We are always surprised how much useful hacking gear is in the typical craft store. You just have to think outside the box. Need a hot air gun? Think embossing tool. A soldering iron? Check the sta…

The Raspberry Pi single board computer has been an astounding success since its launch nearly five years ago, to the extent that as of last autumn it had sold ten million units with no sign of sale…

There’s a lot of reasons you might want to emulate the keyboard on your Commodore 64. The ravages of time and dust may have put the original keyboard out of order, or perhaps you need to type…

Right now, I’m at Shmoocon, and it’s living up to all expectations. That’s a tall order — last year, the breakout talk was from [Travis Goodspeed] on his efforts to reverse …

Some time back, we posted about [Gavin]'s laser-cut/3D printed Dymaxion Globe -- if you haven't read about it yet, you should check it out. [noniq] loved the idea, and like a true hacker, built and s...

If you remember old computer magazines (or browse them today), you'll see that back in the late 1970s and early 1980s, you weren't always sure what you were going to do with a computer. Games were a s...

Just before the dawn of the PC era, IBM typewriters reached their technical zenith with the Wheelwriter line. A daisy-wheel printer with interchangeable print heads, memory features, and the beginn…

The renaissance of Nixie tube popularity amid the nostalgia surrounding older tech has made them almost prohibitively expensive for individual projects. Seeing an opportunity to modernize the belov…

Over the last semester, Cornell student [Ope Oladipo] had the chance to combine two of his passions: engineering and photography. He and teammates [Sacheth Hegde] and [Jason Zhang] used their time …

It's OK, you can admit it -- from the time you first saw those huge electromagnetic cranes in scrap yards you've wanted to have one. While it may not fling around a car, parts donated from scrapped mi...

Far too much stuff is wireless these days. Home security systems have dozens of radios for door and window sensors, thermostats aren't just a wire to the furnace anymore, and we are annoyed when we ca...

Emulators are a great way to reminisce about games and software from yesteryear. [Jorj Bauer] found himself doing just that back in 2002, when they decided to boot up Three Mile Island for the Appl…

After following along with all the Magic Mirror builds, [Troy Denton] finally caved in and started building one for his girlfriend for Christmas. These popular builds are all pretty much bespoke, and ...

A garage door opener is a pretty classic hack around these parts. IR, Bluetooth, WiFi, smartphone controlled, web interfaces -- we've seen it all.  But if you want to keep track of people going in an...

Anyone can hack a radio, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy: there’s a lot of mechanics that go into formatting a signal before you can decode the ones and zeros. At his Shmoocon tal…

What's more expensive than a car and a less useful means of transportation? A 747 flight simulator built in a basement. There's a project page where a few more details are revealed. There's a 180 de...

[Chris Grill] got his hands on a pet boa constrictor, which requires a fairly strict temperature controlled environment. Its enclosure needs to have a consistent temperature throughout, or the snake c...

The Intel 8085 microprocessor was introduced 40 years back, and along with its contemporaries — the Z80 and the 6502 — is pretty much a dinosaur in terms of microprocessor history. But …

There are a host of tiny plug-top computers available for the experimenter who requires an all-in-one mains-powered computing platform without the annoyance of a full-sized PC or similar. But among th...

The forgotten child of the Raspberry Pi family finally has an update. The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 3 has been launched. The Pi 3 Compute Module was teased all the way back in July, and what we k…