For most of human history, musical instruments were strictly mechanical devices. The musician either plucked something, blew into or across something, or banged on something to produce the sounds t…

Casually browsing YouTube for “shop improvements” yields a veritable river of project ideas, objects for cat amusement, and 12 INCREDIBLE SHOP HACKS YOU WON’T BELIEVE, though some…

It seems a reasonable assumption that anyone who’d be willing to spend a few hundred dollars on a pair of headphones is probably the type of person who has a passion for high quality audio. T…

The best computer ever made is nearly thirty years old. The Macintosh SE/30 was the highest-spec original all-in-one Macs, and it had the power of a workstation. It had expansion slots, and you cou…

[James] has been working with GameCubes, emulators, and Animal Crossing for a while now, and while emulators are sufficient, he’d like to play on real hardware. This means he needs to write t…

When it comes to reverse engineering silicon, there’s no better person to ask than Ken Shirriff. He’s the expert at teasing the meaning out of layers of polysilicon and metal. He’…

Beyond pride, the biggest issue keeping adults off small motorized scooters is the fact that their tiny motors usually don’t have the power to move anything heavier than your average eighth g…

Despite appearances, [This Old Tony]’s latest series has little to do with CNC-ifying an Etch A Sketch. Although he certainly achieves that, more or less, automating the classic toy is just t…

If you still have a Commodore 64 and it’s gathering dust, don’t sell it to a collector on eBay just yet. There’s still some homebrew game development happening from a small group …

When it was released, the Beckman Model 421 CRT controller represented the latest and greatest in liquid chromatography technology. Its 12 inch screen would allow the operator to view critical info…

“The prototype was $12 in parts, so I’ll sell it for $15.” That is your recipe for disaster, and why so many Kickstarter projects fail. The Bill of Materials (BOM) is just a subse…

It’s often said that if something is worth doing it’s worth doing right, or maybe even worth overdoing. This is clearly a concept that [ANTALIFE] takes very seriously, as made abundantl…

A colleague of mine used to say he juggled a lot of balls; steel balls, plastic balls, glass balls, and paper balls. The trick was not to drop the glass balls. How do you know which is which? For e…

Solar vehicles are getting more and more common as the price of solar panels comes down, and the availability of motors and controllers for all of these vehicles rises. Making a solar-electric bike…

People with diabetes have to monitor their blood regularly, and this should not be a shock to anyone, but unless you are in the trenches you may not have an appreciation for exactly what that entai…

More and more companies are offering ways for customers to personalize their products, realizing that the increase in production cost will be more than made up for by the additional sales you&#8217…

Although hard to believe in the age of cheap IMSI-catchers, “subscriber location privacy” is supposed to be protected by mobile phone protocols. The Authentication and Key Agreement (AK…

It’s a fairly safe bet that a Venn diagram of Hackaday readers and those who closely follow the careers of YouTube megastars doesn’t have a whole lot of overlap, so you’re perhaps…

You’re not cool unless you have a mechanical keyboard. No, you won’t be able to tell if your coworkers don’t like it, because you won’t be able to hear their complaining ove…

A few years back, a company by the name of Pano Logic launched a line of FPGA-based thin clients. Sadly, the market didn’t eventuate, and the majority of this stock ended up on eBay, to event…

There are very few machines as complex to build as a turbojet engine. The turbine blades on a commercial airliner are grown from a single crystal of metal. The engineering tolerances are crazy, and…