Perhaps I’m just an idiot, but what *is* it? OK, he made a PCI card which is really cool and certainly demonstrates his l337 ub3r electrical engineering 5ki11z, but what does said PCI card do? Someone please clue me in.

Posted at 12:06 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by madmax

I don’t know but this hack as exponentional potentional for us tinkers :-D

Posted at 12:21 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by Quafboy

I Think it was just a proof of concept. All i saw it do was show that a computer can input data into the card and retreive data from it.

Posted at 12:22 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by Darkpenguin

Once you have a PCI card that has a register that can be read from and written to, you can do anything. Simply replace the latches with your favorite FPGA, interface to another microprocessor or dsp, and you are set. You could set up an array of FPGAs on a pci card to create a hardware based password cracker. FPGAs have been used in the past to do this. You could interface the FPGA to optical relays that control 110V relays, for turning on and off 110V outlets. You could add ADCs to read temperatures, voltages, pressure, humidity, etc etc. You could add a DAC to make your own sound card or function generator.

Posted at 12:42 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by tom

Damn that’s hot! Only problem is, do I bookmark this in my “Hacks” folder or my “pr0n” folder?

Posted at 12:53 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by furtim

furtim, I couldn’t agree more! I’ve been wanting to see this for ages. I do admit I’d be a bit worried about putting a decive I built on my mobo, but really this is sweet!

Posted at 1:23 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by xSmurf

This is fantastic! There are loads of possible applications for this kind of hack.

*Hackers, if you had the money, skill, and time to create your own custom PCI card, what would you have it do?*

I envision one that holds RAM DIMMs and uses them as a ram disk to speed up the swap file. It could incorporate lithium polymer batteries that could hold the volatile information if power were to unexpectedly go out and the system did not have the time to back up the ram disk to hard disk.

Posted at 1:32 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by billytheimpaler

to #7 if you are going to use a RAM drive for your swap file space. then you dont need a battery at all. Great idead thou :)

Posted at 2:07 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by Spyingwind

Gigabyte allready makes on of those..

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/05/31/gigabyte_ramdisk/

PCI for power, SATA for data, with battery and 4 RAM slots.

Nice part is that the PCI provides constant power even when the computer is off so the battery is rarley used.

Posted at 2:44 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by Quantis

Great work, but horrible English. Reminds me of my last physics TA.

Posted at 3:22 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by bronzeG3

#9 that’s quite sweet, too bad i can’t afford even that much ram for my system :(

what else do people want to see as pci hacks? You guys (and gals) have got to have some neat ideas.

Posted at 3:53 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by billytheimpaler

A custom PCI board could come in handy for testing other hacks. I recall a certain serial dongle in my uni’s projects lab that had 18 kajillion leads and proprietary software that was used to record and display digital waveforms for testing logic circuits. It was almost certainly ridiculously expensive, but I bet you could do it as a PCI hack for significantly less.

Although, actually, pretty much any hack that involves computer I/O could be redone as a PCI board.

A good example that comes to mind was a feature we had considered but dropped for a project I worked on in said lab. We wanted to record wind speed and direction, but all the commercial wind gauges we could afford served up analog signals and all the digital interfaces were too expensive. A PCI hack could have been devised to convert the analog signals from a cheap wind gauge into digital signals and feed them to our project software.

Well… most projects I can think of to do with PCI could also be done with serial/USB connections. Just the PCI way saves having to build a robust enclosure, since your PC is now your enclosure for all but the actual sensor. Which is helpful in its own way, of course.

I guess the real question is can anyone think of a PCI project that *couldn’t* be done on USB?

Posted at 4:39 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by furtim

how about an internal LCD to say hi to people staring into your case at a lan party?

GREG HUM IS A STALKER

Posted at 6:12 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by CAptSnuffy

By far, the worst case of Engrish I have ever seen. “The PCI seems to be thought that it cannot be touch in the hand of amateurs due to the high performance of the PCI.”
I would make a PC diagnostics tool (possibly with LCD readout and battery on-board) as a PCI project.

Posted at 6:14 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by Pocketbrain

PCI bus is for high speed data comm and it’s a hell to implement… if you want to activate relays please use serial or paralel ports or even a USB/serial converter to do so… don’t use a cannon to kill a fly!

Posted at 10:07 pm on Oct 7th, 2005 by darcio

what about using it as an interface to emulate a automotive ECU to use and control OEM fuel injection harness with your own software.

Posted at 1:17 am on Oct 8th, 2005 by jeanphe

Being a case modder, I’d love to use something based on this which could simply switch relays (or actually transistors would be better) and see if switches were switched on/off. That in itself would be very nice, because with the software that you’d surely have to make for it, you could totally automate your case (or a robot if you wanted to). Only problem would be figuring out how to write software that could communicate with it. Also to even build those simple features I described is way above my head.

