When living in an area that is prone to natural disasters, it’s helpful to keep something on hand for backup power. While a large number of people chose to use generators, they are often unre…

Burning Man is so many different things to so many people, that it defies neat description. For those who attend, it always seems to be a life-changing experience, for good or for ill. The story of…

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’d be familiar with Nintendo’s hugely popular Classic Mini consoles. Starting with the NES, and now followed with the SNES, the consoles…

For the last few months, I’ve been up to my neck in electronic conference badges. This year, I created the single most desirable badge at DEF CON. I also built a few Tindie badges, and right …

[Ash] built Moo-Bot, a robot cow scarecrow to enter the competition at a local scarecrow festival. We’re not sure if Moo-bot will win the competition, but it sure is a winning hack for us. [A…

I’m guessing you got quite a few e-mails today. But have you ever had a v-mail? That sounds like some new term for video e-mail, but it actually dates back to World War II. If you are in Euro…

When it comes to high-tech bionic legs for amputees, all the cool stuff is titanium, carbon fiber or other, more exotic materials. With carbon fiber “blades” all the rage, it’s ea…

Puerto Rico has a long road to recovery, and part of this is the damaged infrastructure: much of the electricity distribution network was destroyed, and will take months or years to rebuild. The Ja…

If you have ever had to assemble a batch of electronic kits, you will know the tedious nature of cutting the tape containing your components. It’s easy enough to count four or five surface-mo…

Vibration is a fact of life in almost every machining operation. Whether you’re milling, drilling, turning, or grinding, vibration can result in chatter that can ruin a part. Fighting chatter…

For those of us not old enough to remember, and also probably living in the States, there was a relatively obscure computer built by Microsoft in the early 80s that had the strong Commodore/Atari v…

When you buy an off-the-shelf automatic cat feeder, you might well expect it to do the one thing it’s supposed to do. Feed the cat. Well, at least as long as you do your part by keeping it fi…

Do jumper wires pulling out of your Uno have you pulling your hair out? Is troubleshooting loose jumpers making you lose your mind?  Are your projects backing up because of all the time you’v…

Part of the problem with getting involved in a new hobby is the cost. Whether you’re learning to surf, weld, garden, or program, often the entry cost is several hundred dollars. We’re h…

Retrocomputers are fun, but ultimately limited in capability compared to modern hardware. One popular pursuit to rectify this is the connection of early home computers to the Internet. To that end,…

When a rainforest is clearcut for agricultural use, we only see the surface problems: fewer trees, destruction of plant and animal habitats, and countless other negative effects on the environment.…

[Johan Beyers] built an elegantly simple Dog Speedometer project that uses a POV display to display a running dog’s speed without the benefit of an accelerometer. Using an Arduino (looks like…

Introducing your friendly neighborhood SpiderMAV, a micro aerial vehicle that shoots webbing to enable it to hang from ceilings and stabilize itself horizontally using low power. It’s inspire…

Modern radios are often digital affairs, in which the frequency is derived from a stable crystal oscillator and varied through a microprocessor controlled frequency synthesiser. It won’t drif…

We’re used to attaching peripherals to our computers, when we have a need for them to interact with the world around them. An Arduino Uno needs a shield to turn on the lights, for example. Ju…