coffee maker project was only ranked as moderate. I was hoping that I could ‘make’ a cup of coffee using my browser (then I would have been really impressed) but the project had the aim of letting you know whether there was any coffee in the pot and its temperature. As with other chapters, the first page starts with an informative background setting the scene nicely for the project . This project again worked by teaching you how to put together freely available or commercial parts and also provided adequate information on the hardware side of things.
The internet coffee maker was an interesting sounding project but I plan to start on the wearable computer one first. Of the 15 projects I’m sure there is one that speaks to your inner geek and if so I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend getting hold of the book to give it a try. You are sure to learn a lot and have a useful toy at the end of it.
If there was anything disappointing about the book it was likely due to the fact I had not read in detail what the book was about in advance. I had hoped that I might learn some tips about how to try to fix some of the broken hardware I have such as hard disks or a PDA. I guess given the huge range of hardware available this approach would be impractical and the fully explained project approach is good for giving you all the required knowledge to get you started working on projects in a short amount of time. The book also succeeds in helping you build a good working knowledge and toolset for embarking on projects of your own.
For those of you who never got further than taking apart toys as kids, now you have no excuse not to let loose your inner hardware geek with the help of O’Reilly’s (http://www.oreilly.com) ‘Hardware Hacking Projects for Geeks’ (ISBN: 0-596-00314-5).
