For people under a certain age, the 8 inch floppy disk is a historical curiosity. They might just have owned a PC that had a 5.25 inch disk drive, but the image conjured by the phrase "floppy disk" wi...

Desk toys are perfect for when you don't want to work. There's a particularly old desk toy called the Newton's cradle. If you don't know the name, you'd still recognize the toy. It is some ball bearin...

There aren't too many sports named for the sound that is produced during the game. Even though it's properly referred to as "table tennis" by serious practitioners, ping pong is probably the most obvi...

What is a 1971 Ford Torino worth? It depends, but even a 2-door in terrible condition should fetch about $7 or $8k. What is a 1971 Ford Torino covered in 3D printed crap worth? $5500. This is the firs...

Although there is a lot of discussion about health care problems in big countries like the United States, we often don’t realize that this is a “first world” problem. In many plac…

[Bithead942]’s ten-year-old niece is a huge Star Wars fan, and also a violinist. Which of course has led her to learn to play some of the music from the film franchise, and then to ask her un…

Having a restricted 4-way or 8-way digital joystick for an arcade game is fine if the joystick is built into a game cabinet that plays only one game — 4-way for Pacman and 8-way for Super Cob…

Building a software defined radio (SDR) involves many trades offs. But one of the most fundamental is should you use an FPGA or a CPU to do the processing. Of course, if you are piping data to a PC…

To a casual observer it might seem as though our community is in the news rather a lot at the moment. It's all about hacks on our TV screens in the soap opera of Washington politics, who hacked this, ...

We aren’t sure this technically qualifies as music synthesis, but what else do you call a computer playing music? In this case, the computer is a Teensy, and the music comes from a common cla…

Hackers’ perspiration may go into soldering, coding, and building. For many of us, the inspiration for these projects comes from science fiction. The books, movies, TV shows, short stories, and comi...

Hackaday is primarily a place for electronics hackers, but that’s not to say that we don’t see a fair number of projects where woodworking plays a key role. Magic mirror builds come to …

The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) report on the May 2016 fatal accident in Florida involving a Tesla Model S in Autopilot mode just came out (PDF). The verdict? "the Automa...

[Tinker_on_Steroids] made some awesome looking spinners that not only light up when spun but are a really professional looking build on their own. Before we’d watched his assembly video we we…

Video resolution is always on the rise. The days of 640x480 video have given way to 720, 1080, and even 4K resolutions. There's no end in sight. However, you need a lot of horsepower to process that m...

Superficially, it is easy to think about converting a 3D printer into a CNC machine. After all, they both do essentially the same thing. They move a tool around in three dimensions. Reducing this t…

Human input devices are a consumable on our computers today. They are so cheap and standardised, that when a mouse or a keyboard expires we don’t think twice, just throw it away and buy anoth…

If we believe science fiction — from Minority Report to Iron Man, to TekWar — the future of computer interfaces belongs to gestures. There are many ways to read gestures, although often…

MalDuino is an Arduino-powered USB device which emulates a keyboard and has keystroke injection capabilities. It’s still in crowdfunding stage, but has already been fully backed, so we antici…

The start of World War II threw quantum theory research into disarray. Many of the European physicists left Europe all together, and research moved across the ocean to the shores of the United Stat…