Some may be surprised to hear that CB radio is alive and well in the 21st century. From disaster response to operating in areas without reliable communication infrastructure, there are plenty of re…

If you were a gamer in 1991, you were presented with what seemed like an easy enough choice: you could get a Nintendo Game Boy, the gray brick with a slightly nauseating green-tinted screen that wa…

For the last several months, we’ve been hosting the greatest hardware competition on Earth. This is the Hackaday Prize, and we’ve just wrapped up the last of our five hardware challenge…

We’re digging these daisy-chainable encoders built by [fattore.saimon]. Each module consists of a rotary encoder attached to a PCB with a PIC16F15386 on the back. As we’ve covered in the past…

[Niklas Roy] built a windmill-powered music box for his backyard, and it was so awesome all the neighbors wanted to take a picture of it. Someone even liked it so much that he stole [Niklas]’s wind…

Having a child is perhaps the greatest “hack” a human can perform. There’s no soldering iron, no Arduino (we hope), but in the end, you’ve managed to help create the most co…

Making PCBs with the toner transfer method has been around since you could buy your traces at Radio Shack. There are a million techniques for removing copper from sheets of fiberglass, from milling…

Not every project is meant to solve a new problem. Some projects can be an extension of an existing solution just to flex the geek muscles. One such project by [limbo] is the Web Clock 2.0 which is…

Plywood laser-cuts fairly well but has drawbacks when used in serious production runs, as [Marie] explains in a blog post about a quest for the ultimate laser-cutting plywood. One of the things [Ne…

Fire safety is drilled into us from a young age. And for good reason, too, because fire hazards are everywhere in the average home. Even a small fire can turn devastatingly dangerous in a matter of…

Groucho Marx famously said, “Time flies like an arrow, but fruit flies like a banana.” As insulting as it is, researchers often use fruit flies for research because they have similar be…

A few weeks ago, the popcorn overflowed because of an ambiguous tweet from Adafruit. Did Adafruit just buy Radio Shack? While everyone else was foaming at the mouth, we called it unlikely. The smar…

[Max Breedon] found an old Apple IIe clone twenty years ago. He recently dug this Epson AP-200 out of the salvage heap and quickly discovered that the keyboard decoder chip was fried. The old chip …

Sometimes, you just can’t find something you want, and that’s when you break out the tools and get dirty with a bit of DIY. Reddit user [JaredBanyard] wanted a nice beam light for the d…

When it comes to lithium batteries, you basically have two types. LiPoly batteries usually come in pouches wrapped in heat shrink, whereas lithium ion cells are best represented by the ubiquitous c…

There are quick hacks, there are weekend projects and then there are years long journeys towards completion.  [Boris Vitazek]’s grafofon falls into the latter category. His creation can best …

For the last couple years, a MakerBot press release has generally signaled that more pink slips were going to be heading out to the already shell-shocked employees at their NYC factory. But just la…

What if we told you that you are likely to have more computers than you think? And we are not talking about things that are computers while not looking like one, like most modern cars or certain li…

It’s been a few years since the introduction of the first Open Source toolchain for FPGAs. You would think a free and Open way to program FPGAs would be a boon for hardware development, but s…

Almost exactly one year ago, [Kreosan] published a video detailing an EM “weapon” built out of three magnetrons, some batteries, and a taser. It all seemed a bit too good to be true, so…