On occasion I have encountered portable soldering irons and my impressions of them have ranged from nearly usable to total rubbish. While using a popular butane powered model and pondering if it was r...

[whitequark] has been experimenting with a blowtorch for SMD reflow. Having just moved 8,000 km [whitequark] was stuck without any of his usual reflow tools. He did however have a blowtorch handy, and...

Oh sure, the thought of owning a happy whirring drill press of your very own is exciting, but have you really thought about it? It's a big responsibility to welcome any tool into the home, even seemin...

Int 1777, Georg Lichtenberg found that discharging high voltage on an insulating surface covered with a powder, a fractal-like image appears, sometimes known as a lightning tree. Incidentally, this…

We’re still not sure exactly how [connornishijima]’s motion detector works, though many readers offered plausible explanations in the comments the last time we covered it. It works well…

This is just good, clean fun. Well, maybe not clean since this souped-up racing Roomba appears to move too fast to actually clean anything anymore. But did they ever really clean very well in the f…

[Dave Hrynkiw] wrote up some practical and useful detail around embedding electronics into clothing. It centers around his daughter’s “Starry Night” high school graduation dress, …

However you sell your kits online, you’ll have to find a means of shipping them to the customer. For an online operation this unseen part of the offering is more important than any other when…

What do you get when you combine an arc cigarette lighter and some scrap glass and metal? [NightHawkInLight] created a simple plasma cutter project along with some hot glue and a few simple tools. …

One problem with engineering education today is a lack of experimental teaching. Oh sure you may have a project or two, but it’s not the focus of the program because it’s hard to standa…

On August 25th, 1966, an Apollo Command Module was launched aboard a Saturn IB rocket in mission AS-202. This mission was intended to immediately precede the ill-fated Apollo 1 mission, the AS-202 …

Coilguns used to be the weapons of science fiction. Nowadays, whenever we see someone build one in their workspace it always serves as an inspiring reminder that the future is now. YouTuber [Cody'sLab...

If you enjoy building radio projects you may have noticed something slightly worrying over the last few years in your component supply. Variable capacitors are no longer as plentiful as they used t…

Some of us need a bit of help to get up in the mornings. This can come in the form of a sunrise lamp, which simulates the light of the sunrise to fool our poor sleep-deprived brains into waking up …

[Jack Qiao] wanted an autonomous robot that could be handy around an ever-changing shop. He didn’t want a robot he’d have to baby sit. If he said, ‘bring me the 100 ohm resistors&…

Lithium-Ion batteries are finicky little beasts. They can’t be overcharged, overdischarged, overheated, or even looked at funny without bursting into flames. Inside any laptop battery pack, a…

We put a lot of trust into some amazingly cheap components, sometimes that trust is very undeserved. Long gone are the days when every electronic component was a beautifully constructed precision lab ...

A while back, [cnlohr] needed a USB keyboard and mouse. His box ‘o junk didn’t hold this particular treasure, and instead of hopping on Amazon like a normal geek or venturing into the o…

Drones come in all shapes and size, and [Kedar Nimbalkar] was wondering if the guts of a tiny Cheerson CX-10 nano-drone could take off with a larger body, leading to an interesting brain transplant…

Time and tide wait for no man. Chaucer may be right, but a man (or woman) wearing a watch can get ahead of time before it sneaks up on them. People aren't ever satisfied with just the time though. T...