Before the Arduino took over the hobby market (well, at least the 8-bit segment of it), most hackers used PIC processors. They were cheap, easy to program, had a good toolchain, and were at the hea…

RADIO WONDERLAND is a one-man band with many famous unintentional collaborators. [Joshua Fried]'s shows start off with him walking in carrying a boombox playing FM radio. He plugs it into his sound ri...

Very few residential architectural elements lend themselves to automation, with doors and windows being particularly thorny problems. You can buy powered doors and windows, true, but you'll pay a pret...

Nintendo look as though they may have something of a hit on their hands with their latest console offering. It’s not the next in the line of high-end consoles with immersive VR or silicon tha…

The Travelling Hackerbox is going International. I wrote a post on this earlier in the week, and I'm still looking for recipients for the box that are not in the United States. The sign-up form is ri...

For many parts of the world, the great raking has begun as deciduous trees in temperate zones drop their leaves. Of course not everyone can abide the simple yet laborious process of manual raking and ...

If you live in a city with poor air quality you may be aware that particulates are one of the chief contributors to the problem. Tiny particles of soot from combustion, less than 10μm across, hence c...

If generations of Hollywood heist films have taught us anything, it’s that knocking off a bank vault is pretty easy. It usually starts with a guy and a stethoscope, but that never works, so t…

The Electronica trade show in Munich is so big that it only takes place once every two years. Every manufacturer, distributor, and maker of anything electronic is there. To get a feel for the scale of...

A while back I tried to make a case for good safety disciple as a habit that, when proactively pursued, can actually increase the quality of your work as a side effect. In those comments and in oth…

The moon's orbit is not circular. According to Wikipedia, the moon is closest at around 357,000 kilometers and farthest at 406,000: a difference of something like 13%. That's a freakishly egg-shaped o...

I have a good background working with high voltage, which for me means over 10,000 volts, but I have many gaps when it comes to the lower voltage realm in which RC control boards and H-bridges live. W...

It seems Power Wheels are like LEGO -- they're handed down from generation to generation.  [Nicolas] received his brand-new Peg-Perego Montana Power Wheels in 1997 as a Christmas present. After sitti...

Got a bunch of questionable electrolytic caps sitting in your junk bin? Looking to recap a vintage radio chassis? Then you might need to measure the equivalent series resistance of the capacitors, in ...

A lot of hardware and software hackers aren't all that keen on documentation. The problem is, if you don't document, it is harder for people to replicate or build on your work. If you aren't happy wri...

Drone technology is seeing useful application in a new field seemingly every day -- so it was only a matter of time before it saw use in archaeology. And so, a team of researches in Australia are comb...

It’s generally a bad idea to mix high voltage electricity and water, but interesting things happen if you do. This video from [RWGResearch] shows one of them: water bridging. If you have two …

While some people may enjoy the occasional whiff of noxious smells -- gasoline, axe body spray, etc -- prolonged exposure to fumes is not good for your health. This goes for soldering too, isn't it ab...

There are few things to which we pay as much attention as the passage of time. We don’t want to be late for work, or a date. Even more importantly, we don’t want to age and die. Good ti…

With ubiquitous desktop computing now several decades old, anyone creating an operating system distribution now faces a backwards compatibility problem. Each upgrade brings its own set of new featu…