It’s hard to pass up another lesson in good machine design brought to us by [Mark Rehorst]. This time, [Mark] combats the relentless forces of bed deformation due to thermal expansion. Did yo…

Designing a good clock takes a lot of considerations. It’s not just hands, faces, and numbers anymore; there are also word clocks, electronic clocks, marble clocks, or water clocks, and just …

Right now, you can design a PCB, send it off to a PCB fab, and get professional finished boards in a few days for less than a dollar per square inch. This is fantastic, and it’s the driving f…

We’re no stranger to seeing people jam a Raspberry Pi into an old gaming console to turn it into a RetroPie system. Frankly, at this point it seems like we’ve got to be getting close to…

Like many of us, [Zoltan Toth-Czifra] has completely embraced 21st century living. His home is awash in smart gadgets and dodads, from color changing light bulbs to Internet-connected cameras. But …

[Patrick McDavid] and his wife had a legitimate work-related reason for writing some Python code that would pull the exact latitude and longitude of the individual locations within a national retai…

NASA is famously risk-averse, taking cautious approaches because billions of taxpayer dollars are at stake and each failure receives far more political attention than their many successes. So while…

The Apollo Guidance Computer is a remarkably important piece of computing history. It’s the computer that guided the Apollo lander to land on the moon. We’ve seen a few replica builds o…

It’s doubtful that the early pioneers of CNC would have been able to imagine the range of the applications the technology would be used for. Once limited to cutting metal, CNC machines can no…

When referring to classic cars, there’s a good reason that “they don’t make ’em like that anymore.” Old cars represented the limits of what could be done in terms of m…

If you think about it, an operating system kernel is really just a very powerful shared library that offers services to many programs. Of course, it is a very powerful library, but still — it…

Getting a solar array to track the sun has always been an interesting problem, and it has led to some complicated solutions. Controllers that use GPS and servos seem to be much in favor these days,…

[Michael Karliner]’s Belshazzar, named for the Biblical character upon whose wall the writing appeared, is a unique light painting machine, that tracks an array of UV LEDs across a glow-in-th…

[XTronical]’s idea for a laser-based persistence of vision gadget failed, but the basic idea seemed sound. A row of inexpensive red lasers shine into a spinning mirror and are reflected onto …

The greatest bit of consumer electronics is shipping and the reviews are out: Amazon’s Alexa-enabled microwave is a capable microwave, but befuddling to the voice-controlled-everything neophy…

We got pointed by [packrat] to a 2015 presentation by [Dan Holohan] on the history and art of steam heating systems. At the advent of central heating systems for entire buildings, steam was used in…

Every once in a while, you’ll find some weirdness that will send your head spinning. Most of the time you’ll chalk it up to a bad solder joint, some bad code, or just your own failings.…

The technique of assembling circuits without substrate goes by many names; you may know it as flywiring, deadbugging, point to point wiring, or freeform circuits. Sometimes this technique is used f…

If there’s one thing that’s making you insecure, it’s your smartphone. Your smartphone is constantly pinging the cell towers, giving out your location and potentially leaking your…

The millennium: a term that few had any use for before 1999, yet seemingly overnight it was everywhere. The turning of the millenium permeated every facet of pop culture. Unconventional popstars li…