Travelling Hacker Box

Received the Travelling Hacker Box on my first day back from a quick vacation. I waited until the following day to open it at work to find a bunch of little goodies waiting inside.

Digging thought the box it wasn't until I got to the very last item that I found something that really interested me. Buried at the bottom of the small plastic box was a USB snake camera/light. I figured this would be a nice tool to have both at home fixing cars and at work diagnosing routing issues in cramped areas of the radio station that I work at.

In return for the camera I added a pair of switches and missile covers to the box. My original intent was to use them as a grounding switch for turntables. Along with the switches I included what is left of my original Kindle Fire. I was hoping to wipe the entire device but due to the touch functions not working I decided to remove the main logic board and battery. I hope that someone can still find a use for the screen and enclosure.

Tomorrow I hope to add some goodies and ship it off to its next destination!

The box showed up on my doorstep in Anchorage Alaska, It was packed so tight that stuff nearly jumped out at me when I opened it up!

Here is an obligatory image of what I found inside:

There were a few crt displays from old camcorders, a stepper motor driver kit, what appeared to be a few solar cells, a raspberry pi display, and various passive components such as resistors and a couple small EEPROM's. Also included were some blank PCB and hackaday stickers. The long usb cable appears to be a camera (no documentation nor part number) of some sort? There is also a hard plastic case inside that had some of the more delicate components inside it.

I decided to put in a parallel picmicro programmer, power supply for said programmer, as well as two pics to get someone started. Both pic18f877A. Documentation is also included with a recommendation for software that runs fine under current windows operating systems.

Back before I could afford a proper USB unit, which were super expensive back then, it served me well.... Hopefully someone else will get some use out of it :)

All packed up, ready to address and then ship out! Hopefully in the morning :)

This is a new box with Kevlar and custard reinforcement. It even has a plastic box inside.

This little thing looks really interesting, I think it's a mini CRT. Nonetheless, I don't have a project for it, so it's still in the box.

I had brought a box of random stuff to a friends' shop to figure out what to put back in the box. This.

Those of you who are in the travelling hackerbox chatroom often know this post has been a long time coming.

The first travelling hacker box has been stolen. It was stolen by a jackass in Georgia. There are exactly three people who know who stole the travelling hacker box: Benchoff, the guy who shipped it to the jackass, and the jackass himself.

A retrospective of the first travelling hacker box

The first travelling hacker box travelled to the following places, in order:

• Philadelphia, PA
• Bay Area, CA
• Cape Cod, MA
• Seattle, WA
• Long Island, NY
• Middle of, TX
• Cape Cod, Again
• Some jerk's house in Georgia.

The total distance traveled given by a great circle calculator was 14167 miles. That's over half the distance of what I wanted to cover before going internationally. Oh well. Now we know to vet people more carefully before dispatching the box to them.

A NEW BOX APPEARS

Let's not forget the old travelling hacker box had problems. It was, after all, an ill-fitting horror freight case stuffed inside a USPS flat rate box. There was wasted space. This problem has been solved with the Travelling Hacker Box Mk. 2.

Lloyd T Cannon III has solved the problem of wasted space by reinforcing a USPS flat rate box with 'kevlar' and 'custard'. We can only hope by 'custard' he means 'epoxy'. The new travelling hacker box is built around a medium flat-rate box. This will ultimately be cheaper to send, while still providing the structural rigidity required of tens of thousands of miles of travel.

Right now the Mk. 2 box is travelling from Lloyd to hackaday's own Sophi in upstate NY. This is a total of 1584 miles.

Over the next few days, I'm going to do the route planning for the first 25000 miles. The plan is still the same: go around the circumference of the Earth while still enjoying USPS flat rate boxes. After that, we hit Europe, Asia, Africa, and the rest of the world.

I received the box on Friday of this week. It was pretty well packed and easy to open. Anyways here is what i looked like on after I opened it and rummaged a little, forgot to take a picture of the packing job.,

So here is what I have decided to take from the box:

- LayerOne demoscene board

- ESP-Thing

- Teensy

- zUNO clips

- trek patch

- RPi patch

- CYpress dev kit

- Blinkin labs pendant

- Teensy LC

- Juicy Fruit box, Film canister, and skeleton box (took this ones mostly to free up space, I put their contents into bags)

- Adam Fabio's Analog stepepr gauge

- Benchoff's highly humorous trinket derivative.

