Conventional wisdom holds that we no longer make things to last for the long haul, and that we live in a disposable world. It’s understandable — after all, most of us have a cell phone …

Big ol’ motors are great when you need to get a big job done, but they can be expensive or hard to source new. However, there’s a source of big, fat, juicy motors right at home for most…

Tiny catapults, kinetic sculptures, a Newton’s Cradle — all kinds of nifty toys can adorn the desk of the executive in your life. On the high end of the scale, a 16-cylinder butane-powe…

The AT&T 3B2 series of computers are historically significant, being the main porting platform for System V Release 3 UNIX. Unfortunately, the documentation for these computers has been nearly …

If you listen to the radio bands in the United States, you might wonder if anyone at the FCC is paying attention, or if they are too busy selling spectrum and regulating the Internet. Apparently ho…

Cheap, high-quality PCBs are truly a wonder of our age. That a professionally fabricated board with silkscreen and solder mask can be ordered online and delivered to your door has lowered the bar b…

Performing high-energy physics experiments can get very expensive, a fact that attracts debate on public funding for scientific research. But the reality is that scientists often work very hard to …

[k-roy] hates electricity. Especially the kind that can be lethal if you’re not careful. Annoyed by the constant advertisements for the popular Sense Home Energy monitors (which must be insta…

Yesterday Magic Leap announced that it will ship developer edition hardware in 2018. The company is best known for raising a lot of money. That’s only partially a joke, since the teased hardw…

With the holiday season upon us, it is useful to be able to determine just how much (or how little) spiking the office party punch has received. [Russell Smith] shows how he tried to determine the …

Imagine it’s 1943, and you have to transport 1,000 P-47 fighter planes from your factory in the United States to the front lines in Europe, roughly 5,000 miles over the open ocean. Flying the…

Instructables user [Osprey22] has been building towards this Christmas for years. Why? This year, he has brought an impressive musical Christmas light display inside, and at a fraction of the cost …

Unless you really look closely at the image above, you might not realize you aren’t looking at a normal Game Boy Advance; which is sort of the point. Even though it retains the looks of the i…

Since Autodesk’s acquisition, Eagle has been making waves in the community. The de facto standard for Open Hardware PCB design is now getting push-and-shove routing, a button that flips the b…

If print supports have ever caused you grief, know that there’s an alternate printing method in the works. First: get yourself a vat of industrial gel in which to print. Rapid Liquid Printing…

If you are a certain age, there’s a fair chance your first computer was a Commodore 64. These machines are antiques now, and [RetroManCave] received one from a friend’s loft in unknown …

Careful not to sneeze while using this diminutive logic analyzer — you could send it flying across the bench. Undertaken more for the challenge than as a practical bench tool, [Uwe Hermann]&#…

A few months ago, [Marco] picked up a cheap, cheap, cheap laser engraver from one of the familiar Chinese resellers. It’s a simple affair with aluminum extrusions, a diode laser, and a contro…

Just how much metaphorical juice is in a coin cell battery? It turns out that this seemingly simple question is impossible to answer — at least without a lot of additional information. The pr…

A lot of things tend to get stretched during the holiday season, like shopping budgets and waistbands and patience. This year, [Chris] is stretching the limits of both the mini breadboard and the h…