Oscilloscope bandwidth is a tricky thing. A 100 MHz scope will have a defined attenuation (70%) of a 100 MHz sine wave. That’s not really the whole picture, though, because we aren’t al…

Designing circuit boards for high speed applications requires special considerations. This you already know, but what exactly do you need to do differently from common board layout? Building on whe…

The original Xbox launched way back in 2001, to much fanfare. This was Microsoft’s big first entry into the console market, with a machine packing a Pentium III CPU, and commodity PC hardware…

Writing this in the frigid darkness of a Northern Hemisphere January evening, I have to admit to more than a little envy of Samy Kamkar and his friends. One of their summer events is a private part…

Let’s not pretend we aren’t all guilty of it: at some point we’ve all connected to a public WiFi network to check our email or log into some site or service. We know the risks, we…

When you think about all the forces that have to be balanced to keep a drone stable, it’s a wonder that the contraptions stay in the air at all. And when the only option for producing those f…

If you are writing a hello world program, you probably aren’t too concerned about how the compiler translates your source code to machine code. However, if your code runs on something that pe…

Mechanical watches are great in that they never need batteries, but they are simultaneously less than great in that they will lose time if not worn or otherwise regularly agitated. The ridiculous s…

Robots, as we currently understand them, tend to run on electricity. Only in the fantastical world of Futurama do robots seek out alcohol as both a source of fuel and recreation. That is, until [Le…

Handheld consoles have to make a lot of design choices that their TV connected brethren don’t have to worry about. Battery life is important, as is screen visibility, and the games can’…

Recently, I was lucky enough to receive a big haul of retro computer gear from a friend who was emptying out his garage. Even better, the haul was almost entirely old Amiga gear — my favorite…

Chiptune is a musical genre built upon the creation of music through the use of chip-based sound synthesizers, found in early game consoles. The Commodore 64’s venerable SID chip and the Game…

It’s cold outside! So grab a copy of the Hackaday Podcast, and catch up on what you missed this week. Highlights include a dip into audio processing with sox and FFMPEG, scripting for Gmail, …

We are somewhat spoiled because electronics today are very reliable compared to even a few decades ago. Most modern electronics obey the bathtub curve. If they don’t fail right away, they won…

The Hackaday Superconference is all about showcasing the hardware heroics of the Hackaday community. We also have a peer-reviewed journal with the same goal, and for the 2018 Hackaday Superconferen…

They walk among us, unseen by polite society. They seem ordinary enough on the outside but they hide a dark secret – sitting beside their keyboards are trackballs instead of mice. We know, it…

Quadcopters are familiar, and remote control planes are old hat at this point. However, compact lightweight power systems and electronic flight controllers continue to make new flying vehicles poss…

TI certainly have certainly seen off rivals such as HP or Casio to capture the lion’s share of the calculator market. The TI-84 is a real staple, and with as many units as there are out there…

Bikes are a great way to get around. They’re cheap compared to cars and can be faster through city traffic, and you can get some exercise at the same time. The one downside to them is that th…

Dot matrix printers are the dinosaurs that won’t go extinct. They are not unlike a typewriter with the type bars behind the ink ribbon replaced by a row of metal pins controlled by solenoids,…

Unlike DOS, early versions of Windows, and most *nixes, the classic Mac operating system is weird. Contained in the ROM are subroutines to draw windows, pop up dialog boxes, and other various tasks…