The modern Internet can be a dangerous place, especially for those who might not have the technical wherewithal to navigate its pitfalls. Whether it’s malware delivered to your browser throug…

We sometimes wonder if designers ever actually use their own products, or even put them through some sort of human-factors testing before putting them on the market. Consider the mechanism that sec…

Sometimes, we need devices to notify us of something. The oven timer is going off. Your phone has a push notification. The smoke detector battery is getting low. All of these problems can be solved…

Silicon and integrated circuits come and go, but when it comes to extended lifetime support from a company, it’s very, very hard to find fault with Microchip. They’re still selling the …

You don’t usually think of simulating Verilog code — usually for an FPGA — as a visual process. You write a test script colloquially known as a test bench and run your simulation.…

If you haven’t been paying attention, live streaming has become a big business. Streamers are getting out of their basements and moving around among us. While IRL streams may not be our cup o…

The CatGenie is an amazing device to watch in action, basically a self-cleaning litter box for cats that even does away with the need to replace the litter. It’s comparable to what the indoor…

A couple years ago I got into making electronic conferences badges by building a device for DEFCON 25 shaped like a dragonfly. Like all badges the most important design factor was quite literally h…

Who among us doesn’t procrastinate from time to time? We can’t count the number of times that we’ve taken advantage of the Post Office staying open until midnight on April 15th. A…

One of the most practical applications for a home 3D printer is the ability to produce replacement parts; why wait a week for somebody to ship you a little plastic widget when you’ve got a ma…

The HTC Vive Tracker adds real-world objects to your virtual world. While these real-world objects in virtual environments are now mostly limited to a Nintendo Zapper for a Duck Hunt clone and a te…

On the face of it, PCB production seems to pretty much have been reduced to practice. Hobbyists have been etching their own boards forever, and the custom PCB fabrication market is rich with vendor…

We’ve written about a lot of DIY robotic arms. Some of them are high-performance, some are inexpensive, and some are just uniquely fun. This one certainly falls into the last category; whilst…

The Surface Dial is a $100+ rotary control. You can turn it, and it’ll make some basic stuff happen on your Microsoft Surface. It’s silver and sleek and elegant but fundamentally, it ju…

Racing is certainly exciting for the person rocketing around the track fast enough to get the speedometer into the triple digits, and tends to be a decent thrill for the spectators if they’ve…

What do you do when you want to add a new feature to some electronics but you can’t or don’t want to tear into the guts? You look for something external with which you can interface. We…

Regular readers may recall we recently covered a neat Arduino trick that allowed you to “blow out” an LED as if it was a candle. The idea was that the LED itself could be used as a rudi…

If you have your ear even slightly to the ground of the software community, you’ll have heard of Docker. Having recently enjoyed a tremendous rise in popularity, it continues to attract users…

If you’re going to be flying around a FPV-capable aircraft, be it a quadcopter or a fixed-wing plane, you shouldn’t be surprised if bystanders want to take a turn wearing your googles. …

When it comes to IoT and robotics, the name of the game is sensors. These aren’t just IMUs and the stuff that makes robots move — we’re talking about environmental sensors here. E…