- + 2024: As The Hardware World Turns—With 2024 now officially in the history books, it’s time to take our traditional look back and reflect on some of the top trends and stories fro...
- + DIYFPV: A New Home for Drone Builders—If you’re looking to get into flying first-person view (FPV) remote controlled aircraft, there’s an incredible amount of information avail...
- + Light Brite Turned Sci-Fi Console on the Cheap—Generally, the projects featured on Hackaday actually do something. We won’t go as far as to say they are practical creations, but they usually ...
- + Broken USB Lamp Saved with a Bit of Woodworking—For many of us, when we think of creating a custom enclosure, our minds immediately go towards our 3D printer. A bit of time in your CAD program of ch...
- + Protect Your Site with a DOOM Captcha—We all know that “Can it run DOOM?” is the first question of a hardware hacker. The 1993 first person shooter from id Software defined an ...
- + 38C3: Taking Down the Power Grid Over Radio—You know how you can fall down a rabbit hole when you start on a project? [Fabian Bräunlein] and [Luca Melette] were looking at a box on a broken stre...
- + FLOSS Weekly Episode 814: The Banksy Situation—This week, Jonathan Bennett and Rob Campbell talk with Alistair Woodman about FRRouting, the Internet routing suite that helps make all this possible....
- + 2024 Brought Even More Customization to Boxes.py—If you have access to a laser cutter, we sincerely hope you’re aware of boxes.py. As the name implies, it started life as a Python tool for gene...
- + LED Wall Clock Gets Raspberry Pi Pico Upgrade—When [Rodrigo Feliciano] realized that the reason his seven-segment LED wall clock wasn’t working was because the original TG1508D5V5 controller...
- + Creating Temporal Light Reflections With Metamaterials—Owing to the wave nature of light there are many ways that such different waves can interact with each other, but also with materials. Everyone knows ...
- + Turning a Lada Into An EV With 50 Cordless Drills, Because Why Not?—[Garage 54] is no stranger to vehicle-related projects of the “because why not?” variety, and their latest is using 50 cordless drills com...
- + Repairing a BPS-305 30V Bench Power Supply—When [Tahmid Mahbub] recently reached for his ‘Lavolta’ BPS-305 bench supply, he was dismayed to find that despite it being a 30V, 5A-rate...
- + Quantum Mechanics and Negative Time With Photon-Atom Interactions—Within our comfortable world of causality we expect that reactions always follow an action and not vice versa. This why the recent chatter in the medi...
- + A Foil Tweeter, Sound From Kitchen Consumables—The world of audio has produced a variety of different loudspeaker designs over the last century, though it’s fair to say that the trusty moving...
- + Doomscroll Precisely, and Wirelessly—Around here, we love it when someone identifies a need and creates their own solution. In this case, [Engineer Bo] was tired of endless and imprecise ...
- + Sony Vaio Revived: Power, The Second 80%—A bit ago, I’ve told you about how the Sony Vaio motherboard replacement started, and all the tricks I used to make it succeed on the first try....
- + Why 2025 Will Not Be The Year Of Linux On The Desktop—One of the longest running jokes in our sphere is that the coming year will finally be the year of “Linux on the Desktop.” Never mind that...
- + New Years Circuit Challenge: Make This RFID Circuit—Picture this: It’s the end of the year, and a few hardy souls gather in a hackerspace to enjoy a bit of seasonal food and hang out. Conversation...
- + vPlayer Puts Smart Display in Palm of Your Hand—It’s not something we always think about, but the reality is that many of the affordable electronic components we enjoy today are only available...
- + Lowering Your Noise Floor, the Easy Way—If there’s anything more annoying to an amateur radio operator than noise, we’re not sure what it could be. We’re talking about radi...
- + Fan Made Dreamcast Port of GTA 3 Steals The Show—As it turns out, Sega’s long defunct Dreamcast console is still thinking. The company behind the machine cut support long ago due in part to the...
- + Re-engineering Potatoes To Remove Their All-Natural Toxins—Family Solanum (nightshade) is generally associated with toxins, and for good reasons, as most of the plants in this family are poisonous. This includ...
- + When The EU Speaks, Everyone Charges The Same Way—The moment everyone has been talking about for years has finally arrived, the European Union’s mandating of USB charging on all portable electro...
- + 38C3: Save Your Satellite with These Three Simple Tricks—BEESAT-1 is a 1U cubesat launched in 2009 by the Technical University of Berlin. Like all good satellites, it has redundant computers onboard, so when...
- + Release Your Inner Ansel Adams With The Shitty Camera Challenge—Social media microblogging has brought us many annoying things, but some of the good things that have come to us through its seductive scrolling are t...
- + Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the Copycat Keyboard—This is Crater75, an almost completely from-scratch row-staggered wireless split board that [United_Parfait_6383] has been working on for a few months...
- + Bringing OpenStreetMap Data into Minecraft—Over the years, dedicated gamers have created incredible recreations of real (and not so real) locations and structures within the confines of Minecra...
- + The Twisted History of Ethernet on Twisted Pair Wiring—We all take Ethernet and its ubiquitous RJ-45 connector for granted these days. But Ethernet didn’t start with twisted pair cable. [Mark] and [B...
- + Ball Nut Modification Charts a Middle Course Between Building and Buying—A lot of the projects we feature here on Hackaday engender the classic “build versus buy” argument. We’ve always been puzzled by tha...
- + [Kerry Wong] Talks (and Talks) About a 300 MHz Oscilloscope—There aren’t many people who could do an hour-long video reviewing an oscilloscope, but [Kerry Wong] is definitely one of them. This time, he...
- + 38C3: Lawsuits are Temporary; Glory is Forever—One of the blockbuster talks at last year’s Chaos Communications Congress covered how a group of hackers discovered code that allegedly bricked ...
- + Beam me Up: Simple Free-Space Optical Communication—Let’s think of the last time you sent data without wires. We’re not talking WiFi here, but plain optical signals. Free-space optical commu...
- + 38C3: Xobs on Hardware Debuggers—If you just want to use a debugger for your microcontroller project, you buy some hardware device, download the relevant driver software, and fire up ...
- + Wire Rope: Never Saddle a Dead Horse—If you’re into building large projects, you’ll eventually find yourself looking at wire rope. Multistrand steel wire used as antenna guy w...
- + A Die-Level Look at the Pentium FDIV Bug—The early 1990s were an interesting time in the PC world, mainly because PCs were entering the zeitgeist for the first time. This was fueled in part b...
- + A Review That Asks: Do You Need a Thermal Camera?—[Maker’s Fun Duck] has a recent video review of a cheap thermal camera from a company called Kaiweets, which you can see below. It checked all o...
- + The Business Card of DOOM—This account of running DOOM on a PCB business card isn’t really about serving the “Will it DOOM?” meme of getting the classic game ...
- + Porting Dragon’s Lair to the Game Boy Color Was a Technical Triumph—If you remember the 80s arcade game Dragon’s Lair, you probably also remember it was strikingly unlike anything else at the time. It didn’...
- + Full Color 3D Printing With PolyDye and Existing Inkjet Cartridges—Being able to 3D print FDM objects in more than one color is a feature that is rapidly rising in popularity, assisted by various multi-filament system...
- + 38C3: Towards an Open WiFi MAC Stack on ESP32—At the 38th Chaos Communications Congress, [Frostie314159] and [Jasper Devreker] gave us a nice update on their project to write an open-source WiFi s...
- + Circuit Secrets: Exploring a $5 Emergency Light—Who would’ve thought a cheap AliExpress emergency light could be packed with such crafty design choices? Found for about $5, this unit uses simple com...
- + Let it Snow with a sub $100 snowmaking machine.—[Mattmopar] figured out how to get a white Christmas even if the weather isn’t frightful. He built a simple DIY snow making machine with a few p...
- + A Low-Cost Spectrometer Uses Discrete LEDs and Math—A spectrometer is a pretty common lab instrument, useful for determining the absorbance of a sample across a spectrum of light. The standard design is...
- + Building a 3D Printed Phone Handset with Mil-Spec Style—In general, military gear is designed to be rugged and reliable. A side effect of this is that the equipment usually has a distinct visual look that m...
- + FallingWater Clock Puts New Spin on a Common LCD—Sometimes, all it takes is looking at an existing piece of tech in a new way to come up with something unique. That’s the whole idea behind Fall...
- + Creating a Mechanical Qubit that Lasts Longer Than Other Qubits—Among the current challenges with creating quantum computers is that the timespan that a singular qubit remains coherent is quite limited, restricting...
- + Playing Around with the MH-CD42 Charger Board—If you’ve ever worked with adding lithium-ion batteries to one of your projects, you’ve likely spent some quality time with a TP4056. Whet...
- + Lathe Gears Make a Clock—When you think of making something using a lathe, you usually think of turning a screw, a table leg, or a toothpick. [Uri Tuchman] had a different id...
- + 20 GHz LNB Testing and Teardown—Many things have combined to make very high-frequency RF gear much more common, cheaper, and better performing. Case in point: [dereksgc] is tearing a...
- + Do You Know Vail Code?—We talk about Morse code, named after its inventor, Samuel Morse. However, maybe we should call it Vail code after Alfred Vail, who may be its real in...
- + LDU Decoded: The Untold Tale of LEGO Dimensions—LEGO bricks might look simplistic, but did you know there’s an actual science behind their sizes? Enter LDUs — LEGO Draw Units — the minus...
