Once upon a time, [hardwarecoder] acquired a Gen8 HP microserver that he began to toy around with. It started with ‘trying out’ some visualization before spiraling off the rails and ful…

If the computer you have isn’t particularly fast, there’s a well-documented way to get more out of it. You just need more of the same computer, and you can run your tasks on them all at…

Very slowly, some very cool parts are coming out on the market that will make for some awesome builds. Supercapacitors are becoming a thing, and every year, the price of these high power supercaps …

In July 1940 the German airforce began bombing Britain. This was met with polite disagreement on the British side — and with high technology, ingenuity, and improvisation. The defeat of the G…

Most normal 3D prints are not watertight. There are a few reasons for this, but primarily it is little gaps between layers that is the culprit. [Mikey77] was determined to come up with a process fo…

It seems almost absurd now, but cosmologists once assumed that galaxies of a given type were all the same and didn’t change. Because of this assumption, galaxies were used as a redshift or li…

Word clocks, or a matrix of light-up letters that spell out the time, are a standard build for all enterprising electronics enthusiasts. The trouble is finding the right way to drive a matrix of LE…

Whether you need to pump water out of your basement this spring, or just want to have fun shooting water around in the yard this summer, here’s a way to build a pump instead of buying one. Th…

What is more fun than plugging in your phone and coming back to find your battery on empty? Stepping on a LEGO block with bare feet or arriving hungry at a restaurant after closing probably qualify…

Electromagnetic actuators exert small amounts of force, but are simple and definitely have their niche. [SeanHodgins] took a design that’s common in flip-dot displays as well as the lightweig…

[Revanth Kailashnath] writes in to tell us about an interesting project he and his team have been working on for their “Real Time Embedded Programming” class at the University of Glasgo…

Through-hole chips are slowly falling by the wayside, and if you want to build something with new parts you will be using surface mount components. This means spreading paste and throwing it in the…

[Dhole], like the fox, isn’t the first to connect his computer to a Game Boy printer but he has done a remarkable job of documenting the process so well that anyone can follow. The operation …

I recently spent a largely sleepless night at a hotel, and out of equal parts curiosity and boredom, decided to kill some time scanning the guest network to see what my fellow travelers might be up…

Tornadoes are a rightfully feared natural disaster. Fire tornadoes are an especially odious event to contend with — on top of whatever else is burning. But, a fire vortex cannon? That’s…

We are now in a golden age of printed circuit boards. It wasn’t too long ago that making your own circuit boards either involved a lot of money, or slightly less money and using some propriet…

A friend of mine once suggested that there should be a support group for burned-out former hackerspace directors. We could have our own Village of the Damned at summer camps, where we’d sit m…

Electric lighting – is there anything it can’t do? Coming in all manner of forms and flavours, you can get everything from a compact reading lamp to a blindingly powerful worklight for …

A flip-flop is one of the most basic digital electronic circuits. It can most easily be built from just two transistors, although they can and have been built out of vacuum tubes, NAND and NOR gate…

For sturdy utilitarianism, there were few designs better than the Western Electric Model 500 desk phone. The 500 did one thing and did it well, and remained essentially unchanged from the mid-1940s…

The R820T tuner IC is used in the popular Airspy software defined radio (SDR) as well as many of the inexpensive RTL SDR dongles. [TLeconte] did some experiments on intermediate frequency (IF) conf…