We were doing our daily harvest of YouTube for fresh hacks when we stumbled on a video that eventually led us to this conversion of a 1980s Armatron robot to steam power.

The video in question was ...

[EssentialCraftsman] is relatively new to YouTube, but he's already put out some impressive videos. We really enjoyed an episode dedicated to a fixture in his shop, his large custom blacksmith's forge...

A few years ago, thermal imaging sensors - cameras that could see heat - became very cheap. FLIR was going all-in with their Lepton module, and there were a number of clip-on cellphone accessories tha...

A SCARA (Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm) is a type of articulated robot arm first developed in the early '80s for use in industrial assembly and production applications. All robotics designs ...

Do any of you stay awake at night agonizing over how the keytar could get even cooler? The 80s are over, so we know none of us do. Yet here we are, [James Cochrane] has gone out and turned a HP ScanJ...

The first time I was in school for electrical engineering (long story), I had a professor who had never worked in the industry. I was in her class and the topic of the day was measuring AC waveforms. ...

Sometimes there's just no substitute for the right diagnostic tool. [Ankit] was trying to port some I2C code from an Arduino platform to an ARM chip. When the latter code wasn't working, he got clever...

Everyone wants their prototypes to look polished, as opposed to looking like 3D-squirted weekend afterthoughts. The combination of Delrin and a Laser Cutter make this easy, especially if you learn …

The Raspberry Pi is a great computer, even if it doesn’t have SATA. For those of us who have lost a few SD cards to the inevitable corruption that comes from not shutting a Pi down properly, …

We toss together our own PCB designs, throwing in a microcontroller here or there. Anything more demanding than that, and we reach for a Raspberry Pi or BeagleBone (or an old Linksys router). Why don'...

It's frustrating, the reluctance of some of my fellow hackspace members to put the cordless drill battery back in the charger after use.  As this is being written I've just coaxed enough energy from...

Slit lamps are prohibitively expensive in the third world areas of India where they are most needed. An invention that's been around for over a hundred years, the slit lamp is a simple-in-concept way ...

Redditor [mulishadan] — a fan of the movie WarGames — has created a singular thermostat in the form of a Defcon alert meter. Looking to learn some new skills while building, [mulishadan…

This year’s DEF CON badge is electronic, and there was much celebrating. This year’s DEF CON badge has an x86 processor, and there was much confusion. The badge this year, and every yea…

In the previous article in this series on making a personal electronic project into a saleable kit, we looked at the broader picture of the kit market for a new entrant, the importance of gauging w…

Most of North America has been locked in a record-setting heat wave for the last two weeks, and cheap window AC units are flying out of the local big-box stores. Not all of these discount units underg...

Measuring length is a pain, and it's all the fault of Imperial measurements. Certain industries have standardized around either Imperial or metric, which means that working on projects across multiple...

Latvian artist [Krists Pudzens] just put on a show in Sweden and sent us the video of his amazing kinetic sculpture. (Embedded below.) We found an arty-theory writeup of another exhibition of his t…

The sensor on your digital camera picks up a lot more than just the light that’s visible to the human eye. Camera manufacturers go out of their way to reduce this to just the visible spectrum…