Some years back, a museum asked me to help them with an exhibit a contractor had built for them. It was a wheel like the one on Wheel of Fortune, but smaller and mounted on the wall instead of the …

Commodity electronics manufacturing is a tough game. If you come out with a world-beating product, like WorldSemi did with the WS2812B addressable RGB LED “pixel”, you can be pretty sur…

There are many uses for an old 10 Mbps Ethernet hub besides using it as a speed-bump in your network. (No fun in that!) [thinkerzone] decided to gut an old EN104 Bay Networks 'Netgear Hub' to re-purpo...

It would be nice if your 3D printer could spit out PC boards. There's been lots of work done to make that happen, mostly centered on depositing conductive material, although we've been surprised no on...

We’ve featured quite a few of [mitxela]’s projects here in the past, and many of them have the propensity to be labelled “smallest”. His Morse Code USB Keyboard Mk II adds t…

From the look of it sitting on his bench, you'd never guess that [3nz01]'s power supply was actually a couple of el-cheapo modules from eBay, but now we all know the dirty truth.

Re-using or re-pur...

[Bjørn Karmann]’s Objectifier is a device that lets you control domestic objects by allowing them to respond to unique actions or behaviour, using machine learning and computer vision. The Ob…

World War I began in 1914 as a fight among several European nations, while the United States pursued a policy of non-intervention. In fact, Woodrow Wilson was reelected President largely because &#…

If you haven’t gone laptop shopping recently, you’re in for a big shock when you do. While the current generation of MacBook Pros is rightly torn to shreds for being an overpriced machi…

There are certain design guidelines for PCBs that don’t make a lot of sense, and practices that seem excessive and unnecessary. Often these are motivated by the black magic that is RF transmi…

A tool breaking in the midst of a CNC machining operation is always a disaster. Not only do you have a broken tool (no small expense), but if the program continues to run there is a good chance it&…

For just about as long as there have been electronics, there’s been a search for a way to let students and hobbyists build projects without a lot of effort. A board with Fahnestock clips was …

[Decino] made a nice LED animated blinking heart box for his girlfriend. That's a nice gesture, but more to the point here, it's a nice entrée into the world of custom hardware. The project isn't any...

I don't think we'll call virtual assistants done until we can say, "Make me a sandwich" (without adding "sudo") and have a sandwich made and delivered to us while sitting in front of our televisions. ...

With the rising popularity of electronic textbooks and laptops being used for schoolwork, the ubiquitous high school locker is becoming less and less necessary. So, students are left with a private st...

If you can't answer the riddle, don't feel bad. Metal conductors usually conduct electricity and heat. Usually, that's true, but researchers at the Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National La...

[Jared Sanson] has a solar power setup on his beach house, consisting of 6 panels and a 24V battery bank, supplied by Outback Inc. Their chargers and inverters pair over a seemingly proprietary con…

Let’s start right off with a controversial claim: Forth is the hacker’s programming language. Coding in Forth is a little bit like writing assembly language, interactively, for a strang…

When a rocket sends a capsule up with supplies for the International Space Station, they usually send a bunch of their trash back down with it, all of which burns up in the atmosphere on re-entry. But...

[Chris D] noticed that the excellent software defined radio (SDR) software gqrx will run on the Raspberry Pi now. So he married a Raspberry Pi 3, a touchscreen, an RTL-SDR dongle, and an upconverte…