Many of you will probably at some point have looked at a satellite dish antenna and idly wondered whether it would collect useful amounts of heat if you silvered it and pointed it at the sun. Perhaps...

An essential skill for a maker is the ability to improvise or re-purpose existing materials into new parts. Sometimes, one needn't make many modifications to create something new, as is the case with ...

Home-made transportation is a thriving area for makers to flex their skills. Looking to shorten their university commute, [doublecloverleaf] modded his penny board by adding a motor that can have him ...

If you’re like us, you spend most of your time in front of a computer keyboard, wondering where your life went wrong. [AnonymouSmst] has a slightly more positive outlook on life, which led th…

We all know that it's not the volts that kill you, it's the amps. But exactly how many electrons per second are there in an amp? It turns out that nobody really knows. But according to a press release...

We'll just come out and say it, [reboots] has friends with nice garbage. Sure, some of us have friends who are desperately trying to, "gift," us a CRT monitor, hope dropping like a rock into their st...

A few months ago, a very inexpensive 3D printer appeared on Monoprice. My curiosity for this printer was worth more than $200, so I picked one of these machines up. The Monoprice MP Select Mini is …

We sometimes look back fondly on the old days where you could–it seems–pretty easily invent or discover something new. It probably didn’t seem so easy then, but there was a time w…

A lot of us spend a lot of time switching between Windows and Linux. Now that platforms like the Raspberry Pi are popular, that number is probably increasing every day. While I run Linux on nearly …

The Hackaday SuperConference is the greatest gathering of hardware hackers on the planet. Last year at the SuperCon, we saw talks on building systems from scratch, creating new and interesting uses fo...

A must-have peripheral for games consoles of the 1980s and 1990s was the light gun. A lens and photo cell mounted in a gun-like plastic case, the console could calculate where on the screen it was …

Warranty? We don't need no stinking warranty! We're hackers, and if you have access to a multi-million dollar CNC machine and 3D CAM software, you mill your own headphone replacement parts rather tha...

It wasn’t long ago that faced with a controller project, you might shop for something with just the right features and try to minimize the cost. These days, if you are just doing a one-off, i…

In Star Trek, there is a race of cyborgs with a drive to slowly assimilate all sentient life. Their aesthetic is not far off from the one [Ronald]'s ever expanding coffee machine is taking on. One h...

This scene replays quite often in our house: my wife has misplaced her cell phone so she asks me to call her. But where did I leave my cell phone? And the race is on! Who will find their phone first t...

We don't know who the [amgworkshop] wanted to listen in on, but they apparently went searching for a small FM wireless transmitter. There's plenty of circuits around, but they wanted something smaller...

One of my favorite types of science fiction character is found in the books of Ben Bova; a business mogul who through brilliance, hard work, and the force of personality drives mankind to a whole new...

We are all (hopefully) aware that we can be watched while we're online. Our clicks are all trackable to some extent, whether it's our country's government or an advertiser. What isn't as obvious, thou...

Accountants and MBAs use spreadsheets to play “what if” scenarios with business and financial data. Can you do the same thing with electronic circuits? The answer–perhaps not surp…

[Seb Lee-Delisle]’s NES lightgun gave us pause as the effect is so cool we couldn’t quite figure out how he was doing it at first. When he pulls the trigger there erupts the beam of lig…