- + This Week in Security: License Plates, TP-Link, and Attacking Devs—We’re covering two weeks of news today, which is handy, because the week between Christmas and New Years is always a bit slow. And up first is t...
- + Minecraft in…COBOL?—When you think of languages you might read about on Hackaday, COBOL probably isn’t one of them. The language is often considered mostly for busi...
- + Uncanny Valley of Clean Conquered by Clever Chair—Do you ever have clothes that you only wore for a few hours, so you don’t want to wash them, but it still seems icky to put them back in …...
- + Blast Away the Flux — With Brake Cleaner?—Can you use brake cleaner for flux removal on PCBs? According to [Half Burnt Toast], yes you can. But should you? Well, that’s another matter. I...
- + Stream Deck Plus Reverse Engineered—[Den Delimarsky] had a Stream Deck and wanted to be free of the proprietary software, so he reverse-engineered it. Now, he has a Stream Deck Plus, and...
- + A LoRa Rain Gauge from the Ground Up—It’s a fair bet that most of us have a ton of wireless doo-dads around the house, from garage door remotes to wireless thermometers. Each of the...
- + A Mechanical Calculator For The Modern Age—There was a brief period through the 1960s into the 1970s when the last word in electronics was the calculator. New models sold for hundreds of dollar...
- + The TimeChi Never Shipped, but You Can Build One From Scratch—What do you do when a crowdfunded product you really liked gets cancelled? Naturally, you take the idea and build your own version of it. That’s...
- + The Focus Dial Never Shipped, but You Can Build One From Scratch—What do you do when a crowdfunded product you really liked gets cancelled? Naturally, you take the idea and build your own version of it. That’s...
- + Battery-Electric Ships: Coming Soon to a Harbor Near You?—When ships moved from muscle- and wind power to burning coal and other fossil fuels for their propulsion, they also became significantly faster and la...
- + Blinded by the Light: the Problem with LED Headlights—Having a good set of (working) headlights is a crucial feature of any motor vehicle, assuming you want to be able to see the road ahead of you when th...
- + Tech in Plain Sight: Incandescent Bulbs—While they are dying out, you can still find incandescent bulbs. While these were once totally common, they’ve been largely replaced by LEDs and...
- + OpenWRT, But On An Unsupported Router—Everyone likes something cheap, and when that cheap thing is a router that’s supported by OpenWRT, it sounds like a win. [Hennung Paul] ordered ...
- + Open Source Lemontron 3D Printer is Ready to Build—In this era of cheap turn-key machines, the idea of actually building your own desktop 3D printer might seem odd to some. But if you’re looking ...
- + Taking “Movies” of Light in Flight—This one isn’t clickbait, but it is cheating. [Brian Haidet], the guy behind Alpha Phoenix, has managed to assemble movie footage of a laser bea...
- + Time Management for Toddlers—It’s really never too early (or too late) to learn time management. All joking aside, carefully managing one’s time can result in some rea...
- + Tweezers Probe Reviewed—Over the last few decades, electronic devices have drastically changed. Radios that once had point-to-point wiring gave way to printed circuit boards ...
- + When It Comes To DOS, Don’t Forget DR-DOS.—Despite the latest and greatest Intel-derived computers having multi-core 64-bit processors and unimaginably fast peripherals, at heart they all still...
- + Esperanto: The Language That Hoped to Unite the World—Christmas: a good time to broach a topic of hope. We’re talking Esperanto. This language that spurred the hope it one day could hack the barrier...
- + Open Source Multimeter Raises the Bar for DIY Tools—Whether you only dabble in electronics as a hobby or it’s your full-time job, there are few tools as indispensable as the multimeter. In fact, w...
- + Break Me Off a Piece of That Open Source Serial Adapter—We know, you’ve already got a USB to serial adapter. Probably several of them, in fact. But that doesn’t mean you couldn’t use one m...
- + Going Digital: Teaching a TI-84 Handwriting Recognition—You wouldn’t typically associate graphing calculators with artificial intelligence, but hacker [KermMartian] recently made it happen. The innovative p...
- + Pi’s Evil Twin Goes for Infinity—Most people know about the numerical constant pi (or π, if you prefer). But did you know that pi has an evil twin represented by the symbol ϖ? As [Joh...
- + Holiday Jukebox Gets ESP32, Home Assistant Support—If we’ve learned anything over the years, it’s that the only thing hardware hackers love more than a device festooned with buttons is one ...
- + A Twenty-Segment Display, Artistically—We all know and love the humble seven-segment display, right? And if you want to make characters as well as numbers, you can do an okay job with sixte...
- + Keeping Track of Old Computer Manuals with the Manx Catalog—An unfortunate reality of pre-1990s computer systems is that any manuals and documentation that came with them likely only existed on paper. That̵...
- + The Mystery of the Messed-Up Hammond X5—[Filip] got his hands on a sweet old Hammond X5 organ, but it had one crucial problem: only half of the keys worked. Each and every C#, D, D#, E, ...
- + Retrotechtacular: Quest for the “Big Boy” CRT Finds New Home in Mini Doc—To celebrate the twentieth anniversary of their Trinitron line of televisions, Sony launched the KX-45ED1. At forty three inches the screen on this pa...
- + Calling Pink Floyd—[Corelatus] said recently that “someone” asked them to identify the phone signals in the 1982 film The Wall, based on the Pink Floyd song ...
- + Watch Any Video on Your Game Boy, Via Link Cable—Game Boys have a link cable that lets two of them play together. You know, to battle with a friend’s Pokemon and stuff like that. But who says t...
- + ALSEP: Apollo’s Modular Lunar Experiments Laboratory—Although the US’ Moon landings were mostly made famous by the fact that it featured real-life human beings bunny hopping across the lunar surfac...
- + Camera Slider Uses Repositionable Rail To Do Rotational Moves—You can buy motorized camera sliders off-the-shelf, but they’re pretty costly. Alternatively, you can make one yourself, and it’s not even...
- + Crawler Challenge: Building Rope-Traversing Robots—Rope-climbing robots are the stuff of engineering dreams. As kids, didn’t we all clutter our family home with constructions of towers and string...
- + A Pi Pico Makes A Spectrum Laptop—There are many retrocomputer emulation projects out there, and given the relative fragility of the original machines as they enter their fifth decade,...
- + Atoms For Peace: the US Nuclear Fleet Build-Out and Modern-Day Revival—By the end of World War II the world had changed forever, as nuclear weapons were used for the first and – to this date – only time in ang...
- + Silicone Tubing as Springs for Capacitive Touch Buttons—Capacitive touch buttons are a great way to turn just about any (non-conductive) surface into a button, but people generally dislike the lack of tacti...
- + Keebin’ with Kristina: the One With the Keyboard-Mouse—One of the most annoying things about keyboard and mouse input has got to be the need to constantly switch between the two. Ever wish there was a sing...
- + Handheld Satellite Dish is 3D Printed—Ham radio enthusiasts, people looking to borrow their neighbors’ WiFi, and those interested in decoding signals from things like weather satelli...
- + E-Paper Anniversary Counter Is A Charming Gift With Minimal Power Draw—[Lonyelon] wanted to build an anniversary gift for his girlfriend. He decided to say it with e-Paper, a wise choice given its persistence and longevit...
- + Faster Integer Division with Floating Point—Multiplication on a common microcontroller is easy. But division is much more difficult. Even with hardware assistance, a 32-bit division on a modern ...
- + DIY Camera Slider Moves And Rotates For Slick Shots—Camera sliders are a popular project for makers—especially those who document their projects on video. They’re fun and accessible to build, and ...
- + Hackaday Links: December 22, 2024—Early Monday morning, while many of us will be putting the finishing touches — or just beginning, ahem — on our Christmas preparations, so...
- + 3D Printed Forklift Is A Cute Desk Toy—Many of us grew up with dreams of piloting a forklift one day. Sadly, most warehouses take a dim view of horseplay with these machines, so few of us g...
- + Optimizing Your Linux Shell Experience—Are you familiar with huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way. Shorter chara...
- + Old 3D Printer Parts Repurposed Into DIY Camera Slider—What do you do with an old 3D printer? They’re full of interesting components, after all, from switches and motors to lovely smooth rails. [Muke...
- + Dog Plays Chess on ESP32—The ESP32 is s remarkably powerful microcontroller, where its dual-core processor and relatively high clock speed can do some impressive work. But get...
- + Vintage Audio Amp Gets LED Lighting Upgrade—Vintage hi-fi gear can be very attractive, particularly compared to modern stuff. However, when this stuff starts getting into its third or fourth dec...
- + Inside a Diamond Plant—While you tend to think of diamonds as ornamental gemstones, diamonds also have many important industrial uses, and many of those diamonds are now syn...
- + Nanoscale Imaging and Control of Altermagnetism in MnTe—Altermagnetism is effectively a hybrid form of magnetism and ferromagnetism that might become very useful in magnetic storage as well as spintronics i...
- + An LCD, Touch Sensor, USB-C, And A Microcontroller for a Buck—[CNLohr] has been tinkering with some fun parts of late. He’d found out that ordinary LCD screens could be used as simple touch sensors, and he ...
- + The Bendix G-15 Runs 75,000 Lines of Code—There’s a Blue Bendix in Texas, and thanks to [Usagi Electric] it’s the oldest operating computer in North America. The Bendix G-15, a va...
