It’s a boat! It’s a hackerspace! It’s a DIY research platform and an art gallery! It’s Boat Lab! [Andrew Quitmeyer] lead a project in the Philippines that was nominally char…

The must-have toy of the moment last winter was the “Hoverboard”. We all probably secretly wished them to be the boards from the Back to the Future series of films made real, but the mo…

Quick: What’s the forward voltage drop on a conducting diode? If you answered something like 0.6 to 0.7 V, you get a passing grade, but you’re going to have to read on. If you answered …

One of the biggest challenges for a company that holds invaluable data is protecting it. At first, this task would seem fairly straightforward. Keep the data on an encrypted server that's only accessi...

Intel made an appearance at the recent summer X Games in Austin, TX with the Curie, a gadget for sensing the motion and position of skateboarders and BMXers. The Curie, attached to the bikes or hel…

Makerbot is in the gutter, 3D Systems and Stratasys stock is only a shadow of their 2014 glory, but this is the best year 3D printing has ever had. Machines are now good and cheap, there's a variet...

I could have sworn that we has asked this one before, but perhaps I'm thinking of our discussion of nuclear aircraft. In my mind the two share a similar fate: it just isn't going to happen. But, that ...

When you work at Tektronix and they make a difficult to refuse offer for their ‘scopes, you obviously grab it. Even if the only one you can afford is the not-so-awesome TDS1012. [Jason Milldr…

The folks at Leeds Hackspace have built themselves a shiny new C-beam based CNC mill. As you might expect everyone wants to try the machine out, but there's a problem. A CNC machine presents a st...

GOMX-3 is a CubeSat with several payloads. One of them is a software defined radio configured to read ADS-B signals sent by commercial aircraft. The idea is that a satellite can monitor aircraft ov…

Ziehl-Neelsen Sputum Smear Microscopy (ZN) is one of most common methods for diagnosing Tuberculosis. On the equipment side, it requires not much more than an optical microscope, although it still nee...

It wasn't an easy weekend for the rest of the world's hackers and makers, that of the Bay Area Maker Faire. Open your social media accounts, and most of your acquaintances seemed to be there and havin...

[Alex] is no stranger to making machines of negligible utility. A few years ago he made the Almost Useless Machine, a solar-powered system that cuts through a 20mm dowel rod while you wait (and wait,...

Today’s computers are unimaginably complex, and so complicated it’s nearly impossible for anyone to comprehend everything a CPU can do in excruciating detail. It wasn’t always lik…

This is so cool; an unexpected use for an antiquated digital storage medium. [DeepSOIC] built a cutter that shaves off plastics but cannot cut through metal. It’s made out of the media part o…

Last week on the Hacklet we covered optical microscopy projects. Those are the familiar scopes that many of us have at work or even at home on our benches. These are scopes that you typically can use ...

We were trolling around Hackaday.io, and we stumbled on [Barb]'s video series called (naturally enough) "Barb Makes Things". The plot of her videos is simple -- Barb points a time-lapse camera at her ...

If you are a certain age, there were certain science toys you either had, or more likely wanted. A chemistry set, a microscope, a transparent human body, and (one of several nuclear toys) a cloud cham...

Looking for a more unique living experience, [Zach Both] converted a 2003 Chevy Express Van he picked up from Craigslist into a gorgeous mobile home.

The van had 200,000 miles when he bought it. ...

You can drive from Boston to Chicago without picking up a single ticket from a toll booth, or handing money to a single toll booth worker. You can do this because of E-ZPass, a small plastic brick …