Here is what I have put into the box, I have tons of stuff so this was hard, many years dumpster diving, salvaging, and MIT swapfest hauls have resulted in huge piles of hackable items.

- Water flow sensor

- chinese android tab, (wont boot)

- pocket digital picture frame

- Granite State FIRST Robotics Regional embroided patch

- Breadboard ribbon wire

- normal ribbon wire

- Maxon Motor with gearbox and encoder

- light up icecube

- 3D printed extruder bowden tube mounts

- 3D printed angle brackets

- Makerfaire 2013 button

- Mini breadboard with transitors

- Ranodm ESC programmer

- Minecraft Nether Portal Keychain

- Keil ULINK-ME

- Autodesk sticker

- linux stickers from redhat

- ESP-01 Module

- ADI DSP Board with the AMD memory hack

- 3V3 LDO modules (2)

- Neuron Robotics DyIO

- Random PCB for something I dont know

- uPre PCB and knobs

So after finding Adam Fabio's board I decided to package a small kit for one of my designs too, the uPre. Project page is here if you care: https://hackaday.io/project/7704-upre

To pack the box I just dumped everything on the kitchen table and packed by starting with the big things, filling in the cracks with little items.

Box itself halfway done

Box finished and remaining items packed into the side

Fully Packed

Now the box is off to the next person, down in Georgia!!!! Hope the rest of you guys enjoy the box, great to be a part of it.

Never thought it would get here so fast. Well Adam spoiled the show with his video last week but it's not like me to not take a peek inside. Speaking of peek, I was tempted to take the peek he added last week but I figured the st boards and that huge lcd were more worth my time. Here's what I am adding. Click on the picture to read the tiny text.

Plus one Nextar Q4 GPS unit and an HP 12C RPN Financial calculator.

And here's what I am taking:

Both ST Discovery Boards. (both have broken buttons)

The ST prototyping board for the f0 board

2 different Hackaday.io stickers

The graphic LCD

One of the Cypress CY8KIT Psoc boards

An Adafruit Pro Trinket

Sparkfun BLE Mate 2

RGB Button

Hope someone can use my stuff!

~xobmo

The next person to receive the Travelling Hacker Box is Hackaday's own Adam Fabio.

Want a video? Here's a video.

Here's what Adam added:

The box will next travel to somewhere around Waco, TX. The current plan is to sent the box around the US for a few more hops, before redirecting it to the Hackaday Supercon next month in San Francisco.

This is a map of the previous travels of the box. Blue is already travelled, Orange is the next leg of the journey:

I have no idea how they packed this thing shut. Thankfully it's in a cardboard box, so overflow is contained!

Awesome tape. Gonna reuse that.

Spoiler-Alert Below!

Stupidly, I didn't piece-together the fact that the first log-entry contains links to many of the things in here... so spent most of a day looking these things up the hard way. No need to post those links here, again ;)

Stuff looks cool and all, when it's all packaged in their retail-boxes, but be sure to open 'em up. It's packed so tight there's stuff hidden in various boxes.

This one's hard to pass-up... Someone's gonna be lucky to get it!

Seriously, a Lego LED?

Now here's a few things I included: A PS/2 touchpad, two really groovy 6800 microcontrollers with EPROM sockets mounted atop (Unfortunately, they're for bigger EPROMs than those above, but a true 1337 Haxor could reroute a couple pins, right?)

And a project I tried to sell a while back... supply 9-15V and attach a pushbutton (or "bump switch").

Unfortunately, I still haven't decided what I'm going to take... but tomorrow's Sunday, so you have at least 24 hours to put in a "request to not take..."

The box will soon be sent off to Hackaday's own Adam Fabio. In the map below, blue is already travelled, orange is the next trip:

The box is over flowing, but I got it closed again for it's trip to Washington state. Here is what I added:

Now the box is off to somewhere around Seattle:

Got home from work to find this waiting on the dining room table:

Hmmm, I wonder what's in this box??

And now for the big reveal:

So much stuff!

Even a computer game from the 80s...

If only I had a 3.5" floppy drive hanging around somewhere...

If you want to be surprised by what's in the box stop reading now!

I grabbed one of the Cypress PSoC kits and the eeZeeProp board. I put in a first edition Teensy LC and a couple of tubes that I had lying around (a 12AX7 and an EL84) that were for a tube amp project that I started ages ago and never finished.

Now off to the next stop, somewhere in Massachusetts. Blue is already traveled, Orange is current trip.