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…

I heard a "Year in Review" program the other day on NPR with a BBC World Service panel discussion of what's ahead for 2017. One prediction was that UAV delivery of packages would be commonplace this ...

We have all been beneficiaries of the boom in availability of cheap imported electronics over the last decade. It is difficult to convey to someone under a certain age the step change in availability ...

A few days ago we reported on a new product for owners of the Raspberry Pi Zero, a set of solderless header pins that had a novel installation method involving a hammer. We were skeptical that they…

The 90s were a wonderful time for portable communications devices. Cell phones had mass, real buttons, and thick batteries – everything you want in next year’s flagship phone. Unfortuna…

There are few projects on how to make your own cordless drill, but what sets [Johnnyq90’s] amazing project apart is the fact that his power plant is a nitro engine. Not an easy task of course…

Before Bluetooth, before the Internet of Things, and before network-connected everything, infrared was king. In the 90s, personal organizers, keyboards, Furbys, and critical infrastructure was buil…

The concept behind DIY electronic drum kits is fairly simple — small piezoelectric elements are used to generate a voltage when the drumpads are struck. That’s easy enough, but the mech…