Somewhere in the recesses of my memory there lives a small photograph, from one of the many magazines that fed my young interests in science and electronics – it was probably Popular Science.…

There’s something compelling about high-altitude ballooning. For not very much money, you can release a helium-filled bag and let it carry a small payload aloft, and with any luck graze the e…

The field of radio control has benefited much from the onward march of technology. Where a basic 2-channel setup would once have cost hundreds of dollars, it’s now possible to get a high-end …

From cars to refrigerators, it seems as if every new piece of tech is connected to the Internet. For better or for worse, we’re deep into the “Internet of Things”. But what about …

Sometimes you encounter projects that defy description, as is the case with this one. So perhaps it’s best to start with what this project is NOT. It is not a sphere. It is not a perpetual en…

Small microcontrollers and tiny systems-on-chips are getting more and more popular these days as the price comes down and the ease of programming goes up. A Raspberry Pi is relatively inexpensive a…

Here’s a tip for all you retrocomputing enthusiasts or even anyone with an old computer in the garage. Go remove the battery. Yes, that old mid-90s desktop has a battery inside for the real-t…

If you have an eye for obscure Microsoft products, you may be aware of the Microsoft PixelSense, a table-sized horizontal touchscreen designed as a collaborative workspace. It’s a multi-user …

When Charles “Chuck” Yeager reached a speed of Mach 1.06 while flying the Bell X-1 Glamorous Glennis in 1947, he became the first man to fly faster than the speed of sound in controlled…

Resistors are an odd bunch. Why would you have 1.0 Ω resistors, then a 1.1 Ω resistor, but there’s no resistors in between 4.7 Ω and 5.6 Ω? This is a question that has been asked for decades,…

One of the killer apps of 3D printers is the ability to make custom gears, transmissions, and mechanisms. But there’s a learning curve. If you haven’t 3D printed your own gearbox or aut…

If anything ends up on the beds of hobbyist-grade laser cutters more often than birch plywood, it’s probably sheets of acrylic. There’s something strangely satisfying about watching a l…

When it comes to 3D printing, functional prints are still few and far between. Sure, you can print a mount for anything, a Raspberry Pi case, but there are few prints out there that are truly usefu…

When it comes to 3D printing, functional prints are still few and far between. Sure, you can print a mount for anything, a Raspberry Pi case, but there are few prints out there that are truly usefu…

By now we’ve all seen ways to manufacture your own PCBs. There are board shops who will do small orders for one-off projects, or you can try something like the toner transfer method if you wa…

A large chunk of the global economy now rests on public key cryptography. We generally agree that with long enough keys, it is infeasible to crack things encoded that way. Until such time as it isn…

Breakfast is a meal fraught with paradoxes. It’s important to start the day with a hearty meal full of energy and nutrition, but it’s also difficult to cook when you’re still blea…

PostmarketOS began work on a real Linux distribution for Android phones just over 600 days ago. They recently blogged about the state of the project and ensured us that the project is definitely no…

As a layperson reading about some branches of mathematics, it often seems like mathematicians are just people who really like to create and solve puzzles. And, knowing that computer science shares …

I recently came across the most peculiar way to make a color CRT monitor. More than a few oscilloscopes have found their way on to my bench over the years, but I was particularly struck with a find…

…theoretically, anyway. When [Quinn] lucked into a bunch of 5 mm red LEDs and a tube of 74LS164 shift registers, a project sprang to mind: “The Forever Number,” a pseudo-random nu…