A hacker scavenged parts from wrecked Tesla Model 3s and turned them into a desk-bound computer setup. Time to step out of your software bubble.
Have you ever gotten so bored of writing boring CRUD apps, fixing UI bugs, and just thought... what if I rip the computer out of a wrecked Tesla and boot it up on my desk? Well, some absolute madman actually did it, and I'm not sh*tting you.
The story comes from a blog post by a hacker named xdavidhu. Instead of hopping on Newegg to buy regular PC parts, this guy went scavenging for parts from crashed and completely wrecked Tesla Model 3s.
Instead of letting it become literal scrap metal, he brought the salvage home, wired it up, reverse-engineered the power delivery, and successfully booted the massive infotainment touchscreen (MCU - Media Control Unit) right on his desk.
If you're a standard web dev who is used to getting Free $300 to test VPS on Vultr to spin up instances with one click, looking at bare-metal car wiring and bootloader bypassing might give you an instant headache. Building a custom PC is one thing; building a "Car PC" is a whole different beast.
(While HN hasn't exploded with comments just yet on the source data, having lurked there for years, here is exactly how the community is splitting into factions):
Ripping apart modern car hardware exposes a blatant truth: the gap between software devs and embedded hardware engineers is shrinking. Modern cars are literally just locked-down Linux machines with four wheels and a ton of DRM.
Sometimes, drowning in JS frameworks day after day makes our brains numb. Occasionally throwing out the VSCode window, reading crazy hardware hacking blogs, or just buying a Raspberry Pi to short-circuit some LEDs can actually reignite that spark you had when you first got into tech.
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