A fan used to be a simple device – motor rotates blades, air moves, and if you were feeling fancy, maybe the whole thing oscillates. Now fans have thermostats, timers, and IR remotes. So why …

Every few years, someone on the Internet builds a truly homebrew CPU. Not one built with a 6502, Z80, or a CPU from the 80s, either: one built completely out of 74-series logic chips or discrete tr…

Those tiny black rectangles of epoxy aren’t black boxes anymore. Decapsulating ICs is becoming somewhat common, and if you’re reverse engineering a chip-on-board epoxy blob, or just fig…

No circuit is so trivial that it’s not worth thinking hard about. [Charles Wilkinson] wanted to drive a solenoid air valve that will stay open for long periods of time. This means reducing th…

The Peachy Printer, originally a crowdfunding campaign for a $100 stereolithography 3D printer, is now dead in the water.[Rylan Grayston], the creator of the Peachy Printer, announced that [David B…

If you've read through the comments on Hackaday, you've doubtless felt the fires of one of our classic flame-wars. Any project done with a 32-bit chip could have been done on something smaller and che...

Android-based TV sticks should be in more projects. They are readily available and inexpensive. They have a lot of horsepower for the price, and they can even boot a mainline Linux kernel, unlike s…

[Martin Raynsford] wrote a program that converts a black-and-white 2D image to G-code so that his laser printer could then etch the image. Not satisfied with just that, he used his laser printer to…

You need a coffee table, you need a dinner table. Do you really need two tables? [Shua] thinks the answer is "no". That's why he built this swinging countersink table out of concrete and a aluminum....

Knocking a microcontroller into sleep mode and waking it up on demand or in intervals is common practice in many low power applications, enabling devices to stay in operation for years on a single …

How do you earn a place in a flower festival with a handful of Arduinos and a 3D printer? By building a water curtain that draws flowers. That’s exactly what Tecnoateneu Vilablareix, a hackin…

It’s great to see different kinds of hardware and software tossed into a project together, allowing someone to mix things that don’t normally go together into something new. [Freddy Kil…

When I started boxing classes I was told, at my level, I could do just as much good for my form by doing core exercises such as crunches, running, push-ups, and pull-ups for a month as I could by doin...

At first glance, [Frank Howarth]'s turned bamboo Death Star seems like a straight woodworking project. No Arduino controlled lights, no Raspberry Pi for audio clips of an X-wing attack or escaping TIE...

I was a bit of a lost soul after high school.  I dabbled with electrical engineering for a semester but decided that it wasn’t for me – what I wouldn’t give for a do-over on that …

If you are doing a senior design project in engineering school, it takes some guts to make a robotic duplicate of the school's president. He or she might be flattered, or completely offended. Us? We l...

[Derryn Harvie] from the MakeHackVoid maker space hacked a $10 IR Thermometer and made it talk USB. Sounds easy? Read on. He opened it up in the hope of finding, and tapping into, a serial bus. But…

Have you ever had to write a bit of code to interpret a non-linear analog reading as picked up by an ADC? When all you have to work with for your transfer function is a graph in a semiconductor datash...

[Stefan] works in a place where knowing the exact state of the foreign-exchange market is important to the money making schemes of the operation. Checking an app or a website was too slow and broke h...