When you move from one-off builds to production scale, perhaps to meet that Kickstarter commitment or to keep your Tindie store stocked, you’re going to need to tool up. Jobs like building wi…

Back in the Before Times, when microcontroller development required ultraviolet light, building anything was a pain. You probably had to burn a ROM onto a chip with a parallel programmer, there was…

The Before Times were full of fancy logic analyzers. Connect the leads on these analyzers to a system, find that super special ROM cartridge, and you could look at the bus of a computer system in r…

A fully stocked freezer can be a blessing, but it’s also a disaster waiting to happen. Depending on your tastes, there could be hundreds of dollars worth of food in there, and the only thing …

Hackers often find uses for pressure sensitive materials, detecting footfalls during walking or keypresses in a synthesizer being two examples. [Marco Reps] decided he’d make a hi-res, body-s…

VR is in vogue, but getting on board requires a steep upfront cost. Hackaday.io user [Colin Pate] felt that $800 was a bit much for even the cheapest commercial 360-degree 3D camera, so he thought:…

Magnetic storage is quickly becoming an antiquated technology but IBM may have given it a few more years. Currently, magnetic storage is still manufactured as hard disk drives (HDDs) but you won’t …

A few links posts ago, we wrote something about a company selling huge LED panels on eBay, ten panels for $50. Those panels are gone now, but a few lucky hackers got their hands on some cool hardwa…

This might be German engineering at its funnest. [Wiegand Maelzer GmbH] have created a new type of amusement park ride that combines the thrill of a water slide with the gentle revolutions of a Fer…

When you think of a software defined radio, what language might you consider reaching for to create the software part of the equation? C? C++, maybe? How about Scratch? “What, Scratch as in t…

You’ve probably heard of micro-drones, perhaps even nano-drones, but there research institutions that shrink these machines down to the size of insects. Leading from the [Wiss Institute For B…

A Tesla coil easily makes it to the top spot on our list of “Mad Scientist” equipment we want for the lab, second only to maybe a Jacob’s Ladder. Even then, it’s kind of unf…

For decades, Gordon Clark and his company Clark Foam held an almost complete monopoly on the surfboard blank market. “Blanks” are pieces of foam with reinforcing wood strips (called &#8…

When we see what [Jason Allemann] does with LEGO, we wonder why more one-offs aren’t made this way. This time he’s made a Halloween mechanical marvel that will surely scare more kids th…

I take coffee very seriously. It’s probably the most important meal of the day, and apparently the largest overall dietary source of antioxidants in the United States of America. Regardless of whet…

The Arduino is the standard for any introduction to microcontrollers. When it comes to displaying video, the bone stock Arduino Uno is severely lacking. There’s just not enough memory for a f…

[q3k] got tipped off to a very cool problem in the ongoing Pwn2Win capture-the-flag, and he blew it out of the water by decoding the metal interconnect layers that encode a password in a VLSI IC. A…

Here’s a fun fact, the kind of thing that you might (but we definitely did not) find out when writing a blog post: Dan Brown actually made up the cryptex for his book, The Da Vinci Code. We t…

[Becky Stern] likes to harness the power of the Sun. Most of us will immediately think of solar cells and other exotic solar energy techniques. But [Becky] shows how to make a hot air balloon using…

If you were a computer-mad teen in the late 1980s, you were probably in the process of graduating from an 8-bit machine to a 16-bit one, maybe an Amiga, or an Atari ST. For the first time though yo…

Rollerblading is fun, but who needs all that pesky exercise? Wouldn’t strapping on the blades be so much more tempting if you had an electric pusher motor to propel you along your way? We hav…