Wicked practical joke

[steve_w]

Check out this story, the guy who did this is just plain diabolical, what an evil sense of humor. I would love to work with him.

enjoy

Steve W

http://ultrakeet.com.au/write-ups/microcontrollers-not-allowed

[Vgkid]

That is pretty ingenius.

[rob77]

nice joke but i would have soldered much thinner wires to the internal structure of the pins and potted the IC back  then let the teacher to reuse the chip later on - in fact trolling not just the teacher but also future students 

[German_EE]

Work like that is impressive and if I was his course instructor I would hand out extra credits.

So, the next time someone suggests that the CIA/NSA/FBI have installed a keylogger inside your keyboard just remember stuff like this before you dismiss them 

[free_electron]

Any instructor worth his salt would have spotted this immediately .it's Pretty obvious this was a hacked 7447 as the font is wrong. In a real 7447 The 7 doesnt have The segment f, the 6 doesnt have segment a, and the nine doesnt have segment d.

Youd need a 74247 to get the 6 and 9 , but even then the 7 would still not have segment f.

Teachers ..  . Duh ..




Edit. I really need to get a real life one day. As soon as the number 6 flew by in the video my brain went -fake fake fake- : the font is wrong. And then 7 flew by and the alarm just went louder.  It's pretty bad when your subconscious memory fires up alarms looking at a seven segment display ...

[colecaz]

Had to join EEVblog just to comment on this.

Obviously, this student had too light of a class load.  But what a clever implementation and excellent workmanship.  He's hired!!

[steve_w]

Maybe Dave should recruit him for the vacant position at EEVBlog.  That post is a pretty good resume for the job.

Dave, headhunt this guy.

Steve W

[pickle9000]

Awesome

[HighVoltage]

I would hire some student like this on a spot.
What a great idea and implementation

[TerraHertz]

He fixed his http://ultrakeet.com.au/about/   page. Nice workshop!

[holozip]

What an amazing practical joke, shame it was so well executed they didn't spot it

Gets my +1 for new lab assistant!

[EEVblog]

Maybe Dave should recruit him for the vacant position at EEVBlog.  That post is a pretty good resume for the job.
Dave, headhunt this guy.
Steve W

As it turns out, I know him! 
http://ultrakeet.com.au/about/
I know who he used to work for.
I had no idea he was "UltraKeet"

[Zero999]

Any instructor worth his salt would have spotted this immediately .it's Pretty obvious this was a hacked 7447 as the font is wrong. In a real 7447 The 7 doesnt have The segment f, the 6 doesnt have segment a, and the nine doesnt have segment d.

Youd need a 74247 to get the 6 and 9 , but even then the 7 would still not have segment f.

Teachers ..  . Duh ..




Edit. I really need to get a real life one day. As soon as the number 6 flew by in the video my brain went -fake fake fake- : the font is wrong. And then 7 flew by and the alarm just went louder.  It's pretty bad when your subconscious memory fires up alarms looking at a seven segment display ...

The difference is you knew it was a fake before you saw the video.

If you expected to see a standard 7 segment counter circuit, then you'd be much less likely to spot it, until you saw it uttering obscenities.

[VK3DRB]

Here are practical joke war stories I knew about over the years. Enjoy!

(1) An ex-IBM plant manager admitted that during his engineering course at university, he changed some colour codes bands on resistors housed in little clear plastic boxes with banana plugs. Hence 100K would look like 1K by just over-painting the yellow stripe with red, or a 22K would look like a 22 ohm by painting over the third red strip with black.

(2) At RMIT an oscilloscope had a problem. Turn it on and there was no trace. The technician open up the CRO and checked all the signals at the neck of the tube were OK, the focus voltage seemed to work and there was EHT. So he ordered a new picture tube (expensive back in the early 80's). When he went to replace the picture tube, out fell a piece of cardboard that some clown had placed between the picture tube and the graticule screen. 

(3) A technician once swapped the 'T' and 'Y' keytops on a keyboard belonging to another technician. The victim came to the conclusion the keyboard decoder inside the keyboard itself was defective and ordered a new replacement keyboard.

(4) Two PC's connected with a back-to-back phone line emulator (hidden away). The mouse on one PC was thus made to "interfere" with the second PC's monitor via PC Anywhere. The victim looked underneath the mouse and was adamant, "I have seen this before. This crap is made in China and there is RF interference into the other PC." His engineering colleagues were in tears.

(5) At RMIT in the 1970's, some students inflated several boxes of condoms and floated them out the upper storey window past the Queen Victoria Hospital maternity wing.

(6) At Melbourne Uni in the late 1970's, the Farrago magazine advertised a stunt where a bloke was going to jump off the multi-story Howard Florey building onto some cardboard boxes. As a crowd gathered, the stuntman wearing overalls entered the building to take the lift to the top. Instead an effigy of the stuntman containing some bags of tomato sauce was thrown off the roof and made to miss the boxes and hit the concrete. One of the staff needed medical attention from shock. 

