In the days before semiconductor diodes, transistors, or even vacuum tubes, mechanical means were used for doing many of the same things. But there's still plenty of fun to be had in using those mec...

Here's a blast from the past, or future, reminiscent of the self-lacing shoes from Back to the Future Part II. [Vimal Patel] made his own self-lacing shoe using LEGO "bolted" to the shoe's sole. We th...

One of the standout talks at the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress concerned pseudo-random-number generators (PRNGs). [Vladimir Klebanov] (right) and [Felix Dörre] (left) provided a framework for ma...

A proper soldering iron is one of the fundamental tools that a good hacker needs. Preferably one that has a temperature control so it can handle different types of solder and connectors. Decent sol…

Christmas light displays winking and flashing in sync to music are a surefire way to rack up views on YouTube and annoy your neighbours. Inspired by one such video, [Akshay James] set up his own di…

Teleknitting, the brainchild of Moscow artist [vtol], is an interesting project. On one hand, it doesn't knit anything that is useful in a traditional sense, but on the other, it attempts the complex ...

The Amazon Dash button is now in its second hardware revision, and in a talk at the 33rd Chaos Communications Congress, [Hunz] not only tears it apart and illuminates the differences with the first…

Has work been a little stressful this week, are things getting you down? Spare a thought for an unnamed sysadmin at the GitHub-alike startup GitLab, who early yesterday performed a deletion task on…

It is incredibly interesting how many parts of a computer system are capable of leaking data in ways that is hard to imagine. Part of securing highly sensitive locations involves securing the compu…

In a previous episode of Hackaday, [Rich Olson] came up with a new no-etch circuit board fabrication method. And now, he’s put it to the test: building an nRF52 Bluetooth reference design, co…

There are numerous examples of hardware which has latent features waiting to be unlocked by software. Most recently, we saw a Casio calculator which has the same features as its bigger sibling hidd…

It sounds like something out of a sci-fi or horror movie: people suffering from complete locked-in state (CLIS) have lost all motor control, but their brains are otherwise functioning normally. This c...

Car lifts used to be a tool reserved for professional mechanics. Times are a-changing though. With the advent of reasonably priced four-post hydraulic lifts, more and more shade tree mechanics are j...

An experimental project to mix reality and virtual reality by [Drew Gottlieb] uses the Microsoft Hololens and the HTC Vive to show two users successfully sharing a single workspace as well as control...

Amazon Dash is a handy service, and when Amazon released their AWS IoT platform, [Brian Carbonette] felt that it left out all the hardware hackers from the tinkering fun. Seeking justice, he put to…

We're less than a week away from the Hackaday Superconference, where we'll be announcing the winners of the Hackaday Prize. The Hackaday Prize is a celebration of the greatest hardware the Hackaday c...

If you make crystal radios, you've probably got a few crystal earpieces. The name similarity is a bit coincidental. The crystal in a crystal radio was a rectifier (most often, these days, a germanium ...

A few years ago, FLIR unleashed a new line of handheld thermal imagers upon the world. In a manufacturing triumph, the cheapest of these thermal imaging cameras contained the same circuitry as the …

Most of us who have dabbled a little in electronics will have made our own printed circuit boards at some point. We'll have rubbed on sticky transfers, laser-printed onto acetate, covered our clothing...

The history of aviation is a fascinating one, spanning more than two thousand years starting from kites and tower jumping. Many hackers are also aviation fans, and the name of Alberto Santos Dumont…

When our new computer overlord arrives it'll likely give orders using an electromagnetic speaker (or more likely, by texting instead of talking). But for a merely artificial human being, shouldn't we ...