The unit had been sitting on a makeshift shelf in the garage – very close to the roof. I had only tested it briefly after acquiring it from an estate auction in December 2002 (too bad, I missed the opportunity to get the compatible Canon printer in the same auction…grrrr!).
Back then, it was still a fairly popular hobby for hardware guys to hack this piece. But, back then, perhaps I had too much to attend to and forgot the iOpener altogether.
Suddenly, last month – after I set up yet another PC/TV for my parents in our living room, using the assortment of PC hardware scattered throughout the garage – the final product didn’t seem aesthetically appealing to me.
Ding! Ding! Why not use a hacked iOpener instead?
Maybe it’s fortuitous…Parts for the hack would have been considerably steeper had I done it earlier! Now, I’m simply waiting for the UPS truck to arrive!!!
—notes:
You can see the ‘blow-by-blow’ account of the iOpener transformation (hack??) by clicking the second photo at the top of the photo grid and reading: ‘other notes‘ after the description here.
After a month of on-and-off work, on June 1, 2004, the hack was completed. You can see the finished product here.