(7) At IBM, some engineer typed an email to his manager from another engineer's PC as an in-house joke saying, "I want twice the money for half the work else you can stick you job up your... ." It backfired. He typed the intended recipient's address with a typo in one character and instead it went to the secretary of a senior executive. There was an enquiry ordered into the incident, and he was lucky not to have lost his job.

(8 ) At IBM, an engineer who was leaving the company sent an image of a person's backside made out of text characters to the CEO of IBM Corporation. All hell broke loose and the next day as he was marched to the door, he actually asked for a job reference.

Practical jokes can be funny but can have nasty consequences. I heard on an OH & S course that many industrial accidents occur though skylarking and practical jokes.
 

[briselec]

Many years ago I worked for a couple of bosses who loved pulling practical jokes. I reckon the following was their best ever -
They bought a huge amount of polystyrene beanbag fill and emptied the lot in front of the stairwell pressurization fans then turned the fans on. Each time someone opened the door to the stairwell to go to another floor they would get covered in beanbag fill.
They had to hide from the cleaners for a few days after that one.
 

[cosmos]

25 years ago we pulled this one on our boss. This was in a radio/TV repair shop... and he was doing all the VCRs.
The typical fault would be with guiding the video tape around in the mechanics, causing a swishing sound. So we mounted a small capstan driving motor under his desk with a piece of tape on it to make the same sound, remote controlled from the next desk..
Came time for final check of a repaired unit and suddenly there was this noise in it ... he would turn it over to see what it was ... no more sound ... turn it over again .. then it would be back at random times...  kept him going for nearly an hour ... very hard to keep a straight face for the guy sitting next to him.
No repercussions to us and he would do similar things to us if he had the chance so he was cool.

[SeanB]

We had a chair rigged up with some "extra" parts. Think of a car coil, a CDI ignition unit, wires threaded through the seat fabric connected to the coil centre and the ground, a 12V SLA battery, a relay operating as a buzzer and 2 wires across the bottom acting as a switch.

Hilarious fun, and you could sit in it without triggering it if you knew how. Fun was the day the OC came to visit and he sat in the chair.

Another one somebody ( not me)  took a needle and threaded wire strands through the drivers seat fabric of the work utility van, and snaked it unseen to the engine and to the coil centre tower. They convinced the victim that it was "static shock" for about a minute........

[HighVoltage]

We had a chair rigged up with some "extra" parts. Think of a car coil, a CDI ignition unit, wires threaded through the seat fabric connected to the coil centre and the ground, a 12V SLA battery, a relay operating as a buzzer and 2 wires across the bottom acting as a switch.

Hilarious fun, and you could sit in it without triggering it if you knew how. Fun was the day the OC came to visit and he sat in the chair.

Another one somebody ( not me)  took a needle and threaded wire strands through the drivers seat fabric of the work utility van, and snaked it unseen to the engine and to the coil centre tower. They convinced the victim that it was "static shock" for about a minute........

That is borderline mean, but probably hilariously funny.

You could turn the output energy down a lot by keeping the input current to the coil low and one might even really think it is static discharge in the seat.

[Circlotron]

At my workstation quite some time ago I had this HP frequency synthesizer that would go to 60 megs with a resolution of 0.001Hz. Quite cool for 1983. It was only used for generating audio test tones though. Anyway, the guy next to me always had his radio on the local AM station at 1377kHz. Seeing it was a radio factory it was just too lame to set my oscillator to make a heterodyne whistle in his radio, so one lunchtime I exactly zero-beated the oscillator to his favourite station, then did a quick calc and offset the frequency ever so slightly and wrote it down. After lunch I set the oscillator to the predetermined frequency and slowly slowly over a 5-10 minute period his radio would get softer and softer as my sinewave gradually crept out of phase with the radio station carrier. So slowly that he would always think that the batteries were going flat. 

[CJay]

25 years ago we pulled this one on our boss. This was in a radio/TV repair shop... and he was doing all the VCRs.
The typical fault would be with guiding the video tape around in the mechanics, causing a swishing sound. So we mounted a small capstan driving motor under his desk with a piece of tape on it to make the same sound, remote controlled from the next desk..
Came time for final check of a repaired unit and suddenly there was this noise in it ... he would turn it over to see what it was ... no more sound ... turn it over again .. then it would be back at random times...  kept him going for nearly an hour ... very hard to keep a straight face for the guy sitting next to him.
No repercussions to us and he would do similar things to us if he had the chance so he was cool.

Similar 'intermittent' trick, we used a few meters of cable and wired a pushbutton switch and resistor across live to earth on a bench with an earth leakage breaker, at random intervals during the day the button was pushed, tripping the guy's test bench.

Took almost three months for the bench user to work it out.

We also used to use high power resistors mounted in PC power supply cases to load test other repaired SMPSUs, (used to repair AT, PC and PCXT PSUs) so wiring an electrically detonated squib or high volume siren across the terminals was always fun.

[Brumby]

My only such exercise was to put some clear sticky tape over the faces of the active pin of a mains plug, then trim it to the edges with a sharp knife.  At a glance you wouldn't notice, unless you were actually looking for it.  Saw someone try to use it and they went through the same frustrations you would expect, but when the meter came out, I thought for sure I was about to be sprung.

