Somehow, walking robots at our level never really seem to deliver on the promise that should be delivered by all those legs. Articulation using hobby servos is simple enough to achieve, but cumbers…

While 3D printing has been a great thing all by itself, it has also made electromechanical hardware a commodity item. Instead of raiding an old printer for motors and rods of unknown provenance, yo…

“Wait, was that 423 or 424?” When you’re stuck winding a transformer or coil that has more than a few hundred turns, you’re going to want to spend some time on a winding jig…

The biggest allure of 3D printing, to us at least, is the ability to make hyper-personalized objects that would otherwise fall through the cracks of our mass-market economy. Take, for instance, the…

The production capability available to the individual hacker today is really quite incredible. Even a low-end laser engraver can etch your PCBs, and it doesn’t take a top of the line 3D print…

[Markus_p] has already finished one really successful 3D printed tracked robot build. Now he’s finished a second one using standard motors and incorporating what he learned from the first. Th…

Anyone old enough to have driven before the GPS era probably wonders, as we do, how anyone ever found anything. Navigation back then meant outdated paper maps, long detours because of missed turns,…

The future is autonomous robots. Whether that means electric cars with rebranded adaptive cruise control, or delivery robots that are actually just remote control cars, the robots of the future wil…

Do you like badges? Of course you like badges. It’s conference season, and that means it’s also badge season. Well good news, Tindie now has a ‘badge’ category. Right now, i…

We won’t mention names, but we are always dismayed to see people twist knobs randomly on a scope until it shows a good picture. These days, there’s the dreaded auto button, too, which i…

KiCad, the open source EDA software, is popular with Hackaday readers and the hardware community as a whole. But it is not immune from the most common bane of EDA tools. Managing your library of sy…

We’d wager most readers aren’t intimately acquainted with wax motors. In fact, a good deal of you have probably never heard of them, let alone used one in a project. Which isn’t e…

The Ford Securicode, or the keyless-entry keypad available on all models of Ford cars and trucks, first appeared on the 1980 Thunderbird. Even though it’s most commonly seen on the higher-end…

In one bad week in March, two people were indirectly killed by automated driving systems. A Tesla vehicle drove into a barrier, killing its driver, and an Uber vehicle hit and killed a pedestrian c…

With the June solstice right around the corner, it’s a perfect time to witness first hand the effects of Earth’s axial tilt on the day’s length above and beyond 60 degrees latitud…

In firmware-land we usually refer to colors using RGB. This is intuitively pleasing with a little background on color theory and an understanding of how multicolor LEDs work. Most of the colorful L…

We know we’ve told you this already, but you should really keep a close eye on your 3D printer. The cheaper import machines are starting to display a worrying tendency to go up in flames, eit…

There are many ways of storing data in a computer’s memory, and not all of them allow the computer to write to it. For older equipment, this was often a physical limitation to the hardware it…

The Colpitts oscillator is a time-tested design — from 1918. [The Offset Volt] has a few videos covering the design of these circuits including an op-amp and a transistor version. You can fin…

The lab power supply is an essential part of any respectable electronics workbench. However, the cost of buying a unit that has all the features required can be eye-wateringly high for such a seemi…