It all began with a cheap Chinese rotary vane vacuum pump and a desire to learn the witchcraft of DIY vacuum tubes. It ended with a string of successes – a working vacuum chamber, light bulbs…

Walt and Molly Weber had just finished several long weeks of work. He was an FBI agent on an important case. She had a management job at Houghton Mifflin. On a sunny Friday evening in February of 1995...

Sometimes you open a freshly created Hackaday.io project and discover more than you expect. A moment of idle curiosity turns into a lengthy read involving several projects you wonder how you manage…

In a race to produce the cheapest and most efficient full-color 3D object, we think Disney’s Research facility (ETH Zurich and the Interactive Geometry Lab) may have found the key. Combining …

Back in the 1980s I was a budding electronics geek working in a TV repair shop. I spent most of my time lugging TVs to and from customers, but I did get a little bench time in. By then new TVs were…

Chris Gammell is a guy that should need no introduction around these parts. He's a co-host on The Amp Hour, and the guy behind Contextual Electronics, a fabulous introduction to electronics and one o...

While studying failure modes for quadcopters, and how to get them safely to the ground with less than a full quad of propellers, a group of researchers at the Institute for Dynamic Systems and Cont…

The magic glowing orb that tells the future has been a popular thing to make ever since we realized we had the technology to bring it out of the fortune teller's tent. We really like [jarek319]'s inte...

You can classify infrared light into three broad ranges: short wave, medium wave, and long wave. Traditionally, sensors concentrate on one or two bands, and each band has its own purpose. Short wave I...

Your home is your castle, and you are king or queen of all you survey. You’ve built your own home-automation system from scratch. Why would you possibly settle for the stock firmware in your …

Did you know the muzzle velocity of a NERF dart out of a toy gun? Neither did [MJHanagan] until he did all sorts of measurement. And now we all know: between 35 and 40 miles per hour (around 60 km/h)....

The incredible screw drive tractor is back. We've covered the previous test ride, which ended with a bearing pillow block ripping in half, but since then, again, a lot of repair work has been done. ...

Back in the day where the microprocessor was our standard building block, we tended to concentrate on computation and processing of data and not so much on I/O. Simply put there were a lot of thing…

Students of the Samara State Aerospace University are having trouble getting a signal from their satellite, SamSat-218D. They are now reaching out to the radio amateur community, inviting everybody wi...

You can find flex PCBs in just about every single piece of consumer electronics. These traces of copper laminated in sheets of Kapton are everywhere, and designing these cables, let alone manufactu…

It seems these days all the electronics projects are wireless in some form. Whether you choose WiFi, Bluetooth Classic, Bluetooth Low Energy, ZigBee, Z-Wave, Thread, NFC, RFID, Cell, IR, or even se…

Before you zip to the comments to scream “not a hack,” watch a few minutes of this teardown video. This 48 minute detailed walkthrough of a one-off art piece shows every aspect of the p…

Wafer level chips are cheap and very tiny, but as [Kevin Darrah] shows, vulnerable to bright light without the protective plastic casings standard on other chip packages.

We covered a similar phe...

Two University of Washington students exercised their creativity in a maker space and created a pair of gloves that won them a $10,000 prize. Obviously, they weren't just ordinary gloves. These gloves...

Let's talk about tilt sensors for a second. The simplest tilt sensors - the dead simplest - are a few ball bearings rolling around in a small metal can. When the can is tilted, the balls roll into a p...