- + Custom Firmware For Even Cheaper Bluetooth Thermometers—Readers may recall when we first covered the $5 Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC temperature and humidity sensor back in 2020. Prolific hacker [Aaron Christophel] wr...
- + Intel Terminates X86S Initiative After Formation of New Industry Group—Although the world of the X86 instruction set architecture (ISA) and related ecosystem is often accused of being ‘stale’ and ‘bloate...
- + Building A Custom Swiss Army Knife—The Swiss Army knife is the most well-known multitool, combining a bunch of functionality into a compact package. [Jeff Gough] decided to build a cust...
- + Training a Self-Driving Kart—There are certain tasks that humans perform every day that are notoriously difficult for computers to figure out. Identifying objects in pictures, for...
- + 3D Printing a Big LEGO Christmas Tree—LEGO make lots of neat floral arrangements these days, and even little Christmas trees, too. While they’re fun to build out of tiny little block...
- + 3D Printing A Big Lego Christmas Tree—Lego make lots of neat floral arrangements these days, and even little Christmas trees, too. While they’re fun to build out of tiny little block...
- + It’s Official: The North Pole is Moving—Every scout knows how to read a compass, and that there is a magnetic north and a true north. That’s because the Earth’s magnetic field is...
- + Rudolph’s Sleigh on a North Pole PCB—Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] (meanwhile going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the chall...
- + Making a Mechanical Watch From Scratch Is Fine Work—There are plenty of hard jobs out there, like founding your country’s nuclear program, or changing the timing chain on a BMW diesel. Making your...
- + Building a Diet Coke Button—[mars91] had an interesting problem to solve—his girlfriend often requested Diet Coke, but yelling for one across the apartment was frustrating and im...
- + Hackaday Podcast Episode 301: Hacking NVMe into Raspberry Pi, Lighting LEDs with Microwaves, and How to Keep Your Fingers—Twas the week before Christmas when Elliot and Dan sat down to unwrap a pre-holiday bundle of hacks. We kicked things off in a seasonally appropriate ...
- + Embossing Leather With a Pipe Bender and 3D Printed Tooling—Embossed leather belts can be deliciously stylish. However, the tooling for making these fashionable items is not always easy to come by, and it rarel...
- + Subchannel Stations: The Radio Broadcasts You Didn’t Know Were There—Analog radio broadcasts are pretty simple, right? Tune into a given frequency on the AM or FM bands, and what you hear is what you get. Or at least, t...
- + Multimeter Gets Socket Upgrade To Use Nicer Probes—[Piffpaffpoltrie] had a problem. They found the InLine VA40R to be a perfectly usable multimeter, except for a couple of flaws. Most glaring among the...
- + Watch a 3D Scan Become a Car Body Model—Not all 3D scanning is alike, and the right workflow can depend on the object involved. [Ding Dong Drift] demonstrates this in his 3D scan of a projec...
- + Old BBC Micro Gets Some Disk Help From A Raspberry Pi—[Peter Mount] had a simple problem. He’d treated himself to a retro purchase in the form of a BBC Master 128—a faster sequel to the BBC Micro Mo...
- + Getting Dial-Up To Work Over VOIP Isn’t Always Easy—Dial-up modems used to be the default way of accessing the Internet, but times have moved on. They’re now largely esoteric relics from a time go...
- + Fixing 1986 Sinclair Spectrum+2 With a High-Score of Issues—The Sinclair ZX Spectrum+2 was the first home computer released by Amstrad after buying up Sinclair. It’s basically a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, ...
- + Fibonacci Clock Looks Like Beautiful Modern Art—Don’t ask us why, but hackers and makers just love building clocks. Especially in the latter case, many like to specialize in builds that don&#...
- + Measuring a Well with Just a Hammer and a Smartphone—What’s the best way to measure the depth of a well using a smartphone? If you’re fed up with social media, you might kill two birds with o...
- + The Battle Over Vanishing Spray—We talk a lot about patent disputes in today’s high-tech world. Whether it’s Wi-Fi, 3D printing, or progress bars, patent disputes can qui...
- + Better C Strings, Simply—If you program in C, strings are just in your imagination. What you really have is a character pointer, and we all agree that a string is every charac...
- + Human Civilization and the Black Plastic Kitchen Utensils Panic—Recently there was a bit of a panic in the media regarding a very common item in kitchens all around the world: black plastic utensils used for flippi...
- + Where This Xmas Card’s Going, We Don’t Need Batteries!—Energy harvesting, the practice of scavenging ambient electromagnetic fields, light, or other energy sources, is a fascinating subject that we donR...
- + Homebrew Electron Beam Lithography with a Scanning Electron Microscope—If you want to build semiconductors at home, it seems like the best place to start might be to find a used scanning electron microscope on eBay. At le...
- + Back to the Future of Texting: SMS on a Panasonic Typewriter—Among us Hackaday writers, there are quite a few enthusiasts for retro artifacts – and it gets even better when they’re combined in an unu...
- + Bacterium Demonstrates Extreme Radiation Resistance Courtesy of an Antioxidant—Extremophile lifeforms on Earth are capable of rather astounding feats, with the secret behind the extreme radiation resistance of one of them now fin...
- + Simple Fluorometer Makes Nucleic Acid Detection Cheap and Easy—Back in the bad old days, dealing with DNA and RNA in a lab setting was often fraught with peril. Detection technologies were limited to radioisotopes...
- + FLOSS Weekly Episode 813a: Happy Holidays!—This week and next we take off for the holidays! We have an exciting schedule after the break, so stay tuned! Did you know you can watch the live reco...
- + Push for On, Hold for Off, AC Edition—A common theme in modern consumer electronics is having a power button that can be tapped to turn the device on, but needs to be held down when itR...
- + Upper Room UV-C Keeps Air Cleaner—2020 saw the world rocked by widespread turmoil, as a virulent new pathogen started claiming lives around the globe. The COVID-19 pandemic saw a rush ...
- + Enabling NVMe on the Raspberry Pi 500 With a Handful of Parts—With the recent teardown of the Raspberry Pi 500, there were immediately questions raised about the unpopulated M.2 pad and related traces hiding insi...
- + Why Did Early CD-ROM Drives Rely On Awkward Plastic Caddies?—These days, very few of us use optical media on the regular. If we do, it’s generally with a slot-loading console or car stereo, or an old-schoo...
- + Catching the View from the Edge of Space—Does “Pix or it didn’t happen” apply to traveling to the edge of space on a balloon-lofted solar observatory? Yes, it absolutely doe...
- + Learning About The Flume Water Monitor—The itch to investigate lurks within all us hackers. Sometimes, you just have to pull something apart to learn how it works. [Stephen Crosby] found hi...
- + Pulling Backward to Go Forward: The Brennan Torpedo Explained—The Brennan torpedo, invented in 1877 by Louis Brennan, was one of the first (if not the first) guided torpedoes of a practical design. Amazingly, it ...
- + The World Morse Code Championship—If you were in Tunisia in October, you might have caught some of the Morse Code championships this year. If you didn’t make it, you could catch ...
- + PCB Motor Holds Fast, Even After 1.6 Billion Spins—If you aren’t up to date with [Carl Bugeja]’s work with tiny brushless PCB motors, his summary video of his latest design and all the chal...
- + A Compass That Looks to the Stars—Although a lot of tools have been digitized and consolidated into our smartphones, from cameras, music players, calendars, alarm clocks, flashlights, ...
- + Why NASA Only Needs Pi To So Many Decimal Places—If you’re new to the world of circular math, you might be content with referring to pi as 3.14. If you’re getting a little more busy with ...
- + Tech in Plain Sight: Table Saw Safety—If you ask around a wood shop, most people will agree that the table saw is the most dangerous tool around. There’s ample evidence that this is ...
- + The Last Acorn BBC Computer Wasn’t a BBC Micro—For home computer users, the end of the 1980s was the era of 16-bit computers. The challenge facing manufacturers of 8-bit machines through the middle...
- + Man Overboard Systems Aim To Increase Survival Rates At Sea—When you hear the cry of “Man Overboard!” on a ship, it’s an emergency situation. The sea is unkind to those that fall from their vessel, and su...
- + See What ‘They’ See In Your Photos—Once upon a time, a computer could tell you virtually nothing about an image beyond its file format, size, and color palette. These days, powerful ima...
- + 3D Printed Blaster Does it with Compliant Components—The ease of integrating bendy parts into designs is one of 3D printing’s strengths. A great example of this is [uhltimate]’s six-shot blas...
- + Robot Air Hockey Player Predicts Your Next Move—Air hockey is a fun game, but it’s one you can’t play by yourself. That is, unless you have a smart robot hockey player to act as your riv...
- + Versatile, yet Grounded: The Rotodyne Revisited—When it comes to aviation curiosities, few machines captivate the imagination like the Fairey Rotodyne. This British hybrid aircraft was a daring atte...
- + Emulating The Battery Controller In An Ancient Acer PDA—[Mark B] had a problem. He’d come into possession of an Acer N30 PDA, sans batteries. He couldn’t just throw any old cells in, since the u...
- + Using A Smartphone As A Touchscreen For Arduino—If you want a good display and interface device for an embedded project, it’s hard to look past an old smartphone. After all, you’ve got a...
- + 3D-Printed Boat Feeds The Fishes—In most natural environments, fish are able to feed themselves. However, if you wanted to help them out with some extra food, you could always build a...
