The 2016 Hackaday SuperConference is on. If you haven’t had time to submit your proposal for a talk or workshop at the world’s greatest conference for hardware, now is the time to do it…

The history of the diode is a fun one as it’s rife with accidental discoveries, sometimes having to wait decades for a use for what was found. Two examples of that are our first two topics: t…

We've all been there - hiking in the woods with a dead phone battery. No GPS, no way to Tweet that selfie from some hill with a great vista. It's a disaster! But not if you have access to a little tra...

Magnetic gears are surprisingly unknown and used only in a few niche applications. Yet, their popularity is on the rise, and they are one of the slickest solutions for transmitting mechanical energ…

In the surest sign that hardware hacking is the new hotness, Motorola and Farnell/Element 14 have developed an add-on board and SDK that will let you connect virtually anything to your mobile phone…

A personal bartender is hard to come by these days. What has the world come to when a maker has to build their own? [Pierre Charlier] can lend you a helping hand vis-à-vis with HardWino, an open-sou...

Once tried, even grown-ups just can't let go of that hilariously funny Chewbacca mask. Also, the speaking toy literally cries out to be hacked. Weary of the whining Wookie, [John Park] set out to bri...

Most circuit boards any maker could need for their projects can be acquired online at modest cost, but what if you need something specific? [Giorgos Lazaridis] of pcbheaven.com has designed his own et...

A decade and a half ago, a developer testified that he was contracted to make code that would swing an election using electronic voting machines. In this year's presidential primaries, exit polling si...

[Michalis Mavros] likes building things from steel. Guns are from steel. He and his friends also like action movies and beer. To address everybody’s needs [MakeItExtreme] style, he built a gi…

[Howard Matthews] mills his own PCBs, and man, does he hate drilling through-holes. Manually changing the bits between engraving and drilling after isolation routing? What is this? The stone age? […

Even in this age of wearable technology, the actual fabric in our t-shirts and clothes may still be the most high-tech product we wear. From the genetically engineered cotton seed, though an autono…

MIT Media Lab and Microsoft have teamed up to take wearable devices one step further — they’ve glued the devices directly to the user’s skin. DuoSkin is a temporary tattoo created…

It is hard to remember, but there was a time when you couldn't hook much to a telephone line except a telephone. Although landlines are slowly falling out of favor, you can still get corded and wirele...

Super Smash Bros. Melee is a multiplayer fighting game released for the Nintendo GameCube in 2001. For the last decade and a half, it has become one of the premier fighting game eSports, and it is th...

For a brief period in the 1940’s it might have been possible for a young enamored soul to hand his hopeful a romantic mix-spool of wire. This was right before the magnetic tape recorder and i…

Many of the Fail Of The Week stories we feature here are pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. At worse, gears are ground, bits are broken, or the Magic Blue Smoke is released. This attempt t…

The goal is simple: test a bunch of arcade buttons from different manufacturers to get the one with the best function and feel. The resulting build is anything but simple: this wonderfully over-design...

A plague of locusts descends on your garden, and suddenly you realize grasshoppers are very hard to catch. Grasshoppers are nature's perfect collision avoidance system, and this is due to a unique vi...

There are many ways to take an electrical audio signal and turn it into something you can hear. Moving coil speakers, plasma domes, electrostatic speakers, piezo horns, the list goes on. Last week …