However, as I watched the cord get tested, he put the test lead against the uncovered edge of the pin - and it tested good!  Plugged it in and it wouldn't work ... again!  He gave up and grabbed another.

Later in the day I grabbed the 'faulty' one to remove the tape - but I was seen taking it.  He came over and told me it was faulty, but this was just after I had removed the evidence - so I plugged it into the unit I had in front of me, turned it on and - guess what - It worked!  (Mwaah-ha-haaaa)  Did some jiggling tests to show it was reliable and he left looking a little puzzled.

Never did tell him.   

[XOIIO]

25 years ago we pulled this one on our boss. This was in a radio/TV repair shop... and he was doing all the VCRs.
The typical fault would be with guiding the video tape around in the mechanics, causing a swishing sound. So we mounted a small capstan driving motor under his desk with a piece of tape on it to make the same sound, remote controlled from the next desk..
Came time for final check of a repaired unit and suddenly there was this noise in it ... he would turn it over to see what it was ... no more sound ... turn it over again .. then it would be back at random times...  kept him going for nearly an hour ... very hard to keep a straight face for the guy sitting next to him.
No repercussions to us and he would do similar things to us if he had the chance so he was cool.

Similar 'intermittent' trick, we used a few meters of cable and wired a pushbutton switch and resistor across live to earth on a bench with an earth leakage breaker, at random intervals during the day the button was pushed, tripping the guy's test bench.

Took almost three months for the bench user to work it out.

We also used to use high power resistors mounted in PC power supply cases to load test other repaired SMPSUs, (used to repair AT, PC and PCXT PSUs) so wiring an electrically detonated squib or high volume siren across the terminals was always fun.

Reminds me of this. http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html

[ludzinc]

Maybe Dave should recruit him for the vacant position at EEVBlog.  That post is a pretty good resume for the job.
Dave, headhunt this guy.
Steve W

As it turns out, I know him! 
http://ultrakeet.com.au/about/
I know who he used to work for.
I had no idea he was "UltraKeet"

Just checked out his page - funny as.

You should get him on the Amp Hour!

[VK5RC]

My favourite prank(not sure how true it is)  was some Uni students heard some roadworks were about to happen close to the Uni on a known prank day.

They called the police and gave an anonymous 'tip off'  that some uni students dressed as council workers were going to dig up the road,  they also let the council workers 'know'  that some students dressed as police might come and try and stop them.

 The students then went and watched.

[rrinker]

 Best one I got away with was in high school, the computer science class (FORTRAN on Apple II's) teacher annoyed me - mainly because I learned disk file I/O and taught it to her one morning and that day in class I was working on something else while she lectured and she dared call me out for not paying attention. Pay attention to her regurgitate what I had just taught her that morning? Ah if only I wasn't the shy quiet nerd back then. Anyway, a couple of days later we are working on programs so I took one of my floppies and carefully opened the shell and removed the disk and put it back in the drive. Naturally this cause an error when trying to access it. So I called her over, said I was having a problem she tries the same program, same error. Opens the drive, slides the disk out, LOOKS AT IT, puts it back in, retries the operation a few times. Finally opens the drive and takes out the disk again and suddenly it dawns on her that something is not right.

 The best one I THOUGHT I got away with - a group of us in college wrote up a parody song referencing out one EE prof. We had this all figured out - we knew he hung around with another of our professors, so we wrote an anonymous not including the song and our proposal to distribute it in class, and left it in Professor 2's mailbox with the instructions to just say yes or no at the end of class to indicate if he thought Professor 1 would take it in the spirit of humor we intended or if he would be offended, and if he would be offended we wouldn't proceed. A week or so went by and we were getting worried that maybe we were found out or worse, when finally at the end of class one day, Prof 2 said "Oh, one more thing. A week or so ago I got a strange message in my mailbox, I just want to say, I think it's OK." So we went about getting a few hundred copies printed up, and recruited a freshman from our dorm to bring it in - Prof 1 was in the habit of having one of his TAs some by prior to the start time and put a pie of handouts on the front table and we were expected to pick one up on the way in if we saw them. So this freshman brings the stack in and people start taking them, there's a general buzz about the room, and the Prof 1 walks in, sees this (now smaller) stack of papers knowing he had no handout that day, picks one up, glances at it, and shoves it in his briefcase. Not one word, the expression on his face didn't even change. We thought this time we really were in serious trouble, but not one word was said. Ever. This guy happened to be imo the best professor in the EE department so I made it a point to take as many of his classes as I could. Fast forward to senior year, finals are over and I happened to be in the department looking at job notices and he's going to his office as I walk down the hall so he calls me in, mostly to talk about what I thought of the department and my 4 years there, etc. After chatting for a while, we're wrapping it up and he happens to mention this song parody - and says he knew it was us all along!

 I did hear that at least for a few years after we graduated, the song was still being distributed.  Perhaps the closest thing to a legacy I have at that school.