- + Sony Vaio Revived: How Does One Start?—A long-term project of mine is the the Sony Vaio new mainboard project. A year ago, I used it as an example to show you the cool new feature in ̷...
- + A Red Ring Light Show For Your Xbox 360—The Red Ring of Death (RROD) was the bane of many an Xbox 360 owner. The problem was eventually solved, mostly, but memories of that hellish era lurk ...
- + Keebin’ with Kristina: the One With the Curvy Centerfold—What do you get when you combine a Raspberry Pi 4B, a Kaypro keyboard, and a 9″ Apple ], you get the coolest AVR development workstation I’...
- + Building the Spectacular Fibonacci128 Simple Add-On—This year, we not only challenged Supercon attendees to come up with their own Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) for the badge, but to push the envelope on how th...
- + Single Crystal Electrode Lithium Ion Batteries Last a Long Time—Researchers have been testing a new type of lithium ion battery that uses single-crystal electrodes. Over several years, they’ve found that the ...
- + Documented Source Code for Elite on the C64, BBC Micro and Others—If you ever wanted to dive into the source code for the 1980s space game Elite, but didn’t want to invest many hours reverse-engineering the 650...
- + Finally… a Man Page for Life—How often have you wished to have an instruction manual — or, at least, a Unix man page — for life? Well, your wait is over. Of course, yo...
- + Hackaday Links: December 15, 2024—It looks like we won’t have Cruise to kick around in this space anymore with the news that General Motors is pulling the plug on its woe-beset r...
- + Rainwater From the Road to the Garden—Most small-scale, residential rainwater harvesting systems we’ve seen rely on using an existing roof and downspout to collect water that would o...
- + Wago Terminals Make This Ham Radio Dipole Light and Packable—For the amateur radio operator with that on-the-go lifestyle, nothing is more important than having your gear as light and packable as possible. If yo...
- + An iPhone Case Study—Way back in 2008, Apple unveiled the first unibody Macbook with a chassis milled out of a single block of aluminum. Before that, essentially all lapto...
- + ESP8266 Keeps Tabs on Wood Stove Temperature—Wood heat offers unique advantages compared to more modern heating systems, especially in remote areas. But it also comes with its own challenges, nam...
- + Running Fusion 360 on Linux with Wine—One of the major reasons why using Linux on a desktop system is unsuitable for many is due to the lack of Linux support for many major applications, i...
- + A Portable Chainsaw Sawmill—Unless you’re running a commercial logging operation, with specialized saws, log grapples, mills, transportation for the timber, and the skilled...
- + Might Morphin’ Antenna—The shape of an antenna can make a big difference in its performance. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory have used shape memo...
- + How the Lost Mystery Pigment ‘Maya Blue’ Got Recreated—A distinct blue pigment reminiscent of turquoise or a clear sky was used by the ancient Maya to paint pottery, sculptures, clothing, murals, jewelry, ...
- + Behold a Geared, Continuously Variable Transmission—When it comes to transmissions, a geared continuously-variable transmission (CVT) is a bit of a holy grail. CVTs allow smooth on-the-fly adjustment of...
- + tldr-pages Keeps it Short, Wherever You Need It—Let’s face it, even the most accomplished console cowboy can’t keep everything memorized. Sure, you might know all the important arguments...
- + Hacker Tools, Hacked Tools—We just love a good DIY tool project, and more so when it’s something that we can actually use cobbled together from stuff in our closet, or hacked ou...
- + A Self Balancing Bike for Crash Dummy Billy—We aren’t sure there’s enough information in the [We Make Machines’] video to easily copy their self-balancing bike project, but if ...
- + Personal Traffic Light Stops Them In Their Tracks—Working from home can be pretty cool, but if you’re not the only one in the house trying to do it, the whole situation can feel like you’r...
- + Origami-Inspired, Self-locking Structures With 3D Printing—Researchers recently shared details on creating foldable, self-locking structures by using multi-material 3D printing. These origami-inspired designs ...
- + Walkie Talkies, Jedi Style: Building a Communicator—Playing Star Wars Outlaws sparked an idea with [3DSage]: why not recreate the game’s wrist communicator as a functioning gadget? Inspired by the...
- + Flashy Paper Christmas Tree Does It With a 555—‘Tis the season for holiday hacks, and [Ben Emmett] is here to remind us that we don’t necessarily need a fancy microcontroller in order t...
- + Apple Newton Gets Rebuilt Battery Pack—We all carry touch screen computers around in our pockets these days, but before the smartphone revolution, there was the personal digital assistant (...
- + The Stern-Gerlach Experiment Misunderstood—Two guys — Stern and Gerlach — did an experiment in 1922. They wanted to measure magnetism caused by electron orbits. At the time, they di...
- + Hack On Self: How’d My Day Go?—Humans are well overdue for a technological revolution – not a profit-driven one like we’re having now, a human-centric one. Sci-fi is won...
- + Hackaday Podcast Episode 300: The Dwingeloo 25 m Dish, a Dead-Tech Twofer, and Deconstructing PCBs—This week on the big 300th episode, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos teamed up to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of ...
- + Saving an Electron Microscope from the Trash—Who wouldn’t want to have a scanning electron microscope (SEM)? If you’re the person behind the ProjectsInFlight channel on YouTube, you c...
- + This Week in Security: Recall, BadRAM, and OpenWRT—Microsoft’s Recall feature is back. You may remember our coverage of the new AI feature back in June, but for the uninitiated, it was a creepy s...
- + Chirality Could Kill Us All, If We Let It—In our high school chemistry classes we all learn about chirality, the property of organic molecules in which two chemically identical molecules can h...
- + Use Your RTL, In The Browser—The web browser started life as a relatively simple hypertext reading application, but over the 30+ years since the first one displayed a simple CERN ...
- + Automated Rig Grows Big, Beautiful Crystals Fast—We haven’t seen [Les Wright] in a while, and with the release of his new video, we know why — he’s been busy growing crystals. Now, ...
- + A Look Back at Google’s 2015 Chromecast—Google’s Chromecast was first released in 2013, with a more sophisticated follow-up in 2015, which saw itself joined by the Chromecast Audio don...
- + British Spooks Issue Yearly Teaser—As a British taxpayer it’s reassuring to know that over in Cheltenham there’s a big round building full of people dedicated to keeping us ...
- + Good Lighting on a Budget with Cordless Tool Batteries—It’s perhaps not fair, but even if you have the best idea for a compelling video, few things will make people switch off than poor lighting. Goo...
- + The Disappearing Capacitor—As part of a phosphorescence detector, [lcamtuf] has been working with photodiodes. The components, like all diodes, have some capacitance at the junc...
- + The 6GHz Band Opens in the US—On December 11th, the FCC announced that the band around 6GHz would be open to “very low-power devices.” The new allocation shares space w...
- + It’s Critical: Don’t Pile Up Your Fissionable Material—Nuclear fission is a powerful phenomenon. When the conditions are right, atomic nuclei split, releasing neutrons that then split other nuclei in an on...
- + Ore To Iron In A Few Seconds: New Chinese Process Will Revolutionise Smelting—The process of ironmaking has relied for centuries on iron ore, an impure form of iron oxide, slowly being reduced to iron by carbon monoxide in a fur...
- + Pico Logic Analyzer Gets New Version—[Happy Little Diodes] built a Pi Pico logic analyzer designed by [El Dr. Gusman] using the original design. But he recently had a chance to test the n...
- + Tiny PONG, Big Ambitions: World’s Smallest Arcade—London, Ontario college student [Victoria Korhonen] has captured the attention of tech enthusiasts and miniaturization lovers with her creation of wha...
- + Danger-Klipper Fork Renamed to Kalico—Hobbyist 3D printers have traditionally run the open source Merlin firmware, but as printers are being pushed to the limits, more capable firmware Kli...
- + Chaotic System Cooks Meat Evenly—For better or worse, a lot of human technology is confined to fewer dimensions than the three we can theoretically move about in. Cars and trains only...
- + Retrotechtacular: 1980s Restoration of San Francisco’s Cable Car System—The cable car system of San Francisco is the last manually operated cable car system in the world, with three of the original twenty-three lines still...
- + FLOSS Weekly Episode 813: Turn Off the Internet—This week, Jonathan Bennett, Simon Phipps, and Aaron Newcomb chat about retrocomputing, Open Source AI, and … politics? How did that combination...
- + It’s Remotely Ham Radio—Have you ever considered running your ham radio remotely? It has been feasible for years but not always easy. Recently, I realized that most of the pi...
- + Amateur Radio Operators Detect Signals from Voyager 1—At the time of its construction in the 1950s, the Dwingeloo Radio Observatory was the largest rotatable telescope in the world with a dish diameter of...
- + The Hovercraft Revolution and Finding the Right Niche for a Technology—In the world of transportation, some technologies may seem to make everything else appear obsolete, whether it concerns airplanes, magnetic levitation...
- + Unexpectedly Interesting Payphone Gives Up Its Secrets—Reverse engineering a payphone doesn’t sound like a very interesting project, at least in the United States, where payphones were little more th...
- + The Math Behind the Music of the 80s—Although there might have been other music produced or recorded in the 1980s, we may never know of its existence due to the cacophony of all of the va...
- + From Felt to Fate: Building Your Own Sorting Hat—Ever wondered how it feels to have the Sorting Hat decide your fate? [Will Dana] wanted to find out, so he conjured a bit of Hogwarts magic, and craft...
