There are few scenes in life more moving than the moment the solder paste melts as the component slides smoothly into place. We’re willing to bet the only reason you don’t have a reflow…

As if building tiny mechanisms with dozens of moving parts that all need to mesh together perfectly to work weren’t enough, some clock and watchmakers like to put their horology on hard mode …

If you’ve been in a Japanese restaurant, you’ve probably seen a maneki-neko, the lucky cat charm, where a cat welcomes you with a beckoning arm. It’s considered to bring good luck…

It might seem like a paradox that you want a dark field to see things with an expensive microscope. As [IMSAI Guy] explains, a dark field microscope doesn’t make the subject dark. It makes th…

You’ve seen printers with scanners in them, printers with copiers in them, even ones with the ancient technology known as “facsimile” built-in. But have you ever seen a printer wi…

It’s no shock that electric eels get a bad rap for being scary creatures. They are slithery fleshy water snakes who can call down lightning. Biologists and engineers at the University of Cali…

We love to hack IKEA products, marvel at Raspberry Pi creations, and bask in the glow of video projection. [Nord Projects] combined these favorite things of ours into Lantern, a name as minimalist …

STL files are everywhere. When there’s something to 3D print, it’s probably going to be an STL. Which, as long as the model is good just as it is, is no trouble at all. But sooner or la…

It was only a matter of time. Everything else is getting its data logged and reported to the Internet for detailed analysis, so why should our rodents be any different? The cover story is that [Nic…

“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our…

What if you didn’t have to risk your life to disconnect the power during a catastrophic storm? That’s a question many people in Houston were asking themselves as they watched water from…

Readers of a certain vintage will remember the glee of building your own levels for DOOM. There was something magical about carefully crafting a level and then dialing up your friends for a death m…

There’s perhaps nothing worse than working on a project and realizing you don’t have the part you need to complete it. You look through all your stuff twice, maybe three times, on the o…

With Google’s near-monopoly on the internet, it can be difficult to get around in cyberspace without encountering at least some aspect of this monolithic, data-gathering giant. It usually tak…

Proving that astrophotography doesn’t have to break the bank, [Gerald Gattringer] has recently documented his DIY “barn door” style star tracker which is built almost entirely fro…

Transmission lines can seem like magic. When you make use of them it seems strange that a piece of wire can block or pass certain frequencies. It is less common to use transmission lines with pulse…

Gaming controllers have come a long way from an Atari 2600’s single button and digital joystick. As games grew more sophisticated, so did the controllers. This development had a dark side &#8…

I don’t have a signal generator, or more specifically I don’t have a low frequency signal generator or a function generator. Recently this fact collided with my innocent pleasure in buy…

It never fails — we post a somewhat simple project using a microcontroller and someone points out that it could have been accomplished better with a 555 timer or discrete transistors or even …

Last time we looked at Spice models of a current sink. We didn’t look at some of the problems involved with a simple sink, and for many practical applications, they are perfectly adequate. Ho…

Building personal weather stations has become easier now than ever before, thanks to all the improvements in sensors, electronics, and prototyping techniques. The availability of cheap networking m…