There is a rich history surrounding the improvisation of electronic components. From cats-whisker foxhole radio detectors using razor blades through radio amateurs trying antique quartz lenses as c…

Raspberry Pi clusters are a dime a dozen these days. Well, maybe more like £250 for a five-Pi cluster. Anyway, this project is a bit different. It’s exquisitely documented. [Nick Smith] built…

Having hacked away with high voltage for many years I’ve ended up using a large number of very different high voltage sources. I say sources and not power supplies because I’ve even pow…

Wow how the time flies. It seems like only couple of weeks ago we were unveiling the film we shot at Salton Sea to launch this, our third global hacking initiative called The Hackaday Prize. What ...

[Thomas] loves his Logitech MX Master mouse, which has a pretty elaborate scroll-wheel mechanism. Perhaps too elaborate; it broke on him after a week of use, just when he was getting used to the fe…

If you’ve been to an apartment complex with a locked front door, you’ve seen the buzzer systems. You press the corresponding button for the apartment you want and can talk to the reside…

Last weekend was Hamvention, the place you want to be on the third weekend in May. It is the world’s largest gathering of amateur radio enthusiasts, and an exceedingly large flea market conta…

Crystal radios are old news, but great fun. What would happen if a PhD designed a crystal set? By PhD we mean Pizza Hut Deliveryperson and [John Greenlee] (who may not actually be a PhD of either k…

Before the Commodore 64, the IBM PC, and even the Apple I, most computers took input data from a type of non-magnetic storage medium that is rarely used today: the punched card. These pieces of car…

In this day and age we're consistently surrounded with portable electronic devices. In order for them to be called "portable", they must run on batteries. Most, if not all, use rechargeable batteries....

Hands can grab things, build things, communicate, and we control them intuitively with nothing more than a thought. To those who miss a hand, a prosthesis can be a life-changing tool for carrying o…

If you had told 12-year-old me that one day I would be able to listen to pretty much any song I wanted to on demand and also pull up the lyrics as fast as I could type the artist's name and part of ...

Sometimes you start building, and the project evolves. Layers upon layers of functionality accrue, accrete, and otherwise just pile up. Or at least we're guessing that's what happened with [Varun Kuma...

Rudis - A small wooden sword given to a Gladiator as proof of his achieved freedom. It signifies his ascent from being a slave to becoming a free man.
One thing is certain - anything that runs on el...

Alchemists tried in vain to transmute lead into gold. What if you could turn waste products into energy? That's what [chemicum] did in a recent video--he and some friends built microbial fuel cells t...

So you’ve built a central server and filled your house with WiFi-connected nodes all speaking to each other using the MQTT protocol. In short, you’ve got the machine-to-machine side of …

I caught up with Federico Musto, President and CEO of Arduino SRL, at the 2016 Bay Area Maker Faire. Their company is showing off several new boards being prepared for release as early as next month...

Handheld measuring devices make great DIY projects. One can learn a lot about a sensor or sensor technology by just strapping it onto a spare development board together with an LCD for displaying the ...

A lot of old science fiction movies show people wearing the same--or nearly the same--clothes. We're left guessing if this is because there is a single centralized plant mass-producing skin-tight jump...

It is easy to imagine how early man started using rocks and then eventually developed better and better tools until they created the hammer. Some simple tools took a little longer to invent. The spiri...