One of the difficulties in learning about neural networks is finding a problem that is complex enough to be instructive but not so complex as to impede learning. [ThomasNield] had an idea: Create a…

Whilst modern technology relies heavily on satellites, it’s easy to forget they’re there; after all, it’s hard to comprehend mostly-invisible lumps of high-density tech whizzing a…

[Diode Gone Wild] and his cat decided to see how a $3 meter worked inside. The meter was marked as a DT-830B and he already had an older one of the same model, and he wondered how they could afford…

We love seeing hardware and software from bygone eras getting a new lease on life through modern hacks, as longtime readers can surely attest to. Why leave this stuff to rot in a closet somewhere w…

Hacks are often born out of unfortunate circumstances. My unfortunate circumstance was a robbery– the back door of the remodel was kicked in, and a generator was carted off. Once the police r…

One of the more interesting hacks we’ve seen this year is [Carl]’s experimentations with making motors out of PCBs. Honestly, it’s surprising no one has done this before — a…

In a field where components and systems are often known by sterile strings of characters that manufacturers assign or by cutesy names that are clearly products of the marketing department and their…

In the 1980s, there was a synthesizer that you could play like a harmonica. This device was called the Millioniser 2000. It utilized HIP (Harmonica In Principle) technology. The Millioniser 2000 wa…

The heart of the Atari 2600 wasn’t the 6502 (or the 6507 for the pedants), it was the TIA chip. This is the chip responsible for drawing graphics on the display, racing the beam, and extremel…

Why build your own stereo speakers? Some people like to work on cars in their garage. Some people build fast computers. Others seek the perfect audio setup. The problem for a newcomer is the signal…

It’s a sad day when one of the simplest and generally most reliable tools in the shop – the bench vise – gives up the ghost. With just a pair of beefy castings and a heavy Acme sc…

Sometimes a successful project isn’t only about making sure all the electrons are in the right place at the right time, or building something that won’t collapse under its own weight. A…

If you’ve been to the right events, you’ve seen them before – the cars with an external cage that let the car complete a somersault in the forward direction under heavy braking. T…

Chances are good that a fair number of us have been roped into “one of those” projects before. You know the type: vague specs, limited budget, and of course they need it yesterday. But …

On October 24th, 2003 the last Concorde touched down at Filton Airport in England, and since then commercial air travel has been stuck moving slower than the speed of sound. There were a number of …

A camera obscura is a very simple device. Consisting of a dark chamber, with only a pinhole to let light in, it focuses an image on its inside surface. If you want to take a permanent copy, it&#821…

The field of soft robotics sure seems a lot less mature than your standard servo motor and metal framed robot arms. Maybe that’s because building a robot to flex is harder, and maybe it&#8217…

[randomprojectlab] is building a synthesizer around the pentatonic scale for the Hackaday Prize. It’s the Pentasynth, and it’s basically just a keyboard with five notes per scale. There…

The command line. You either love it or hate it, but if you do anything with a Unix-like system you are going to have to use it eventually. You might find marker — a system billed as a &#8220…

You’ve no doubt heard about the “hardware implants” which were supposedly found on some server motherboards, which has led to all sorts of hand-wringing online. There’s no e…