Hardware Hacking Resources

#Platforms There are a couple of major platforms out there that allow us to hack hardware.

Arduino

Arduino is a prototyping board that allows us to interact with different sensor and existing products in the market such as, motors, lamps, speakers.

Furthermore, Arduino gives you the ability to hack end-user products, such as dishwashers and microwaves into better products.-(hh)

• Arduino's Getting Started Guide -(hh)

  • Bonus: Cool Arduino comics (recommended) -(hh)

• Arduino's Playground Manual & Curriculum -(hh)

• Arduino's StackExchange -(hh)

• Arduino's Subreddit -(hh)

Arduino's are pretty popular, you could pick them up at Radioshack, Amazon, and the ECE Store @ UIUC

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi (RPi) was born as miniature low-cost (40$) computer project in order to encourage kids and teenagers to learn coding. Yes, it's a full computer, it runs on Linux, and it could be taken anywhere.

The possibilities for hacking are endless! You could build a media streamer, a router, a smart home server, an arcade machine, a microwave (hackers <3 microwaves) and much more. -(hh)

Note: Since Raspberry Pi is mainly programmed in Python, you might want to look at the Python section as well. -(hh)

• Getting Started with Raspberry Pi-(hh)

• Adafruit's RPi Library-(hh)

• RPi's StackExchange-(hh)

• RPi's Subreddit-(hh)

Kinect

Kinect was originally designed for gaming use on the Xbox. However, hackers took the concept and reversed engineered the hardware to expanded the use of Kinect for scientific and medical uses.

Microsoft later on decided to release a Windows supporting software development kit but the hacker community made sure it to make a compatible environment for the rest of the platforms

Non-Windows Users: Before you go out and buy a Kinect make sure that you have the compatible version for your platform -(hh)

• Kinect + Processing: Multi-platform visualization with Kinect

  • Note: If you decided to do visualization with Kinect, you might want to look at our 'Hacking for Artists' section -(hh)

• Skanect: Turns your Kinect to a 3D scanner-(hh)

• If you would like to use these libraries in your projects go ahead:

  • Xbox 360's Kinect & Kinect for Windows V1: libfreenect-(hh)
  • Kinect for Windows V2:libfreenect version 2-(hh)
  • OpenKinect (libfreenect) vs OpenNI (PrimeSense based)-(hh)

Pebble

Develop for Pebble without Python, Unix, and the hassle of setting your environment-(hh)

Oculus Rift & Other VR Headsets

###Oculus

There are a couple of major options for programming games & 3D applications to use with the Oculus:

• Unity (Commercial -- Free)-(hh)
• Unreal Engine (Commercial -- Paid)-(hh)
• Torque 3D (Open Source)-(hh)
• Blender (Open Source)-(hh)

Open source libraries supporting Oculus:

• OpenHMD (Imersive gaming library)-(hh)
• libovr (C implementation of the Oculus Rift SDK)-(hh)

OSVR By Razer:

• [Build your own Consumer grade Open Soruce VR] (http://www.razerzone.com/osvr)-(hh)