[Bunnie Huang] and [Edward Snowden] have teamed up to publish a paper exploring the possibility of introspection on the iPhone. The idea is that phones are increasingly complex and potentially vuln…

There’s a theory that the fear of scurrying things is genetic. Likewise, a similar theory arose about the tendency for humans to find helpless things cute. After all, our useless babies do be…

In our last installment of Tools of the Trade, we had just finished doing the inspection of the surface mount part of the PCB. Next in the process is the through hole components. Depending on the P…

The gist of the idea is to suspend an underwater tunnel from floating pontoons. By the time you finished reading that sentence, you probably already had a list of things in your head that seem to mak...

It’s more of a half-fail than a full fail, but [Basti] is accustomed to getting things right (eventually) so it sticks in his craw that he wasn’t able to fully realize his ferrofluid dr…

Is it a hack? We think it's definitely a hack. It's just a hack that's so grand and audacious it's hard to even think of it as a hack. [Don Justo Martinez] single-handedly (aside from t...

[Jason Jones] has always wanted a curve tracer for his home shop. When he was starting out in electronics he fell in love with a machine called a Huntron Tracker 2000. This machine would feed a sin…

Despite concerted efforts to kill them, serial ports are alive and well, especially in embedded system. True, most of them end in a USB port, these days, but there's still a lot of gear with a DE-9 (i...

Go into a fancy drug store, and you might just find one of the most amazing sales demonstrations you'll ever see. Step right up, take your shoes off, and place your feet onto the magical Dr.&nbsp...

Back in the day, stoners were content to sit around, toke on a joint, mellow out, and listen to the Grateful Dead or something. Nowadays, they practically need a degree in electrical engineering ju…

Omnidirectional wheels are one of the hardy perennials of the world of invention. There seems to be something about the prospect of effortless parallel parking that sets the creative juices of back…

For humans, moving our arms and hands onto an object to pick it up is pretty easy; but for manipulators, it's a different story. Once we've found the object we want our robot to pick up, we still need...

Lithium-ion batteries make possible smaller and lighter electronics. Unfortunately, they are also costly to produce. In a conventional lithium-ion battery, many thin layers create the finished product...

Near Field Communication (NFC) is something we take for granted these days. Nearly all smartphones have it. We even have NFC interfaces for all our favorite development boards. NFC's history goes back...

Mining the wealth of information in the BitCoin blockchain is nothing new, but BitCluster goes a long way to make sense of the information you’ll find there. The tool was released by Mathieu …

We take recorded telephone messages for granted in these days of smartphones and VOIP. Our voicemail lives on an anonymous server in a data centre in the cloud somewhere, in a flash memory chip on ou...

It probably doesn’t matter much for the hacker who sleeps with a bag of various microcontroller flash programmers under the pillow, but for an end-user to apply a firmware upgrade, convenienc…

Electromyography is a technique used to study and record the electrical signals generated when a muscle contracts. It's used for medical diagnosis, rehab, kinesiological studies, and is the preferred ...

Actually riding around at 30 km/h on a 3D printed means of transportation is pretty gnarly, if not foolhardy. So we were actually pleased when we dug deeper and discovered that [E-Mat]'s unicycle buil...

This collaboration between ETH and the Disney empire's research arm is a ultra-light robot that can roll across horizontal surfaces and also transition and climb walls.

The robot has four wheels wi...