What makes a game a game? Like, how do we know that we’re looking at a variation of PONG when confronted with one? And how do we know how to play it? [Bertho] sought to answer this question a…

Over the recent weeks here at Hackaday, we’ve been taking a look at the humble transistor. In a series whose impetus came from a friend musing upon his students arriving with highly developed…

One of the great unsolved problems in the world of DIY electronics is a small keyboard. Building your own QWERTY keyboard is a well-studied and completely solved problem; you need only look at the …

Now that most of what we do revolves around our phones and/or the internet, it’s nearly impossible to take a short break from work to check the ol’ calendar without being lured by the s…

Putting everything on the Internet is getting easier and easier, what with the profusion of Internet-ready appliances as well as cheap and plentiful IoT modules to integrate legacy devices. Think I…

For those of us who grow up around natural swimming holes, algae are the reason we have to wash after taking a dip. Swimmer’s itch or just being covered in green goop is not an attractive way…

Have you ever seen something and instantly knew it was something you wanted, even though you weren’t aware it existed a few seconds ago? That’s how we felt when we received a tip about …

[SeanHodgins] has a project in mind where he needs to sample over 500 analog sensors. To get ready, he made a breakout board for 32-channel analog multiplexer device he wants to use. He put the pro…

[Harry Axten] turned the diminutive Korn Monotron into a playable analog synthesizer, complete with a full-sized keyboard spanning two octaves and a MIDI interface. Korg Introduced the Monotron ana…

You might think that a microcontroller would be needed to handle a vending machine’s logic. For one thing, only the correct change should activate them and the wrong change should be returned…

How do you start a good habit? As a blogger, someone who spends a spectacular amount of time on Twitter, and a Thought Leader Life Coach, I can tell you: the best way to start a good habit is by do…

Perhaps you’ve noticed, but we here at Hackaday have a slight obsession with the over-engineered. One could fairly say there’s a linear relationship between how likely we are to feature…

If you are building a robot to fight fires, why not use the water that you are fighting fires with to propel your robot? That seems to be the idea behind the Dragon Fire Fighting robot built by [Pr…

It’s easy to assume that older components will be less integrated and bulkier than we might otherwise expect. Then something seems ahead of its time, like the teeny-tiny 490IP1 LED which was …

The K40 laser cutter has become ubiquitous in hackerspaces and well-equipped home workshops over the past few years, as a relatively inexpensive introduction to laser cutting and a machine that is …

[Ryan Wamsley] has spent a lot of time over the past few months working on a new project, the Ultimate LoRa backplane. This is as its name suggests designed for LoRa wireless gateways, and packs in…

What do you do when you have time, thousands of dollars worth of magnets, and you love Mythbusters? Science. At least, science with a flair for the dramatics. The myth that a magnetic wristwatch wi…

Anyone who slings code for a living knows the feeling all too well: your code is running fine and dandy one minute, and the next minute is throwing exceptions. You’d swear on a stack of O&#82…

Thursday night was a real treat. I got to see both Joe Grand and Kitty Yeung at the HDDG meetup, each speaking about their recent work. Joe walked us through the OpticSpy, his newest hardware produ…

The Joo Janta 200 super-chromatic peril-sensitive sunglasses were developed to help people develop a relaxed attitude to danger. By following the principle of, ‘what you don’t know can&…

It’s time for Computex, and that means [Linus] has dropped something. I don’t know what, but he’s dropped something. It’s a meme or something at this point. What were the hi…