[Dan Bowen] describes the construction of a backyard hydroponics set-up in an angry third person tirade. While his friends assume more nefarious, breaking, and bad purposes behind [Dan]'s interest in ...

There has always been a need for electronic graph paper - a digital device that records ones and zeros, writes bits, and keeps track of analog voltages. Many moons ago, this sort of device was graph ...

If you are like most people, your drone flights start on the ground and end either on the ground or--in more cases than most of us want to admit--in a tree. Earlier this year, DARPA awarded initial co...

One day [Andy] was cruising around eBay and spotted something interesting. Forty Virtex-E FPGAs for two quid each. These are the big boys of the FPGA world, with 512 user IO pins, almost 200,000 logic...

Like many people, going through university followed an intense career building period was a dry spell in terms of making things. Of course things settled down and I finally broke that dry spell to …

Building an electric motor from a coil of wire, some magnets, and some paper clips is a rite of passage for many budding science buffs. These motors are simple brushed motors. That is, the electrom…

We have our eyes on the horizon for an epic GPS spoof to catch some legendaries in Pokemon Go, but until that hack shows up, we really like [Brian McEvoy's] hack for the perfect Poke Ball throw.

[B...

Last time I talked about how to use AWK (or, more probably the GNU AWK known as GAWK) to process text files. You might be thinking: why did I care? Hardware hackers don’t need text files, rig…

Since the introduction of the Raspberry Pi, the embedded Linux scene has been rocked by well supported hardware that is produced in quantity, a company that won't go out of business in six months, an...

[caption id="attachment_213708" align="alignright" width="250"] DIY Research Vessel in use, while ROV is busy below. [Source: NYT][/caption]OpenROV shared the results of their June 2016 underwater ex...

Sometimes the journey is as interesting as the destination, and that’s certainly the case with [Marc]’s pursuit of measuring his sleep apnea (PDF, talk slides. Video embedded below.). S…

Any maker worth their bits will look for new ways to challenge themselves. [Robert Fotino], a computer science student at the University of California, is doing just that: designing and building his o...

[Amanda], [Jacob], [Katherine], and [vyshaalij] had a class project for their 'Critical Making' class at UC Berkeley. The task was to design a 'Neo-Wearable' that would fulfill an unmet need. Realizi...

If you were an early 1990s youth, the chances are [Nirvana]’s Smells Like Teen Spirit is one of those pieces of music that transports you straight back to those times. As your writer it evoke…

Last week we had a walk through of the Lunar Module's source code with Don Eyles, who wrote the landing programs. Now you can take a rather thrilling ride to see Don's code in action.

Below is an...

One of the problems with a cheap drone is getting good video, especially in real time. Cheap hobby quadcopters often have a camera built-in or mounted in a fixed position. That's great for fun shots, ...

Sometimes we need the look, feel, and weight of a metal part in a project, but not the metal itself. Maybe you’re going for that retro look. Maybe you’re restoring an old radio and you have one bra…

Microcontrollers are getting faster and faster, as is most of the rest of the computing world. Just like you can play Nintendo console games on the newest Nintendo handhelds, it seems that modern m…

How does one go about measuring the mass of an object? Mass is defined as the amount of matter an object contains. This is very different from weight, of course, as the mass of our object would remain...

We hear a lot about drone surveillance, drone package delivery, drone this, and drone that. Honestly, though, the best use of drones has been taking cool aerial videos and posting them online. Until n...