A lot of the DIY laser engravers and cutters we cover here on Hackaday are made with laser diodes salvaged from Blu-ray drives and projectors, which are visible lasers in the 400 – 450nm rang…

When the average person looks at a bed, they think about sleeping. Because that’s what beds are for. You cover them with soft, warm cloths and fluffy pillows and you sleep on them. [Peter] is…

For many of us. the holiday season is coming up and that means hosting parties and mixing drinks, which can get tiresome. [GreatScott] has come up with a solution, what he calls a crude cocktail mi…

Invariably when we write about living on Mars, some ask why not go to the Moon instead? It’s much closer and has a generous selection of minerals. But its lack of an atmosphere adds to or exa…

If there is one constant in the world of making things at the bench, it is that there is never enough light. With halogen lamps, LEDs, fluorescent tubes, and more, there will still be moments when …

On an October night in 1847, a telescope on the roof of the Pacific National Bank building on Nantucket Island was trained onto the deep black sky. At the eyepiece was an accomplished amateur astro…

Some things don’t sound like they should go together, but they do. Peanut butter and chocolate. Twinkies and deep frying. Bacon and maple syrup. Sometimes mixing things up can produce great r…

Remember the days when the television was the most important appliance in the house? On at dawn for the morning news and weather, and off when Johnny Carson said goodnight, it was the indispensable…

If you only have a car and you need to unsolder some tricky surface mount components: what would you do? If you’re Kasyan TV, you’d remove your car’s halogen lights and get to town. That’s right: c…

Here on Hackaday, we like keyboard hacks. Given how much time we all spend pounding away on them, they’re natural hacks to come up with. If you’re pulling the circuitry from an existing…

In theory, there is no reason you can’t automate things all over your house. However — unless you live alone — you need to consider that most people won’t accept your kludgy…

Your job is to create a random number generator. Your device starts with a speaker and a membrane. On this membrane will sit a handful of small, marble-size copper balls. An audio source feeds the …

Believe it or not, there are quite a few people out there who have purchased gun safes that can be remotely unlocked by Bluetooth. Now we can understand why somebody might think this was a good ide…

Years ago, while the GPLv3 was still being drafted, I got a chance to attend a presentation by Richard Stallman. He did his whole routine as St IGNUcius, and then at the end said he would be answer…

The 555 timer is one of that special club of integrated circuits that has achieved silicon immortality. Despite its advanced age and having had its functionality replicated and superceded in almost…

Previously, we discussed how to apply the most basic hypothesis test: the z-test. It requires a relatively large sample size, and might be appreciated less by hackers searching for truth on a tight…

The future of humans is on Mars. Between SpaceX, Boeing, NASA, and every other national space program, we’re going to Mars. With this comes a problem: flying to Mars is relatively easy, but l…

There’s a lot more to learning how to play the guitar than just playing the right notes at the right time and in the right order. To produce any sound at all requires learning how to do compl…

There’s an old saying, that you should do everything at least twice. Once to learn how to do it, and then a second time to do it right. Perhaps [Zweben] would agree, since he wasn’t sat…

[Avidan Ross] has an unyielding passion for coffee. Brewing a proper espresso is more than measuring fluid ounces, and to that end, his office’s current espresso machine was not making the cu…