Following time backward, for portable music we’ve had iPods, CDs, and cassette tapes which we played using small Walkmans around the size of a cigarette box. And for a brief time before that,…

What do you do when you find a 5 kW transmitting tube in your local electronics store? If you are [TannerTech], you build a vacuum tube tesla coil. This isn’t the usual little wimpy coil, but…

If you are an astronomer with an optical reflecting telescope, the quality of your mirror is one of your most significant concerns. Large observatories will therefore often have on-site vapour depo…

Last time in Life on Contract, I discussed ways to figure out a starting point on how much to charge for your services. However, sometimes you and a client may wish to work together but for some re…

Laser projectors like those popular in clubs or laser shows often use mirror galvanometers to reflect the laser and draw in 2D. Without galvos, and on a tight budget, [Vitaliy Mosesov] decided that…

Finding a killer application for e-textiles is the realm of the hacker and within that realm, anything goes. Whether it’s protecting your digital privacy with signal shielding, generating aud…

This is the last weekend to get in on the Open Hardware Design Challenge, the first challenge of the 2018 Hackaday Prize. We’re looking for the boldest idea you can come up with. We want to s…

Take apart a few old DVD drives, stitch them together with cable ties, add a pen and paper, and you’ve got a simple CNC plotter. They’re quick and easy projects that are fun, but they d…

It’s easy to dismiss decades old electronics as effectively e-waste. With the rapid advancements and plummeting prices of modern technology, most old hardware is little more than a historical…

[Laura Kampf] found a new use for an old Zippo lighter by turning it into a carrier for her screwdriver bits. There are several multitools out there which can accept standard screwdriver bits. The …

[Reiner Schmidt] was tired of renting an expensive 5-axis CNC head for projects, so he decided to build his own. It’s still a work in progress, but he’s made remarkable progress so far.…

Many of you will have experimented with driving displays from your microcontroller projects, and for most people that will mean pretty simple status information for which you’d use standard l…

There are no shortage of Nerf gun mods out there. From simply upgrading springs to removing air restrictors, the temptation of one-upping your opponents in a Nerf war speaks to many! Not content wi…

We’ve covered plenty of persistence of vision (POV) displays before, but this one from [Vadim] is rather fun: it’s built on top of a PC fan. He’s participating in a robot building…

[Josh] isn’t one to refuse a challenge, especially when robots are involved. The latest dare from friends and family? Build a beer robot that can bring beverages at everyone’s beck and …

Sometimes the world of tech conference presentations can seem impossibly opaque, a place in which there appears to be an untouchable upper echelon of the same speakers who pop up at conference afte…

If you enjoy flying quadcopters, it is a good bet that you’ll have a drone with a camera. It used to be enough to record a video for later viewing, but these days you really want to see a liv…

“We want to put water right into your processor.” If that statement makes you sweat, that is good. Sweating is what we’re talking about, but it’s more involved than adding s…

If you can code, you can create an Alexa skill — the programs that allow an Amazon Echo or similar device interact with you. What if you can’t code or you are just too lazy to do all th…

They say necessity is the mother of invention. But if the thing you need has already been invented but is extremely expensive, another mother of invention might be budget overruns. That was the cas…