When you think of world-changing devices, you usually don’t think of the washing machine. However, making laundry manageable changed not only how we dress but how much time people spent getti…

Maker Faire is the nexus for all things new and exciting. At the Bay Area Maker Faire this weekend, zGlue introduced a new platform that stretches the definition of custom ICs. Is this custom silic…

Once you step into the world of controls, you quickly realize that controlling even simple systems isn’t as easy as applying voltage to a servo. Before you start working on your own bipedal r…

One of the more interesting pieces of tech from Hollywood that never seems to become a reality is a location tracker. Remember the ‘movement tracker’ in Alien that found the cat in the …

It’s a problem common to every hackerspace, university machine shop, or even the home shops of parents with serious control issues: how do you make sure that only trained personnel are runnin…

[Eric Strebel] doesn’t need an introduction anymore. If there is a picture of an elegantly designed part with a professional finish on our pages, there is a good chance he has a hand in it. T…

Despite the success shown in prototypes from groups like Boston Dynamics, bipedal walking is still really hard to implement. When the robot lifts one leg, it has to shift its center of gravity over…

While we here at Hackaday never question why an individual took on a particular project, it surely doesn’t stop our beloved readers from grabbing their pitchforks and demanding such answers i…

Last week the PGPocalipse was all over the news… Except that, well, it wasn’t an apocalypse. A team of researchers published a paper(PDF) where they describe how to decrypt a PGP encryp…

Koss Porta Pro headphones are something of a rarity in the world of audio gear: they’re widely regarded as sounding great, but don’t cost an exorbitant amount of money. Since the line w…

Recently I had the opportunity to do a teardown of a battery-backed LED bulb, and found some interesting details on how the device operated. Essentially, the bulb contained a low voltage DC uninter…

When [Steve Parker]’s girlfriend got a tea kettle that takes voice commands, he suddenly saw his fancy bean-to-cup coffee machine as a technological dinosaur. It may make good coffee, but get…

It seemed like a good idea to build a semiconductor lapping machine from an old hard drive. But there’s just something a little off about [electronupdate]’s build, and we think the Hack…

We have a bit of a love/hate relationship with tools in the web browser. For education or just a quick experiment, we love having circuit analysis and FPGA tools at our fingertips with no installat…

There was a time when experimenting with software defined radio (SDR) was exotic. But thanks to cheap USB-based hardware, this technology is now accessible to anyone. While it is fun to play with t…

It is a great shame that back in the days when a typical home computer had easy low-level hardware access that is absent from today’s machines, the cost of taking advantage of it was so high.…

In general, heat is the enemy of electronics. [Christopher Barnatt] is serious about defeating that enemy and did some experiments with different cooling solutions for the Raspberry Pi 3. You can s…

I’ll admit it. I have a lot of drones. Sitting at my desk I can count no fewer than ten in various states of flight readiness. There are probably another half dozen in the garage. Some of the…

When a new piece of technology comes out, the price is generally so high that it keeps away everyone but the die hard early adopters. But with time the prices inch down enough that more people are …

The debt we all owe must be paid someday, and for inventor Robert N. Hall, that debt came due in 2016 at the ripe age of 96. Robert Hall’s passing went all but unnoticed by everyone but his f…

What could be cuter than a little robot that scuttles around its playpen and smiles all day? For the 2018 Hackaday prize [bobricius] is sharing his 2D Actuator for Micro Magnetic Robot. The name is…