Yup, we can hear a crowd full of "not-a-hack" loading their cannons as we speak, but this machine has a special place in the community. For years, the Taig milling machine has remained the go-to micro...

An exciting development over the last few years has been the arrival of extremely cheap instrumentation modules easily bought online and usually shipped from China. Some of them have extremely impr…

I received an email Wednesday morning from a company launching new features for a bot called Trim which will negotiate a lower cable bill for you. Give it your Comcast login info and it will launch a...

As microcontrollers become more and more common, we see more ways to get a lot of performance out of one chip. A great example of this was the ESP8266 which was originally seen as a cheap WiFi card bu...

If you are interested in electronics or engineering, you’ll have noticed a host of useful-sounding apps to help you in your design and build work. There are calculators, design aids, and some…

It's getting easier and easier to add machine intelligence to your hacks, even to the point where you sometimes don't have to install any special software. In this case [Dexter Industries] has added ...

This is the continuation of a series of articles demonstrating how to Create A PCB In Everything. In this series, we take a standard reference circuit and PCB layout — a simple ATtiny85 board — and…

Somewhat hidden among athletes, actors, and musicians, three giants of technology have been aptly named as 2016 Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients. Grace Hopper, Margaret Hamilton, and Richard G...

The Enlightened Raspberry Pi Contest wrapped up last week. As soon as the contest closed, Hackaday’s crack team of judges jumped on the case. Every entrant was carefully reviewed.  This was no eas...

Micro-what? Microfluidics! It's the field of dealing with tiny, tiny bits of fluids, and there are some very interesting applications in engineering, biology, and chemistry. [Martin Fischlechner], [Jo...

There’s just something about wielding a laser pointer on a dark, foggy night. Watching the beam cut through the mist is fun – makes you feel a little Jedi-esque. If you can’t get …

If you’re assembling prototypes of SMD boards on your own, placing the parts accurately can be a pain. Of course, it’d be nice to have a full pick and place machine, but those are rathe…

[J.B. Langston] has some vintage late-40's/early-50's tube radios that he wanted to repair - a Motorola All-American 5 AM radio, an Air Castle AM/FM radio and a Sears Silvertone AM/FM radio. He goes o...

Ever so slowly, the main storage in our computers has been moving from spinning disks, to SSDs over SATA, to Flash drives connected to a PCI something or other. The lastest technology is NVMe &#821…

When you own an $80,000 car, a normal person might be inclined to never take it out of the garage. But normal often isn’t what we do around here, so seeing a Tesla S driven by mind control is…

If you are interested in how a computer works at the hardware grass-roots level, past all the hardware and software abstractions intended to make them easier to use, you can sometimes find yourself…

It’s well-known that buying Flash storage devices from cheap online retailers is fraught with danger. Stories abound of multi-gigabyte drives that turn out to be multi-megabyte ones engineere…

Last spring, the world saw something amazing. It was a device that would revolutionize the planet, save the world, and turn your smartphone into a 3D printer. Kickstarters aren't known for selling th...

There are many ways to divide the hacker community into groups. Tubes vs transistors. Emacs vs VI, microcontroller vs discrete component designers. However, one of the more fundamental divisions in th...

Sometimes less is more. This is especially true when dealing with microcontrollers with limited I/O pins. Even if you have lots of I/O, sometimes you are need to pack a lot into a little space. [Hu…