- + A Potential Exploit with the Ext Filesystem—The extended filesystem, otherwise known as ext, has been a fundamental part of Linux since before the 1.0 release in 1994. Currently the filesystem i...
- + Flying Drones That Can Walk and Jump into the Air: An Idea With Legs?—When we look at how everyone’s favorite flying dinosaurs get around, we can see that although they use their wings a lot too, their legs are at ...
- + 3D Printer Eliminates the Printer Bed—Anyone who has operated a 3D printer before, especially those new to using these specialized tools, has likely had problems with the print bed. The be...
- + Trying to Shatter the World’s Fastest RC Car Record—Fresh off a world record for the fastest quadcopter, [Luke Bell] decided to try his luck with something more own to earth, namely trying to tackle the...
- + 2025 Hackaday Europe CFP: We Want You!—Hackaday’s Supercon is still warm in our hearts, and the snow is just now starting to fall, but we’re already looking forward to Spring. Or at least t...
- + Creating A Radiation King Radio In The Real World—If you’re a fan of the Fallout series of games, you’ve probably come across a Radiation King radio before. In the game, that is, they don&...
- + Disc Film,When Kodak Pushed Convenience Too Far—Having a penchant for cheap second-hand cameras can lead to all manner of interesting equipment. You never know what the next second-hand store will p...
- + Updated Mouse Ring Does It With a Joystick—Have you ever wished for easy mouse controls to go along with your VR headset experience? Or maybe you just want a cooler way to mouse in general. In ...
- + An Engineer’s Perspective on Baking Gingerbread Houses—If you’ve ever wanted to merge the worlds of holiday cheer and clever geometry, [Kris Wilk]’s gingerbread house hack is your ultimate insp...
- + A Simple Robot For Learning About Robotics—Robots are super interesting, but you probably shouldn’t start learning about them with a full-sized industrial SCARA arm or anything. Better to...
- + Smartphone Runs Home Server—It’s one of the great tragedies of our technological era. Smartphones that feature an incredible amount of computational power compared to compu...
- + PlayStation Motherboard Sanded and Scanned, But There’s More To Do—If you want to reverse engineer the boards in a modern console, you’d better have a lab, a lot of fancy gear, and a good few months to dedicate ...
- + Raspberry Pi 500 and the Case of the Missing M.2 Slot—Raspberry Pi just dropped the new Raspberry Pi 500, which like its predecessor puts the similarly named SBC into a keyboard. In a detailed review and ...
- + Do 3D Printers Dream of LEGO Sheep?—Imagine the power to clone your favorite LEGO piece—not just any piece, but let’s say, one that costs €50 second-hand. [Balazs] from RacingBrick...
- + Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the Funny Keyboard—What’s the most important keyboard macro you know? Honestly, it’s probably Ctrl-S. But do you use that one often enough? Chances are, you ...
- + Electric Bike Uses No Electronics, Weird Motor—E-bikes combine a bicycle with a big lithium battery, a speed controller, and a motor. What you get from that combination is simple, efficient transpo...
- + Finally Putting the RK1 Through its Paces—The good folks at Turing Pi sent me a trio of RK1 modules to put through their paces, to go along with the single unit I bought myself. And the ̷...
- + Robot Rodents: How AI Learned to Squeak and Play—In an astonishing blend of robotics and nature, SMEO—a robot rat designed by researchers in China and Germany — is fooling real rats into treati...
- + Debugging the UE1 Paper Tape Reader and Amplification Circuit—After recently putting together the paper tape reader for his custom tube-based UE1 computer, [David Lovett] did get squiggles on the outputs, but not...
- + Magic Eye Images In Your Spreadsheet—Ah, the 1990s. It was a simpler time, when the web was going to be democratic and decentralised, you could connect your Windows 95 PC to the internet ...
- + Silicon Carbide May Replace Zirconium Alloys for Nuclear Fuel Rod Cladding—Since the construction of the first commercial light water nuclear power plants (LWR) the design of their fuel rods hasn’t changed significantly...
- + Hackaday Links: December 8, 2024—For some reason, we never tire of stories highlighting critical infrastructure that’s running outdated software, and all the better if it’...
- + Pedaling your Mobile Web Server Across the Globe—We tinkerers often have ideas we know are crazy, and we make them up in the most bizarre places, too. For example, just imagine hosting a website whil...
- + New Tullomer Filament Claims to Beat PEEK—Recently a company called Z-Polymers introduced its new Tullomer FDM filament that comes with a lofty bullet list of purported properties that should ...
- + Tiny NFC-Powered Keychain Thermometer—What if your keychain could tell you the temperature, all while staying battery-free? That’s the essence of this innovative keychain ‘NFC_temp&#...
- + The Audiophile Carrot—The widely quoted carrot factoid that the vegetable’s orange colour is the result of patriotic Dutch farmers breeding them that way may be an ur...
- + WASM-4: Retro Game Dev Right in Your Browser—Have you ever dreamt of developing games that run on practically anything, from a modern browser to a microcontroller? Enter WASM-4, a minimalist fant...
- + Cheap FPGA PCIe Development—Typically, if you want to build an FPGA project inside a PC, you’d need a fairly expensive development board that plugs into the bus. However, [...
- + A Look inside IKEA’s Vallhorn Motion Sensor Teardown—A good source of hackable home automation parts has come for a while in the form of inexpensive modules offered by large retailers such as Lidl, or IK...
- + Microchess Remembered—Playing chess has always been a bellwether for computers. The game isn’t trivial, but the rules are managably simple. However, the game is too c...
- + The £25,000 Tom Evans Pre-Amp Repair and a Copyright Strike—We were recently notified by a reader that [Tom Evans] had filed a copyright claim against [Mark]’s repair video on his Mend it Mark YouTube cha...
- + Liquid Metal Ion Thrusters Aren’t Easy—What do scanning electron microscopes and satellites have in common? On the face of things, not much, but after seeing [Zachary Tong]’s latest v...
- + Tis the Season—’Tis the season for soldering! At least at my house. My son and I made some fairly LED-laden gifts for the immediate relatives last year, and he’s got...
- + Printing in Multi-material? Use These Filament Combos—If one has a multi-material printer there are more options than simply printing in different colors of the same filament. [Thomas Sanladerer] explores...
- + FlatMac: Building the 1980’s Apple iPad Concept—The Apple FlatMac was one of those 1980s concepts by designer [Hartmut Esslingers] that remained just a concept with no more than some physical protot...
- + 3D Printed Caliper Extensions Make Hole Measurement Easier—If there’s anything more frustrating than mounting holes that don’t line up with the thing you’re mounting, we don’t know what...
- + Antenna Measurement in Theory and Practice—If you want to analyze an antenna, you can use simulation software or you can build an antenna and make measurements. [All Electroncs Channel] does bo...
- + VNAs and Crystals—Oscillators may use crystals as precise tuned circuits. If you have a vector network analyzer (VNA) — or even some basic test equipment — ...
- + Ampere WS-1: The Other APL Portable Computer—When thinking of home computers and their portable kin it’s easy to assume that all of them provided BASIC as their interpreter, but for a while...
- + Hackaday Podcast Episode 299: Beaming Consciousness, Understanding Holograms, and Dogfooding IPv6—On this episode of the Hackaday Podcast, Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi talk about the optical witchcraft behind holograms, the finer points of...
- + The 6809 8-Bit Microcomputer: A Father-Son Odyssey—If you’re nostalgic for the golden age of microprocessors and dream of building your own computer, this story might spark your imagination. [Eri...
- + This Week in Security: National Backdoors, Web3 Backdoors, and Nearest Neighbor WiFi—Maybe those backdoors weren’t such a great idea. Several US Telecom networks have been compromised by a foreign actor, likely China’s Salt...
- + Retro Computer Goes Back to the 1950s—When tackling a retrocomputing project, plenty of us will go back to a place like the 80s and restore something like a Commodore64 or Apple II. These ...
- + Hacked Ultrasonic Sensors Let You See With Sound—If you want to play with radar — and who could blame you — you can pretty easily get your hands on something like the automotive radar sen...
- + Non-Planar Fuzzy Skin Textures Improved, Plus a Paint-On Interface—If you’ve wanted to get in on the “fuzzy skin” action with 3D printing but held off because you didn’t want to fiddle with sli...
- + A Hundred Year Old Solid State Amplifier—Conventional wisdom has it that the solid state era in electronics began in 1948 with the invention of the transistor, or if you wish to split hairs, ...
- + Unconventional Oil Production, All You Need to Know—It’s fair to say that climate change is perhaps the greatest challenge facing our planet, and while much attention is directed towards solutions...
- + Gray Matter on a Chip: Building an Artificial Brain with Luminol—Ever wondered if you could build a robot controlled by chemical reactions? [Marb] explores this wild concept in his video, merging chemistry and robot...
- + How Corroded Can a Motherboard Be?—We will admit it. If we found a 386 motherboard as badly corroded as the one [Bits und Bolts] did, we would trash it—not him, though. In fact, we were...
- + Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the Folding Keyboard Mod—Let’s face it, failed Kickstarters are no good. But they can spark good things, like real versions of technologies that might have actually been...
- + A Brief History of Teleportation—OK, I know. We don’t have practical teleportation. But that hasn’t stopped generations of science fiction authors and movie makers from bu...