A serial output would also be nice, to drive things like LCD screens.

Posted at 1:34 am on Oct 8th, 2005 by Face

how about a fan/cold cathode controller that has as many outputs as you want. power can come from Pci and if you need more juice, from molex connetors. you could write routines for it to run or control it from a gui console. you could sprinkle temperature sensors through the case and set up temp thresholds for the fans so they automatically vary themselves with load, just like the controllers on the motherboard. you could set up cooling zones so if one zone becomes hotter than another, just those fans kick into action and rectify the situation.
for lighting you could have optical sensors that determine how dark it is and vary the intensity of the light based on that.

Posted at 9:10 am on Oct 8th, 2005 by billytheimpaler

the problem with these suggestions is that the PCI interface (i know thats redundant)is completely unnecesary. Yuo could just grad the power from a spar molex connector and make yur own simple circuit with a microcontroller and some sensors. You’d only need the PCI to work in conjunction with software, and it seems like a lot of people wouldn’t want to get into that.

Posted at 7:14 pm on Oct 8th, 2005 by CAptSnuffy

Yeah, nice thing. But the problem is, the PCI specifications are completely closed out to the public. Well, general public that is. You have to become a member of the pci-sig group in order to legally access all the PCI documentation, and the annual fee is $3000 a year.

http://www.pcisig.com/membership/join_pci_sig/

Posted at 9:59 pm on Oct 8th, 2005 by Pixel

How to apply 8255 in this card ?

Posted at 4:53 am on Oct 10th, 2005 by kva

It’s responses like #1 that confuse the hell out of me. We apparently live in a world where “ultra leet” speak is more important than knowledge. The last time I checked, being a “hacker” wasn’t a status symbol. It was one persons desire to understand the secrets and inner workings behind closed doors.

For the record, the knowledge of how a PCI card works is MUCH more important than WHAT it can do for you. It’s what YOU can MAKE it do. So, a “hack” is something YOU do to the computer to produce results. Custom results. You make it behave in a way you want it to behave. And, if the feeling of playing God with your computer isn’t enough to rock your ultra leet socks off…

I believe Nintendo has a user friendly interface. Please, go play Mario Sunshine and smile.

Posted at 9:36 pm on Oct 10th, 2005 by haloscorned

It’s responses like #1 that confuse the hell out of me. We apparently live in a world where “ultra leet” speak is more important than knowledge. The last time I checked, being a “hacker” wasn’t a status symbol. It was one persons desire to understand the secrets and inner workings behind closed doors.

For the record, the knowledge of how a PCI card works is MUCH more important than WHAT it can do for you. It’s what YOU can MAKE it do. So, a “hack” is something YOU do to the computer to produce results. Custom results. You make it behave in a way you want it to behave. And, if the feeling of playing God with your computer isn’t enough to rock your ultra leet socks off…

I believe Nintendo has a user friendly interface. Please, go play Mario Sunshine and smile.

Posted at 9:37 pm on Oct 10th, 2005 by haloscorned

I think it’s pretty neat even though it does not implament an auto configureation registor.
It could be useful in allowing one to hook up an LCD or relay box to a legacy free machine esp a macintosh as they have no parallel ports new world ones even lack general serial IO and only have USB and 1394.
Yes one can use a usb interface box but these do cost $130 a copy and they sometimes only come with a windows only driver and may have poor documentation making it difficult to write a new driver.
As on the PCI bus specs they have been loose in public for sometime pinouts and bus timings are publicly avilible so ignore pixel’s remarks and have fun.

Posted at 4:17 pm on Oct 11th, 2005 by Washu

What so exciting about hacking ? :D

Posted at 6:56 am on Oct 17th, 2005 by kva

This page has been temporarily closed due to too much traffic.
Please try again later.

Anyone know of a mirror of this? Or did someone by chance save a copy?

Posted at 11:18 am on Oct 18th, 2005 by ur;lord pyro -k

I also homebrewed a PCI card, but in a slightly more practical way.

http://www.ben.com/minipci/

Posted at 10:56 pm on Nov 19th, 2005 by bEN JACKSON

Hey guys,

very nice ideas. But has anyone have already more information about how to build your own pci, i’m very interested due to a project on school where i need a very fast interface to the pc, and i saw this topic and well if anyone knows how to read and write to a PCI device this would be a very nice solution.
(Maybe some kind of schemtics or software?) I hope you guys can help me, i also searched very much on the internet but didn’t find anything to help, only some timing schemetics.

In forward thanks!

Posted at 5:48 am on Nov 19th, 2007 by Soosie