For most of us, a good part of our childhood involved running around someone’s backyard (or inside the house) trying to score hits with a toy NERF gun. The fun level was high and the risk of …

On a recent bowling excursion it occurred to us that this is one of the most advanced robotics systems most Americans will directly interact with. That’s a bold claim today, but certainly one…

There’s a fine line between a successful DIY project and one that ends in heartbreak. It’s subjective too; aside from projects that end up with fire trucks or ambulances in the driveway…

Some of the most satisfying projects of all are the ones that do something visual. All the network routers, data loggers, and thermostats are great. But we are visual creatures and even a humble bl…

Sometimes you start something simple and then it just leads to a chain reaction of things. I wanted to write a post about doing state machines in Verilog and target the Lattice iCEstick board that …

If you thought the future of electronic musical instruments was massive Emerson-class modular synths, giant MPCs with pads the size of Dance Dance Revolution machines, or hilariously expensive poly…

How do you choose filament when you want strong 3D-printed parts? Like most of us, you probably take a guess, or just use what you have on hand and hope for the best. But armed with a little knowle…

In the world of retro gaming, when using emulators and non-native hardware it’s pretty common to use whatever USB controller happens to be available. This allows us to get a nostalgic look wh…

Most civilized nations ban the use of landmines because they kill indiscriminately, and for years after they are planted. However, they are still used in many places around the world, and people ar…

The journalist’s art is now one of the computer keyboard and the internet connection, but there was a time when it involved sleepless nights over a manual typewriter followed by time spent re…

Ever seen a bit of graffiti in a strange location and wondered how the graffiti artist got up there? It might have been a drone rather than an athletic teen. Disney research has just published an i…

We are used to imagining radio telescopes as immense pieces of scientific apparatus, such as the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico, or the Lovell telescope in the UK. It’s a surprise then th…

Asteroids is one of the classic games of the early arcade era. Launched in 1979 by Atari, it relied upon using an XY vector monitor to deliver crisp graphics for its space-based gameplay. One of th…

One of the great things about hacking together projects these days is how many powerful subsystems are readily available to reuse. [Sanjeet] took full advantage of a whole slate of reusable pieces …

The molar mass of carbon monoxide (CO) is 28.0, and the molar mass of air is 28.8, so CO will rise in an ambient atmosphere. It makes sense to detect it farther from the ground, but getting a tall …

We’ve all heard the range of sounds to be made electronically from mostly discrete components, but what [Kelly Heaton] has achieved with her many experiments is a whole other world, the world…

[Hunter Irving] has been busy with the Nintendo LABO’s piano for the Nintendo Switch. In particular he’s been very busy creating his own custom waveform cards, which greatly expands the…

Here’s something of interest of 3D printing enthusiasts. How do you print lightweight 3D objects? [Tom Stanton] does a lot of stuff with 3D printing and RC airplanes, so yeah, he’s prob…

If you don’t have hearing loss, it is easy to forget just how much you depend on your ears. Hearing aids are great if you can afford them, but they aren’t like glasses where they immedi…