- + Cranking Up the Detail in a Flight Simulator from 1992—Nostalgia is a funny thing. If you experienced the early days of video games in the 1980s and 90s, there’s a good chance you remember those game...
- + Exercise Wheel Tracker Confirms Suspicions About Cats—What do cats get up to in the 30 minutes or so a day that they’re awake? Being jerks, at least in our experience. But like many hackers, [Brent]...
- + Gas Gauge Upgrade Keeps VW Restoration Classy—Getting every detail perfectly right is often the goal in automotive restorations, and some people will go to amazing lengths to make sure the car loo...
- + LongChat for Ham Radio—There was a time when ham radio operators were known for having long conversations over the radio — rag chewing, as they called it. A new progra...
- + Rolling Your Own Ball Screws—We’ve got mixed feelings about a new video from [AndysMachines] that details how he makes custom ball screws. On the one hand, there’s alm...
- + Runway-to-Space No More, Reaction Engines Cease Trading—It’s not often that the passing of a medium sized company on an industrial estate on a damp and soggy former airfield in southern England is wor...
- + FLOSS Weekly Episode 812: Firefox and the Future—This week, Jonathan Bennett and David Ruggles chat with Sylvestre and Brian about Firefox! What’s up in the browser world, what’s coming, ...
- + Hack On Self: Headphone Friend—In the last two articles, I talked about two systems relying on audio notifications. The first one is the Alt-Tab annihilator system – a system ...
- + Did You Know YoSys Knows VHDL Too?—We’ve been fans of the Yosys / Nextpnr open-source FPGA toolchain for a long while now, and like [Michael] we had no idea that their oss-cad-suite ins...
- + The London Underground Is Too Hot, But It’s Not An Easy Fix—The London Underground is an iconic piece of Victorian era engineering. What started in 1863 quickly became a core piece of infrastructure that would ...
- + Sniffing Around Inside a ThinkPad Battery—For most people, a battery pack that’s misbehaving simply means it’s time to get a new battery. But when the battery in their ThinkPad was...
- + Fluke Meter Fails with a Simple Problem—[TheHWcave] found a Fluke 27 multimeter that looked like it had had quite a rough life. At first, the display flashed an overload indicator until he g...
- + Fail of the Week: The SMD Crystal Radio That Wasn’t—The crystal radio is a time-honored build that sadly doesn’t get much traction anymore. Once a rite of passage for electronics hobbyists, the cl...
- + A Month Without IPV4 is Like a Month Without…—Recently, there was a Mastodon post from [nixCraft] challenging people to drop their NAT routers for the month of November and use only IPv6. What wou...
- + 3D Printing Threaded Replacements—Printing an object with threads is nothing new. If you know the specifications on the other thread or you are in control of it, no problem. But [Shop ...
- + Car Radio Chip Goes Into DIY Build—[Sjef Verhoeven] still loves radio and enjoys the challenge of listening to radio signals from far away. He wanted to build his own radio and turned t...
- + Chess What: One More Pi-Powered Board—Chess is timeless, but automating it? That’s where the real magic begins. Enter [Tamerlan Goglichidze]’s Pi Board, an automated chess system that blen...
- + Holograms: the Art of Recording Wavefronts—The difference between holography and photography can be summarized perhaps most succinctly as the difference between recording the effect photons hav...
- + Scratch And Sniff Stickers And The Gas Panic of ’87—Ever wonder how those scratch and sniff stickers manage to pack a punch of aroma into what looks like ordinary paper? The technology behind it is dece...
- + OSHW Battery Tester Aims to Help Tame Lithium Cells—It’s no exaggeration to say that the development of cheap rechargeable lithium-ion batteries has changed the world. Enabling everything from sma...
- + Torque Testing 3D Printed Screws—Unless you’ve got a shop with a well-stocked hardware bin, it’s a trip to the hardware store when you need a special screw. But [Sanford P...
- + From Cans To Sheet Metal, With Ease—Aluminium drinks cans make a great source of thin sheet metal which can be used for all manner of interesting projects, but it’s safe to say tha...
- + Modular Breadboard Snaps You Into Benchtop Tidiness—Solderless breadboards are a fantastic tool for stirring the creative juices. In a few seconds, you can go from idea to prototype without ever touchin...
- + The Automatic Battery Charger You Never Knew You Needed—When we saw [Max.K]’s automatic NiMh battery charger float past in the Hackaday tips line, it brought to mind a charger that might be automatic ...
- + Unique 3D Printer Has a Print Head With a Twist—If you’re used to thinking about 3D printing in Cartesian terms, prepare your brain for a bit of a twist with [Joshua Bird]’s 4-axis 3D pr...
- + A Free Speed Boost For Your Pi 5—The world of the overclocker contains many arcane tweaks to squeeze the last drops of performance from a computer, many of which require expert knowle...
- + A Brief History of Calculator Watches—When humans counted on their fingers, everyone had a state-of-the-art (at the time) calculator at all times. But as we got smarter about calculation, ...
- + Small Feathers, Big Effects: Reducing Stall Speeds With Strips Of Plastic—Birds have long been our inspiration for flight, and researchers at Princeton University have found a new trick in their arsenal: covert feathers. The...
- + Exploring the Sounds and Sights Of Alien Worlds—The 20th century saw humankind’s first careful steps outside of the biosphere in which our species has evolved. Whereas before humans had experi...
- + Building Experience and Circuits for Lithium Capacitors—For the cautious, a good piece of advice is to always wait to buy a new product until after the first model year, whether its cars or consumer electro...
- + ESP32 Powers DIY Smart Energy Meter—Energy is expensive these days. There’s no getting around it. If, like [Giovanni], you want to keep better track of your usage, you might find v...
- + Balancing Balls With A Touchpad—Energy is expensive these days. There’s no getting around it. If, like [Giovanni], you want to keep better track of your usage, you might find v...
- + Stripping GoPros To The Bone For Model Rocketry—The small size of action cameras has made them a great solution for getting high-quality experimental footage where other cameras don’t fit. GoP...
- + Electrostatic Puck: Making An Electret—You might have heard of electrets being used in microphones, but do you know what it is? Electrets produce a semi-permanent static electric field, sim...
- + When Transistor Count Mattered—Many Hackaday readers have an interest in retro technology, but we are not the only group who scour the flea markets. Alongside us are the collectors,...
- + Creating a Signature Wood Joint—We really love when makers make their construction techniques evident in an aesthetically-pleasing way, and [Laura Kampf] has created a clever joint t...
- + Tailwheel Trainer Go-Cart To Avoid Wrecked Planes—Taildraggers remain a popular configuration for small aircraft, but they come with a significant risk during ground handling: ground loops. If the tai...
- + 8-Bit Computers Crunch Advanced Scientific Computations—Although largely relegated to retrocomputing enthusiasts and embedded systems or microcontrollers now, there was a time when there were no other compu...
- + Upgrading the M4 Mac Mini with More Storage—Apple’s in-house chips have some impressive specs, but user serviceability is something Apple left behind for consumer machines around a decade ...
- + Pushing 802.11ah to the Extreme with Drones—It might come as a surprise to some that IEEE, the Institute for Electrical and Electronics Engineers, does more than send out mailers asking people t...
- + Making a Stool from Clay—We’ve seen furniture made out of all sorts of interesting materials here, but clay certainly isn’t the first one that comes to mind. [Mia ...
- + Arduino VGA, The Old Fashioned Way—Making a microcontroller speak to a VGA monitor has been a consistent project in our sphere for years, doing the job for which an IBM PC of yore requi...
- + Uncle Sam Wants You to Recover Energy Materials from Wastewater—The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) was founded to support moonshot projects in the realm of energ...
- + It’s Like LightScribe, But For Floppies!—Back when CD-Rs were the thing, there were CD burner drives which would etch images in the unoccupied areas of a CD-R. These so-called LightScribe dri...
- + Saving a Samsung TV From the Dreaded Boot Loop—[eigma] had a difficult problem. After pulling a TV out of the trash and bringing it home, it turned out it was suffering from a troubling boot loop i...
- + Thanks for Hacking—It’s that time of year again, when the turkey roasts and we think of the important things that we’re thankful for. Here at Hackaday, we’re simply than...
- + The Many Reasons For Putting Microphones in Rainforests—If a tree falls in a forest with nobody around, does it make a noise? In the case of the rainforests equipped with the Rainforest Connection’s G...
- + Building a Miniature Rainbow Sand Table—Sure is coarse and rough and irritating, and it gets everywhere. But it can also be beautiful — drag a small ball through it in a controlled man...
- + Modernizing an Apple iPod, or: a Modern-Day Ship of Theseus—Back in the day the Apple iPod was the personal music player (PMP) to get even if mostly because everyone and their dogs had one. These days most peop...
- + Hacking Trees to Bring Back the American Chestnut—“Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” is playing on the radio now in the Northern Hemisphere which begs the question, “What happened ...
- + Swapping Batteries Has Never Looked This Cool—We don’t know much more than what we see with [Kounotori_DIY]’s battery loader design (video embedded below) but it just looks so cool we ...
- + Simple Pen Plotter Rolls On The Table—Pen plotters are popular builds amongst DIY CNC enthusiasts. They’re a great way to learn the fundamentals of motion control and make something ...
- + Building a Generator That Runs Off Hose Power—[Paul Junkin] bought a curious product off the Internet. It was supposed to generate electricity when hooked up to a running hose. Only, it didn’...
