York Hackspace needed a demonstration piece to grace their stand at Maker Faires and similar events. Their solution was Spacehack, a multi-player control console based starship emergency simulator gam...

While the official history of the digital camera begins with a Kodak engineer tinkering around with digital electronics in 1975, the first digital camera was actually built a few months prior. At t…

If you’re building an omniscient home-automation system, it’s ability to make decisions is only as good as the input you give it. [Petewill]’s self-made panopticon now knows when …

What do you do with an RFID chip implanted in your body? If you are [gmendez3], you build a bike lock that responds to your chip. The prototype uses MDF to create a rear wheel immobilizer. However,…

There have been really cool happenings in the CNC world for the past few years. There is a recent trend of portable, handheld CNC machines. Yes, you read that correctly. This SIGGRAPH paper demonstr...

Looking for a 360 degree hinge that had no slop was harder than [Mr. LeMieux] thought it would be. Add to the fact it had to be made completely out of metal with no plastic components -- and basically...

For better or worse, the most popular use for the Raspberry Pi - by far - is media centers and retro game consoles. No, the great unwashed masses aren't developing Linux drivers for their Pi periphera...

If you’ve played around with laser diodes that you’ve scavenged from old equipment, you know that it can be a hit-or-miss proposition. (And if you haven’t, what are you waiting fo…

If you have a computer on your desk today, the chances are that it has an Intel architecture and is in some way a descendant of the IBM PC. It may have an Apple badge on the front, it may run Linux…

A few weeks ago we ran an article on the benefits of accelerator programs. While I agreed with almost everything in it, the article still bothered me, and I wanted to start a discussion about when an...

The first five weeks of the Hackaday Prize have flown by but many of you have already been busy, submitting over 400 entries! For those that haven't (or for those considering a second entry) there's s...

A law professor and an engineering professor walk into a bar. What comes out is a nuanced article on a downside of autonomous cars, and how to deal with it. The short version of their paper: self-driv...

Programmatic CAD, in particular the OpenSCAD language and IDE, has accompanied the maker movement for a while now. After its introduction in 2009, it quickly found its way into the 3D printing tool…

There was a time in the late 80s and early 90s where the Amiga was the standard for computer graphics. Remember SeaQuest? That was an Amiga. The intro to Better Call Saul? That’s purposefully…

On the last day of MRRF, the guys from Lulzbot were printing a vase with some clear Taulman t-glase on their TAZ 6 prototype. It was probably the third or fourth one they had printed, but I was compel...

You might think that there could be no form factor that has not as yet had an Arduino fitted in to it. This morning a new one came our way. [Johan Kanflo]'s AAduino is an Arduino clone with an onboard...

Residential-grade commercial alarm systems are good at a few things but terrible at others, like keeping pace with telephone technology. So what to do when a switch to VOIP renders your alarm system ...

Getting to play with technology is often the only justification a hacker needs to work on a build. But when your build helps someone, especially your own special-needs kid, hacking becomes a lot more...

For her science fair project, [David]'s daughter had thoughts about dipping eggs in coffee, or showing how dangerous soda is to the unsuspecting tooth. Boring. Instead she employed her father to help...

What happens when you wire up 16 capacitors? Sixteen 2500V 40uF capacitors to be precise... [Lemming] calls it the Box 'O Bangs. Theoretically it outputs 4000A at 2500V for a split second.

They boug...