Since the Beginning of Time* humans have been irresistibly attracted to the blinking of an LED. At first there was one LED and it was good, but eventually there were many working in unison and the mat...

Wanting to experiment with using optical mouse sensors but a bit frustrated with the lack of options, [Tom Wiggins] rolled his own breakout board for the ADNS 3050 optical mouse sensor and in the p…

Many of us have held a circuit board up to a strong light to get a sense for how many layers of circuitry it might contain. [alongruss] did this as well, but, unlike us, he saw art. We’ve cov…

How often do you see problems that need fixing? How often do you design your own solutions to them — even if they won’t be implemented at scale? Seeing that many of the municipal parkin…

For the past year, I've been organizing a very special project over on hackaday.io. It's the Travelling Hacker Box, a box full of random electronics junk, sibling to the The Great Internet Migratory B...

A bubbling Wurlitzer juke would be a prized addition to the classic picture of a man cave -- brass-railed bar, kegerator, pool table, tin signs and neon on the walls. But it would take a particularly...

We’ve seen networks built over some interesting mediums, but QR codes has to be a new one. [Eric Seifert] decided to try to use QR codes to make an IP connection. He used these visual codes t…

I have a confession to make. I enjoy the challenge of squeezing software into a tiny space or trying to cut a few more cycles out of a loop. It is like an intricate puzzle. Today, of course, there …

[austiwawa] was playing around with one of those simple linear motors people build as friendly little science experiments. There's an AA battery in the middle of a set of magnets. When you put it insi...

We’ve all had that treasured pair of headphones fail us. One moment we’re jamming out to our favorite song, then, betrayal. The right ear goes out. No wait. It’s back. No, damn, i…

Open Source software has been around for decades. Over these decades, Open Source software has been the driving force behind most of the Internet, and all of the top-500 supercomputers. The product…

DC to DC conversion has come a long way. What was once took an electromechanical vibrator and transformer has been reduced to a PC board the size of a largish postage stamp that can be had for a coup...

There are times when you set out to do one thing, and though you do not achieve your aim you succeed in making something else that's just a bit special. [TheKhakinator] sent us something he described...

[Gerald Musy] wanted to investigate the source of electromagnetic interference (EMI) in his switching power supply design. Stymied by the high cost of EMI probes, he decided to build his own. Lucky…

Listen to the amateur radio bands long enough, and you’ll likely come to the conclusion that hams never stop talking. Of course it only seems that way, and the duty cycle for a transmitter op…

It's no secret that we love bizarre robot locomotion, so we are naturally suckers for BALLU (YouTube link, also embedded below) the Bouyancy-Assisted Lightweight Legged Unit. The project started with ...

The Amazon Echo and its diminutive Dot cousin have the handy feature of being able to control some home automation devices. If you own the right manufacturer’s hardware you can bend your home…

Seems like all the buzz about autonomous vehicles these days centers around self-driving cars. Hands-free transportation certainly has its appeal - being able to whistle up a ride with a smartphone ap...

If Babbage had started the computer revolution early, we might have seen a mouse like the one [Peter Balch] created. He started with the guts from a USB wheeled mouse and some gears from an old clo…

Those of you with long memories and a compulsive TV viewing habit might remember [Max Headroom], a quirky piece of TV ephemera from the late 1980s and early 1990s. [Max] was a supposedly computer g…