- + Hackaday Podcast Episode 298: Forbidden USB-C, a Laser Glow-o-Scope, and the Epoch Super Cassette Vision—This week’s Hackaday podcast has a European feel, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for a look at the week’s happenings in the wo...
- + Fully Submerge This Modernized pH Sensor—There’s a school of thought that says you shouldn’t mess around with a solution that’s already working, but that’s never seeme...
- + Low-Profile Travel Keyboard Is Mostly 3D Printed—If you’ve got a nice mechanical keyboard, typing on anything else can often become an unpleasant experience. Unfortunately, full-sized versions ...
- + GPS Enabled Pumpkin Spice Sprayer Knows When It’s PSL Season—Pumpkin spice, also known as allspice with better marketing, has found its way into a seemingly endless amount of products over the years. It goes bey...
- + Ultra-Wide Gaming Handheld Channels The Nintendo DS—“The Nintendo DS isn’t wide enough!” said nobody, ever. Most players found Nintendo’s form factor to be perfectly acceptable f...
- + US Is Getting Its First Onshore Wave Power Plant—Renewables let you have a more diverse set of energy inputs so you aren’t putting all your generation eggs in one basket. One type of renewable ...
- + UFO 50 Inspired LX System Looks Straight Out of a Video Game—They simply don’t make them like they used to, and in the case of this retro LX system build, they only make what never existed in the first pla...
- + Minichord Wants To Help You Find Rad Chord Progressions—If you’re good at music theory, you can probably find all the chords and progressions you need just by using your fingers and a suitable instrum...
- + Chocolate-Coating Machine Mk. 2: the Merry-Go-Round—This holiday season, [Chaz] wanted to continue his family’s tradition of enrobing a little bit of everything in dark chocolate, and built an imp...
- + The Japanese Console You Maybe Haven’t Heard Of—The games consoles which came out of Japan in the 1980s are the stuff of legend, with the offerings from Nintendo and Sega weaving themselves into glo...
- + Homebrew Phosphorescence Detector Looks for the Glow in Everyday Objects—Spoiler alert: almond butter isn’t phosphorescent. But powdered milk is, at least to the limit of detection of this homebrew phosphorescence det...
- + Even Apple Get Their Parts Wrong Sometimes—There can be few among those of us who produce printed circuit boards, who have not at some point placed a component the wrong way round, or with the ...
- + A Look Under the Hood of Intermediate Frequency Transformers—If you’ve been tearing electronic devices apart for long enough, you’ll know that the old gear had just as many mysteries within as the ne...
- + Retrotechtacular: The Deadly Shipmate—During World War II, shipboard life in the United States Navy was a gamble. No matter which theater of operations you found yourself in, the enemy was...
- + Boss Byproducts: Corium Is Man-Made Lava—So now we’ve talked about all kinds of byproducts, including man-made (Fordite), nature-made (fulgurites), and one that’s a little of both...
- + Life Found On Ryugu Asteroid Sample, But It Looks Very Familiar—Samples taken from the space-returned piece of asteroid Ryugu were collected and prepared under strict anti-contamination controls. Inside the cleanes...
- + Getting Started In Laser Cutting—If you were to walk into most of the world’s hackerspaces, it’s likely that the most frequent big-ticket tool you’ll find after a 3D...
- + Massive Mural from Thermal Receipt Paper—Turning trash into art is something we undoubtedly all admire. [Davis DeWitt] did just that with a massive mural made entirely from discarded receipt ...
- + Your Undocumented Project May Also Baffle People Someday—What’s life without a little mystery? There’s one less rolling around after historians finally identified a donated mystery machine that h...
- + A Robot Meant for Humans—Although humanity was hoping for a more optimistic robotic future in the post-war era, with media reflecting that sentiment like The Jetsons or Lost i...
- + A Laser with Mirrors makes a CRT-like Display—Phosphor-based displays like CRTs rely on the phosphor to emit light for a set amount of time after being activated, allowing them to display a seemin...
- + Alternatives Don’t Need to be Bashed—By default, bash is the most popular command language simply because it’s included in most *nix operating systems. Additionally, people don̵...
- + Linux Fu: Audio Network Pipes—Life was simpler when everything your computer did was text-based. It is easy enough to shove data into one end of a pipe and take it out of the other...
- + Recreating Unobtainium Weather Station Sensors—Imagine you own a weather station. Then imagine that after some years have passed, you’ve had to replace one of the sensors multiple times. Your...
- + Humans Can Learn Echolocation Too—Most of us associate echolocation with bats. These amazing creatures are able to chirp at frequencies beyond the limit of our hearing, and they use th...
- + The Junk Machine Prints Corrupted Advertising On Demand—[ClownVamp]’s art project The Junk Machine is an interactive and eye-catching machine that, on demand, prints out an equally eye-catching and un...
- + Electric Motors Run Continuously at Near-Peak Power—For a lot of electrical and mechanical machines, there are nominal and peak ratings for energy output or input. If you’re in marketing or advert...
- + Building A Pi-Powered LED Chess Board—If you live near Central Park or some other local chess hub, you’re likely never short of opponents for a good game. If you find yourself lookin...
- + Solar Orbiter Takes Amazing Solar Pictures—There’s an old joke that they want to send an exploratory mission to the sun, but to save money, they are going at night. The European Space Age...
- + An Over-Engineered Basement Monitor—[Stephen] has a basement that depends on a sump pump. What that means is if the pump fails or the power goes out, the basement floods—which is rather ...
- + E-Ink Screen Combined With Analog Dial Is Epic Win—Analog dials used to be a pretty common way of displaying information on test equipment and in industrial applications. They fell out of favor as more...
- + Square Roots 1800s Style — No, the Other 1800s—[MindYourDecisions] presents a Babylonian tablet dating back to around 1800 BC that shows that the hypotenuse of a unit square is the square root of t...
- + Keebin’ with Kristina: the One with the TRON Keyboard—[Folaefolc] was craving a new keyboard build a few weeks ago and got inspired by the humble 3.5″ floppy disk. So much so that he decided to make...
- + Experimental Drone Flies Like A Bird—Most RC planes follow a simple control scheme: elevators for pitch, rudder for yaw, and ailerons for roll. This one-to-one mapping keeps things straig...
- + Apollo-era PCB Reverse Engineering to KiCad—Earlier this year [Skyhawkson] got ahold of a Apollo-era printed circuit board which he believes was used in a NASA test stand. He took high quality p...
- + Hacking Global Positioning Systems Onto 16th-Century Maps—What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets of Antwerp, where merchant...
- + Programmable Zener is Really an IC—[Kevin] doesn’t stock zener diodes anymore. Why? Because for everything he used to use zeners, he now uses TL431 bandgap voltage references. The...
- + Aftershock II: How Students Shattered 20-Year Amateur Rocket Records—When it comes to space exploration, we often think of billion-dollar projects—NASA’s Artemis missions, ESA’s Mars rovers, or China’s Tiangong station....
- + Hackaday Links: November 24, 2024—We received belated word this week of the passage of Ward Christensen, who died unexpectedly back in October at the age of 78. If the name doesn’...
- + Double Your Analog Oscilloscope Fun with this Retro Beam Splitter—These days, oscilloscope hacking is all about enabling features that the manufacturer baked into the hardware but locked out in the firmware. Those ha...
- + Flyback, Done Right—A common part used to create a high voltage is a CRT flyback transformer, having been a ubiquitous junk pile component. So many attempts to use them r...
- + RISC CPU Lives in Excel—Last time we checked in on [Inkbox], he had made a 16-bit CPU in Excel. Impressive, but not really practical. Presumably, his latest project isn’...
- + Modular Multi-Rotor Flies Up To Two Hours—Flight time remains the Achilles’ heel of electric multi-rotor drones, with even high-end commercial units struggling to stay airborne for an ho...
- + Hacking the Soil to Combat Desertification—While the Sahara Desert is an important ecosystem in its own right, its human neighbors in the Sahel would like it to stop encroaching on their enviro...
- + $40 Ham Antenna Works Six Bands—[My Ham Radio Journey] wanted to see if a “common person” (in his words) could build an effective vertical ham radio antenna. If you look ...
- + RFID From First Principles and Saving a Cat—[Dale Cook] has cats, and as he readily admits, cats are jerks. We’d use stronger language than that, but either way it became a significant imp...
- + Forget Pixel Art: Try Subpixels—[Japhy Riddle] was tired of creating pixel art. He went to subpixel art. The idea is that since each color pixel is composed of three subpixels, your ...
- + Close Shave for an Old Oscilloscope Saved with a Sticky Note—When you tear into an old piece of test equipment, you’re probably going to come up against some surprises. That’s especially true of high...
- + 3D Printed Boat Uses Tank Tracks For Amphibious Propulsion—Boats normally get around with propellers or water jets for propulsion. Occasionally, they use paddles. [Engineering After Hours] claims he is “...
- + Open Source, Forced Innovation, and Making Good Products—The open-source hardware business landscape is no doubt a tough one, but is it actually tougher than for closed-source hardware? That question has bee...
- + 3D Space Can Be Tiled With Corner-free Shapes—Tiling a space with a repeated pattern that has no gaps or overlaps (a structure known as a tessellation) is what led mathematician [Gábor Domokos] to...
