A common complaint in the comments of many a Hackaday project is: Why did they use a microcontroller? It’s easy to Monday morning quarterback someone else’s design, but it’s rare …

3 hackers, 16 LEDs, 15 years of development, one goal: A persistence of vision display stick that fits into your pocket. That's the magicShifter 3000. When waved, the little, 10 cm (4 inches) long ha...

Launching a high altitude balloon requires a wide breadth of knowledge. To do it right, you obviously need to know electronics and programming to get temperature, pressure, and GPS data. You’…

Kerbal Space Program will have you hurling little green men into the wastes of outer space, landing expended boosters back on the launchpad, and using resources on the fourth planet from the Sun to…

To get a SCUBA certification, a prospective diver will need to find a dive shop and take a class. Afterwards, some expensive rental equipment is in order. That is, unless you’re [biketool] wh…

When the story of an invention is repeated as Received Opinion for the younger generation it is so often presented as a single one-off event, with a named inventor. Before the event there was no in…

Is your business card flashy? Is it useful in a pinch? Do they cost $32 each and come with an ePaper display? No? Well, then feast your eyes on this over-the-top business card with an ePaper displa…

You would think that there’s nothing to know about RGB LEDs: just buy a (strip of) WS2812s with integrated 24-bit RGB drivers and start shuffling in your data. If you just want to make some s…

DIY medical science is fun stuff. One can ferret out many of the electrical signals that make the body run with surprisingly accessible components and simple builds. While the medical community pre…

The combination of time-lapse photography and slow camera panning can be quite hypnotic - think of those cool sunset to nightfall shots where the camera slowly pans across a cityscape with car lights ...

Cutting out precise shapes requires a steady hand, a laser cutter, or a CNC mill, right? Nope! All you need is PCB design software and a fabrication facility that’ll do the milling for you. T…

The HTC Vive is a virtual reality system designed to work with Steam VR. The system seeks to go beyond just a headset in order to make an entire room a virtual reality environment by using two base…

We are going to great lengths to turn a quick idea into an electronic prototype, be it PCB milling, home etching or manufacturing services that ship PCBs around the world. Unwilling to accept the...

[Andrew Peterson] was looking for a way to indulge in his retro gaming passions in a more contemporary manner. His 3D NES emulator “N3S” for Windows brings Nintendo classics to the Holo…

Amateur radio has a couple of sweet allocations in the VHF bands, but because the signals don’t reflect off the ionosphere like shortwave signals, the use is limited basically to line-of-sigh…

Imagine this: you come home after a day at work. As you open the door, your nose is the first alert that something is very, very wrong. Instead of the usual house smell, your nose is assaulted with…

There’s no shortage of clock projects, but [niq_ro] has his own take using a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD), and Arduino, and a pair of MAX6921 ICs. Those chips are made to drive a VFD, and the us...

In our final installment of Tools of the Trade (with respect to circuit board assembly), we’ll look at how the circuit board is tested and programmed. At this point in the process, the board …

[David Cook]’s summary below the write-up of his experiences working with a bismuth ingot is succinct. “I wasted a weekend learning why elemental bismuth is not commonly used for metal …

Do you always look at it encoded? – Well you have to. The image translators work for the construct program. Word clocks are supposed to de-encode time into a more readable format. Luckily [Xo…