One of my favorite types of science fiction character is found in the books of Ben Bova; a business mogul who through brilliance, hard work, and the force of personality drives mankind to a whole new...

We are all (hopefully) aware that we can be watched while we're online. Our clicks are all trackable to some extent, whether it's our country's government or an advertiser. What isn't as obvious, thou...

Accountants and MBAs use spreadsheets to play “what if” scenarios with business and financial data. Can you do the same thing with electronic circuits? The answer–perhaps not surp…

[Seb Lee-Delisle]’s NES lightgun gave us pause as the effect is so cool we couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing it at first. When he pulls the trigger there erupts the beam of lig…

In this three part video series we watch [Dirk Herrendoerfer] go from scraps to a nice 3D printed assembly as he iterates through the design of a pen plotter for making circuit boards. [dana] menti…

Woodworking is the fine art of building jigs. Even though we have Internet-connected toasters, thermostats, cars, and coffee makers, the Internet of Things hasn't really appeared in the woodshop quite...

Back in the days when you didn’t pay for your TV programming, it was common to have a yagi antenna on the roof. If you were lucky enough to have every TV station in the area in the same direc…

A sip-and-puff device is an assistive technology used by people who cannot use their hands. Being a quasi-medical device, you can imagine this technology is extremely expensive, incapable of being …

Introduced last year as an improvement on the very popular Shapeoko CNC router, the X-Carve by Inventables has grown to be a very well-respected machine in the community. It's even better if you throw...

You will probably be familiar with I²C, a serial bus typically used for not-very-fast communication with microcontroller peripherals. It’s likely though that unless you are an I²C wizard you …

Evolution is one clever fellow. Next time you're strolling about outdoors, pick up a pine cone and take a look at the layout of the bract scales. You'll find an unmistakable geometric structure. In fa...

Tired of being harassed by your cat? [MomWillBeProud] made a cheap, effective — and more importantly cat-operated — cat food dispenser. The feeder is of an efficient construction &#8212…

It used to be tedious to set up a cross compile environment. Sure you can compile on the Raspberry Pi itself, but sometimes you want to use your big computer — and you can use it when your Pi…

On occasion I have encountered portable soldering irons and my impressions of them have ranged from nearly usable to total rubbish. While using a popular butane powered model and pondering if it was r...

[whitequark] has been experimenting with a blowtorch for SMD reflow. Having just moved 8,000 km [whitequark] was stuck without any of his usual reflow tools. He did however have a blowtorch handy, and...

Oh sure, the thought of owning a happy whirring drill press of your very own is exciting, but have you really thought about it? It's a big responsibility to welcome any tool into the home, even seemin...

Int 1777, Georg Lichtenberg found that discharging high voltage on an insulating surface covered with a powder, a fractal-like image appears, sometimes known as a lightning tree. Incidentally, this…

We’re still not sure exactly how [connornishijima]’s motion detector works, though many readers offered plausible explanations in the comments the last time we covered it. It works well…

This is just good, clean fun. Well, maybe not clean since this souped-up racing Roomba appears to move too fast to actually clean anything anymore. But did they ever really clean very well in the f…

[Dave Hrynkiw] wrote up some practical and useful detail around embedding electronics into clothing. It centers around his daughter’s “Starry Night” high school graduation dress, …

However you sell your kits online, you’ll have to find a means of shipping them to the customer. For an online operation this unseen part of the offering is more important than any other when…