Like so many other home appliances, it’s likely that even your air conditioner has a serial interface buried inside it. If you’re wondering why, it’s because virtually every micro…

Sometimes we run into real problems restoring old machines. [RedruM69] recently ran into a system with a dead Real Time Clock (RTC) module. These modules were used on computers and all sorts of oth…

If you are from the United States and of a certain age, it is very likely you owned some form of Commodore computer. Outside the US, that same demographic was likely to own an Amstrad. The Z80-base…

Radio amateurs are inventive people, and though not all of them choose to follow it there is a healthy culture of buildng radio equipment among them. In particular the field of antennas is where yo…

While there are apps that will display plane locations, [squix78] wanted to build a dedicated device for plane spotting. The ESP8266 PlaneSpotter Color is a standalone device that displays a live m…

It's been said that necessity is the mother of all invention. This was probably the fundamental principle behind the show "Inspector Gadget", a story about a police agent who has literally any technol...

Around here we love technology for its own sake. But we have to admit, most people are interested in applications–what can the technology do? Those people often have the best projects. After …

Last year at CES, UniZ introduced the Slash, a desktop resin printer. It’s fast, it’s capable, and it’s shipping now, but there was something else in the UniZ booth that had a muc…

One of the problems that has accompanied the advent of ever more complex home entertainment systems is the complexity of the burgeoning stack of remote controls that manifest themselves alongside your...

At CES last year, Monoprice introduced a $200 3D printer. Initial expectations of this printer were middling. My curiosity got the best of me, and last summer I picked up one of these printers for a r...

Some of the most enjoyable projects tend to have the terrible drawback of also having the most potential to cause bodily harm, like getting zapped by the capacitor when digging into a disposable ca…

[Ken Shirriff] is the gift that keeps on giving this new year. His latest is a reverse engineering of the 74181 Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU). The great news is that the die image and complexity are …

Over the last year, it seems the next big thing in 3D printing is dual and multi-extrusion. This gets you multi-colored objects, but if you have the right filament, it also allows you to print objects...

Every day it seems there is a new Alexa story in the news, as for the moment the Amazon voice assistant is in the ascendant over its rivals from Google, Apple, and Microsoft. Today's slice of Alexa we...

We see a lot of traffic on the tips line with projects that cover old ground but do so in an instructive way, giving us insight into the basics of electronics. Sure, commercial versions of this IR-…

About a year ago, Autodesk showed off one of the most innovative filament printers in recent memory. Project Escher is your basic Cartesian filament printer, but with a twist: it has five heads. Thes...

We will all at some point have forgotten to water a plant. If we're lucky then the limp vegetation we return to will magically revive when we rush to water it, if not then we have the shame of an empt...

Lulzbot is the poster child of the RepRap project. Everything they do is big-O Open. At CES, Lulzbot launched the MOARstruder, a tool head with a 1.2mm nozzle diameter. That pushes a lot of plastic ou...

Lots of people set out to build appliance monitors, whether it be for the fridge, the garage door, or the washing machine. Often, it's nicer not to cut into an appliance to make direct electrical con...

Last October, Next Thing Co., makers of the popular C.H.I.P. platform unleashed the C.H.I.P. Pro, a very capable Linux system on a tiny board. The goal of the C.H.I.P. Pro is to be the brains of a pro...