This is the beginning of a hopefully reoccurring segment called Found Hacks, where I bring up some cool hacks and mods I’ve found on other websites.
Today’s Found Hack is from spritemods.com [via HackedGadgets]. It presents step-by-step instructions on making a hardware dongle that attaches to an HP printer and changes what the display reads.
“A nice thing about the HP laserjets is that they have a little display, and you can use PJL, a sort of controlling language, to change what’s displayed on it, using a bit of code that runs on a PC.
For the microcontroller itself, I decided on my good old pal the ATTiny2313. I could have used an other avr, but I’ve got dozens of this type laying around and theyre cheap enough, so I decided on this one.”
This is a really cool hack and I can’t wait to try it out.
Also: There is a software hack to do this sort of thing over a network. It’s a little less safe because you could mess things up pretty bad.