- + Drilling Rig Makes Accurate Holes In Seconds—Drilling holes can be quite time consuming work, particularly if you have to drill a lot of them. Think about all the hassle of grabbing a part, fixtu...
- + Transforming Drone Drives and Flies—Vehicles that change their shape and form to adapt to their operating environment have long captured the imagination of tech enthusiasts, and building...
- + Mammalian Ancestors Shed Light on The Great Dying—As we move through the Sixth Extinction, it can be beneficial to examine what caused massive die-offs in the past. Lystrosaurus specimens from South A...
- + Lasers, Galvos, Action: A Quest for Laser Mastery—If you’re into hacking hardware and bending light to your will, [Shoaib Mustafa]’s latest project is bound to spike your curiosity. Combining lasers t...
- + Build Yourself A Useful Resistor Decade Box—If you’ve ever worked with guitar pedals or analog audio gear, you’ve probably realized the value of a resistor decade box. They substitut...
- + OLED Screen Mounting, Without The Pain—There was a time when no self-respecting electronics engineer would build a big project without at least one panel meter. They may be a rare part here...
- + Hack On Self: The Un-Crash Alarm—Ever get home, tired after work, sit down on a couch, and spend an hour or two sitting down without even managing to change into your home clothes? It...
- + Enhiker Helps You Decide if its a Good Day to Hike—Many of us check the weather before heading out for the day — we want to know if we’re dressed (or equipped) properly to handle what Mothe...
- + This Week in Security: Footguns, Bing Worms, and Gogs—The world of security research is no stranger to the phenomenon of not-a-vulnerability. That’s where a security researcher finds something inter...
- + A Surprisingly Simple Omnidirectional Display—Old-school technology can spark surprising innovations. By combining the vintage zoetrope concept with digital displays, [Mike Ando] created the Andot...
- + Learn About Robot Arms By Building Pedro 2.0—Whether you’re a kid or a kid at heart, learning about science and engineering can be a lot more fun if it’s practical. You could sit arou...
- + Quick and Very Dirty Repair Gets Smoked PLC Back in the Game—When electronics release the Magic Smoke, more often than not it’s a fairly sedate event. Something overheats, the packaging gets hot enough to ...
- + Creating and Control of Magnetic Skyrmions in Ferromagnetic Film Demonstrated—Magnetic skyrmions are an interesting example of solitons that occurs in ferromagnetic materials with conceivable solutions in electronics, assuming t...
- + Gear Up: A 15-Minute Intro on Involute Gears—If you’re into CNC machining, mechanical tinkering, or just love a good engineering rabbit hole, you’re in for a treat. Substack’s [lcamtuf] has...
- + Custom Mouse Rocks Neat Thumbstick Design—A mouse is just two buttons, and a two-dimensional motion tracking system, right? Oh, and a scroll wheel. And a third button. And…now you’...
- + FREE-WILi Turns DC32 Badge Into Hardware Dev Tool—With few exceptions, electronic event badges are often all but forgotten as soon as the attendee gets back home. They’re a fun novelty for the t...
- + USB-C For Hackers: Reusing Cables—Your project needs a cable, and since USB-C cables are omnipresent now, it’s only natural to want to reuse them for your evil schemes. Ever seen...
- + There’s Now a Wiki For Hacking Redbox Machines—With the rapidly evolving situation surrounding the Redbox vending machines still out in the wild, it’s about time somebody put together a Wiki ...
- + Blended Wing Body Passenger Airplanes and the End of Winged Tubes—Ask someone to picture an airplane and they’re likely to think of what is essentially a tube with wings and a stabilizing tail tacked onto one e...
- + Measuring the Mighty Roar of SpaceX’s Starship Rocket—SpaceX’s Starship is the most powerful launch system ever built, dwarfing even the mighty Saturn V both in terms of mass and total thrust. The s...
- + Simple Hydrogen Generator Makes Bubbles and Looks Cool—Hydrogen! It’s a highly flammable gas that seems way too cool to be easy to come by. And yet, it’s actually trivial to make it out of wate...
- + Simple Stack of Ferrites Shows How Fluxgate Magnetometers Work—Have you ever wondered how a magnetometer works? We sure have, which was why we were happy to stumble upon this article on simple homebrew fluxgate ma...
- + Stepping On LEGO For Science—You might say that the worst LEGO to step on is any given piece that happens to get caught underfoot, but have you ever thought about what the worst o...
- + A Tube Stereo Amplifier, From Scratch—A conventional tube amplifier has a circuit whose fundamentals were well in place around a hundred years ago, so there are few surprises to be found i...
- + A Cyberpunk Pocketwatch—For a time, pocketwatches were all the rage, but they were eventually supplanted by the wristwatch. [abe] built this cyberpunk Lock’n’Watc...
- + FLOSS Weekly Episode 810: Pi4J – Stable and Boring on the Raspberry Pi—This week, Jonathan Bennett, Randal Schwartz, and Aaron Newcomb chat about Linux, the challenges with using system modules like the Raspberry Pi, chal...
- + Junk Box Build Helps Hams with SDR—SDRs have been a game changer for radio hobbyists, but for ham radio applications, they often need a little help. That’s especially true of SDR ...
- + Most Extreme Hypergravity Facility Starts Up in China With 1,900 Times Earth’s Gravity—Recently China’s new CHIEF hypergravity facility came online to begin research projects after beginning construction in 2018. Standing for Centr...
- + Batteries Not Included: Navigating the Implants of Tomorrow—Tinkerers and tech enthusiasts, brace yourselves: the frontier of biohacking has just expanded. Picture implantable medical devices that don’t need ba...
- + Dial-up Internet Using the Viking DLE-200B Telephone Line Simulator—Who doesn’t like dial-up internet? Even if those who survived the dial-up years are happy to be on broadband, and those who are still on dial-up...
- + Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Seen in the Wild—Last Thursday we were at Electronica, which is billed as the world’s largest electronics trade show, and it probably is! It fills up twenty airplane-h...
- + Supercon 2024 SAO Petal KiCad Redrawing Project—Last week I completed the SAO flower badge redrawing task, making a complete KiCad project. Most of the SAO petals are already released as KiCad proje...
- + The Vecdec Cyberdeck is More than a Pretty Case—A common criticism we hear of cyberdecks is that functionality too often takes a backseat to aesthetics — in other words, they might look awesom...
- + The Great Redbox Cleanup: One Company is Hauling Away America’s Last DVD Kiosks—Remember Redbox? Those bright red DVD vending machines that dotted every strip mall and supermarket in America, offering cheap rentals when Netflix wa...
- + Power Supply With Benchtop Features Fits In Your Pocket—[CentyLab]’s PocketPD isn’t just adorably tiny — it also boasts some pretty useful features. It offers a lightweight way to get a pr...
- + The Barcode Beast Likes Your CDs—Over the years we’ve featured many projects which attempt to replicate the feel of physical media when playing music. Usually this involves some...
- + Ruined 1993 ThinkPad Tablet Brought Back From The Brink—Collecting retrocomputers is fun, especially when you find fully-functional examples that you can plug in, switch on, and start playing with. Meanwhil...
- + Analog Shift Register Revealed—Nowadays, if you want to delay an audio signal for, say, an echo or a reverb, you’d probably just do it digitally. But it wasn’t long ago ...
- + Completing the UE1’s Paper Tape Reader and First Squiggles—On today’s installment of UE1 vacuum tube computer construction, we join [David Lovett] once more on the Usagi Electric farm, as he determines j...
- + Hackaday Links: November 17, 2024—A couple of weeks back, we covered an interesting method for prototyping PCBs using a modified CNC mill to 3D print solder onto a blank FR4 substrate....
- + US’s UFO-Hunting Aerial Surveillance System Detailed In Report—Formerly known as Unidentified Flying Objects, Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) is a category of observations that are exactly what the UAP labe...
- + Schooling ChatGPT on Antenna Theory Misconceptions—We’re not very far into the AI revolution at this point, but we’re far enough to know not to trust AI implicitly. If you accept what ChatG...
- + ESP32 hosts a USB keyboard in this Typewriter—Did you know the ESP32 can be a USB host? Well it can, and [Volos] uses host mode to build this fun little word processor. The venerable ESP32 has a w...
- + Ethernet From First Principles—For someone programming in a high-level language like Python, or even for people who interact primarily with their operating system and the software r...
- + World’s First Virtual Meeting: 5,100 Engineers Phoned In—Would you believe that the first large-scale virtual meeting happened as early as 1916? More than a century before Zoom meetings became just another w...
- + Playing Chess Against LLMs and the Mystery of Instruct Models—At first glance, trying to play chess against a large language model (LLM) seems like a daft idea, as its weighted nodes have, at most, been trained o...
- + Hackers, Patents, and 3D Printing—Last week, we ran a post about a slightly controversial video that claimed that a particular 3D-printing slicing strategy was tied up by a patent trol...
- + Spotted at Supercon: Glowtape Wearable Display—We’re big fans of unusual timepieces here at Hackaday, so it didn’t take long before somebody called our attention to the gloriously lumin...
- + WiFi Status Indicator Keeps Eye on the Network—These days, most of us take the instant availability of a high-speed link to the Internet for granted. But despite all of the latest technology, thing...
- + It’s a Soldering Iron! It’s A Multimeter! Relax! It’s Both!—Imagine this. A young person comes to you wanting to get started in the electronic hobby. They ask what five things should they buy to get started. Ma...
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