Casting metal parts from 3D-printed plastic or Styrofoam models is all the rage these days, and for good reason — casting is a way to turn one-offs into mass-produced parts. Seems like most o…

We don’t know if Batman has a keychain for the keys to the Bat mobile, the Bat copter, and all his other vehicles. But we are guessing if he did, it didn’t look like the one [krishnan79…

Most people have at least a fuzzy idea of what DNA is. Ask about RNA, though, and unless you are talking to a biologist, you are likely to get even more handwaving. We hackers might have to reread …

Everyone knows how to convert from Celsius to Fahrenheit, right? On a digital thermometer you just flick the little switch, on a weather app you change the settings, or if worse comes to worse, you…

[JBeale] squeezed every last drop of performance from a $5 Doppler radar module, and the secrets of that success are half hardware, half firmware, and all hack. On the hardware side, the first prot…

I have some aluminum building-set parts on hand and just got a second rotary tool, so I thought I’d try my hand at making a light-duty CNC mill—maybe carve up some cheap pine or make circuit boards…

This past weekend, another smashing round of the Vintage Computer Festival was held at the Computer History Museum in Mountainview. As always, VCF West gathers the sages and lords of vintage comput…

If you ever go to a computer history museum, you’ll be struck by how bland most modern computers look. Prior to 1980 computers had lights and switches, and sometimes dials and meters. Some ha…

While [Elon Musk] and [Jeff Bezos] are working on getting us to Mars and the Moon, [Ronald Jaramillo] is working on building structures once we get there. To that end, he’s been developing th…

DEF CON 25’s theme was retro-tech, and [xres0nance] wasn’t kidding around in the retro badge he built for the convention. The badge was mostly built out of actual parts from the ’80s and ’90s, incl…

For anything involving video capture while moving, most videographers, cinematographers, and camera operators turn to a gimbal. In theory it is a simple machine, needing only three sets of bearings…

Hardly a week goes by that we don’t post a project where at least one commenter will lament that the hacker could have just used a 555. [Peter Monta] clearly gets that point of view. For a 55…

[Roland Meertens] has a bat detector, or rather, he has a device that can record ultrasound – the type of sound that bats use to echolocate. What he wants is a bat detector. When he discovere…

Sometimes the most important thing is getting something done. [Alex Lao] was recently in such a situation. His sister was getting married and he designed, built, and delivered twenty RGB LED table …

[Sam Greydanus] created a neural network that can encode and decode messages just as Enigma did. For those who don’t know, the Enigma machine was most famously used by the Germans during Worl…

Isaac Asimov described the business of rocket fuel research as “playing footsie with liquids from Hell.” If that piques your interest even a little, even if you do nothing else today, r…

There’s a little problem with sending drones to Venus: it’s too hostile for electronics; the temperature averages 867 °F and the pressure at sea level is 90 atmospheres. The world duration record i…

I’m working on a project involving the need to precisely move a tool based on the measured distance to an object. Okay, yeah, it’s a CNC mill. Anyway, I’d heard of time of fight s…

FabDoc is an interesting concept that attempts to tackle a problem many of us didn’t realize we had. There are plenty of version control systems for software, but many projects also have a ha…

Akiba sits at a very interesting intersection of technology and culture. He is well known for his experience with manufacturing in Shenzhen — but he has a few other unique dimension I’l…