(Yeah, we don't know what that title means either.) But holding your PCBs down in one place and nicely registered while you spread solder paste over them is a problem that needs solving, and [Carsten]...

We’ve seen hundreds of ways to create your own PCBs at home. If you have a laser printer, you can put traces on a piece of copper clad board. If you have some hydrogen peroxide and acid, you …

The folks at TOG, Dublin Hackerspace, have a large variac. A variac is a useful device for testing some fault conditions with AC mains powered equipment, it allows an operator to dial in any AC out…

The [Make It Extreme] team has been racking up the builds lately, and a lot of them are heavy with metalworking. When you’re doing that kind of work, and you put as much care into finishing y…

[prubeš] shows that parts printed with carbon fiber filament are as strong, or at least as stiff, as you’d expect. He then shows that his method for producing carbon fiber parts with a mixtur…

A large installed base of powered speakers from a defunct manufacturer and a dwindling supply of working remote controls. Sounds like nightmare fuel for an AV professional - unless you take matters in...

Someone brought a dead Marantz amplifier to [Lansing]'s attention, a rather nice model from the 1980s with one channel entirely dead and the other very quiet. His account of its repair is straightforw...

The Hackaday Overlords (or Hackaday family) are running a series of AMAs on SupplyFX. What is SupplyFX? It's a social network for EEs. Who's in the first AMA? [Brady Forrest], the guy who runs Highway...

In these days of cheap microprocessors and easy access to accurate timing through NTP or from the likes of MSF, WWVB, or DCF77, it's no problem to ensure that any number of clocks keep the same time....

Saturday was the first Madison Mini Maker Faire. In this case, it’s Madison, Wisconsin (sorry Madison, SD I didn’t mean to get your hopes up) where I live. Of course I’m not the o…

For electronics aficionados, there are few devices cooler than music synthesizers. The first synths were baroque confabulations of opamps and ladder filters. In the 70s and 80s, synths began their …

Switch-mode power supplies are ubiquitous. Standard off-the-shelf modules in a consistent range of form factors available from multiple manufacturers. Globalized manufacturing and trade has turned the...

The 6502 is the classic CPU. This chip is found in the original Apple, Apple II, PET, Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Atari 2600, and 800, the original Nintendo Entertainment System, Tamagotchis, and Bend…

It seems every week we report on Kickstarter campaigns that fail in extraordinary fashion. And yet there are templates for their failure; stories that are told and retold. These stereotypical facep…

We'll be at Bay Area Maker Faire and we want to have a beer with you on Saturday night.

Two years ago we headed off to the Bay Area Maker Faire and thought we'd invite friends and acquaintances to ...

Here's a great real-world use case for the Pi—a small job for a small computer. [viking--] works in a public library. Like many public libraries, this one has catalog-only terminals that are separat...

This is the second in a two-part series looking at safety when experimenting with mains-voltage electronic equipment, including the voltages you might find derived from a mains supply but not exten…

A few years ago, Philip Peter started a little pet project. He wanted to build his own processor. This really isn't out of the ordinary - every few months you'll find someone with a new project to bui...

If you've had a child in the last few decades, you've had a choice to make: if you want to know the sex of the baby ahead of time. With ultrasound you can find out or--popular these days--you can have...

The Raspberry Pi was made to be inexpensive with an eye toward putting them into schools. But what about programs targeted at teaching embedded programming? There are plenty of fiscally-starved scho...