In my misspent youth I found myself doing clinical rotations at a local hospital. My fellow students and I were the lowest of the low on the hospital pecking order, being the ones doing the bulk of th...

Cyber security is on everyone's minds these days. Embedded devices like cameras have been used by bad guys to launch attacks on the Internet. People worry about data leaking from voice command devices...

A few months ago, someone clued us in on a neat little programmable power supply from the usual Chinese retailers. The DPS5005 is a programmable power supply that takes power from a big AC to DC wa…

One of the most challenging projects you could ever do with an 8-bit microcontroller is generating VGA signals. Sending pixels to a screen requires a lot of bandwidth, and despite thousands of hack…

The last year has been great for Nvidia hardware. Nvidia released a graphics card using the Pascal architecture, 1080s are heating up server rooms the world over, and now Nvidia is making yet another...

Putting a complete WiFi subsystems on a single-board computer is no mean feat, and on as compact a board as the Zero W, it’s quite an achievement. The antenna is the tricky part, since there&…

The latest from WikiLeaks is the largest collection of documents ever released from the CIA. The release, called ‘Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed’, is the CIA’s hacking arsena…

If your favourite programming language is solder, they you’ve surely worked your way through a bunch of irons and controllers over your hacker existence. It’s also likely you couldn&#82…

It is so often the case with a particular technological advance, that it will be invented almost simultaneously by more than one engineer or scientist. People seem to like a convenient tale of a si…

To a radio amateur who received their licence decades ago there is a slightly surreal nature to today’s handheld radios. A handheld radio should cost a few hundred dollars, or such was the si…

Join [Sylvia Wu], a Senior Manufacturing Engineer at Fictiv, for this week's Hack Chat. [Sylvia's] work at Fictiv gives her a unique viewpoint for modern manufacturing. The company connects engineers...

There comes a time in every electronic designer’s life when, whether they know it or not, they need an analog filter in their design. If you’re coming from a digital background, where e…

If you've ever spent any time around a lab, you've doubtless seen one of those awesome combination magnetic stirrer and heater plates that scientists use to get liquids mixed and up to temperature. If...

For all its simplicity, the arcade classic Asteroids was engaging in the extreme, with the ping of the laser, the rumble of the rocket, the crash of crumbling space rocks, and that crazy warble whe…

The availability of cheap WiFi boards like the ESP8266 and others means you can inexpensively put projects on the network. But there is still the problem of how to connect these devices to other pl…

Stephen Hawking, although unable to speak himself, is immediately recognizable by his voice which is provided through a computer and a voice emulator. What may come as a surprise to some is that this ...

[Jochen Alt] is on a roll. We just covered his ball-balancing robot, Paul, only to find his phenomenal six-DOF robot arm in full retro style. Its name is “Walter” and it’s done up…

There was a time when the desktop peripherals such as your keyboard and mouse were expensive items that you hung on to and cared for. But several decades of PC commoditization and ever-cheaper manu…

These magical creatures crop up out of nowhere and fry your electronics or annoy your ear holes. Understanding them will doubtless save you money and hassle. The ground loop in a nutshell is what h…

If you live in a city, you’re constantly swimming in a thick soup of radio-frequency energy. FM radio stations put out hundreds of kilowatts each into the air. Students at the University of W…