See those blue and green dots in the GIF? Those aren’t pixels on an LCD display. Those are actual drops of liquid moving across a special PCB. The fact that the droplets are being manipulated…

Every day, we see people building things. Sometimes, useful things. Very rarely, this thing becomes a product, but even then we don’t hear much about the ins and outs of manufacturing a bunch…

The Internet of Things is fun to play with; there’s all manner of devices to automate and control remotely. It can be sketchy, though — make a mistake when coding your automatic plant w…

Our society needs energy, and lots of it. If you're reading this then the odds are astronomically good that you're on a computer somewhere using energy, with the power cord plugged into the mysterious...

[Chris Mitchell] was going to make his own plotter for doing cursive writing for cards but realized he might be able to use his 3D printer to do the writing instead. But then he couldn’t find…

Accurate timing is one of the most basic requirements for so much of the technology we take for granted, yet how many of us pause to consider the component that enables us to have it? The quartz cr…

Finally, there’s a way to get rid of those applicator-less tampons that literally no one uses while also destroying a bunch of Axe body spray. Just use the Axe as the propellant in a 3D-print…

1980s American teenagers, if they were lucky enough to attend a school with a computer lab, would have sat down in front of Apple IIs or maybe Commodore VIC20s. Similarly, their British cousins had…

Single tube Nixie clocks? Been there, seen that. A single tube Nixie clock with sculptural wiring that exposes dangerous voltages? Now that's something you don't see every day.

[Andrew Moser]'s clo...

What to call this LED strip music visualizer is a puzzler. It lights up and pulsates in time with music similar to the light organs of 1970s psychedelia fame, but it’s more than that. Is it m…

In most mechanical systems, metal gears that bend are a bad thing. But not so for strain wave gearing, which is designed to take advantage of a metal gear flexing to achieve an action much like pla…

January, for many of us in the Northern Hemisphere, can be a depressing month. It's cold or wet depending where you live, the days are still a bit short, and the summer still seems an awfully long way...

Every time we say “We’ve seen it all”, along comes a project that knocks us off. 60 year old [Mark Nesselhaus] likes to learn new things and he’s never worked with hardware …

There was a time when Radio Shack offered an incredible variety of supplies for the electronics hobbyist. In the back of each store, past the displays of Realistic 8-track players, Minimus-7 speake…

There are several open source phones out there these days, but all of them have a downside. Hard to obtain parts, hard to solder, or difficult programming systems abound. [Arsenijs] is looking to c…

KiCad is the premiere open source electronics design automation suite. It's used by professionals and amateurs alike to design circuits and layout out printed circuit boards. In recent years we've see...

Things seem to go in cycles. Writing a document using old-fashioned tools like TROFF or LaTeX is like knowing a secret code. Visual editors quickly took over, although even WordStar had some &#8220…

Scenario: your little three-hour boat tour runs into a storm, and you’re shipwrecked on a tropic island paradise. You’re pretty sure your new home was once a nuclear test site, but you …

When we see a new build by [Gord] from Gord’s Garage, we never know what to expect. He seems to be pretty skilled at whatever he puts his hand to, with a great design sense and impeccable cra…

It is funny how almost everything has its own set of problems. Rich people complain about taxes. Famous people complain about their lack of privacy. It probably won't happen us, but some Kickstarter c...