To those of us who live in the civilized lands where ~230 VAC mains is the norm and we can shove a cool 3.5 kW into an electric kettle without so much as a second thought, the mere idea of trying t…

[Aditya Sripada] and [Abhishek Warrier]’s TARS3D robot came from asking what it would take to make a robot with the capabilities of TARS, the robotic character from Interstellar. We couldn&#8…

A mosquito has a very finely tuned proboscis that is excellent at slipping through your skin to suck out the blood beneath. Researchers at McGill University recently figured that the same biologica…

Although it might seem like there was a sudden step change from analog to digital sometime in the late 1900s, it was actually a slow, gradual change from things like record players to iPods or from…

Want to know if somebody is lying? It’s always so hard to tell. [dbmaking] has whipped up a fun little polygraph, otherwise known as a lie detector. It’s nowhere near as complex as the …

Connected devices are ubiquitous in our era of wireless chips heavily relying on streaming data to someone else’s servers. This sentence might already start to sound dodgy, and it doesn&#8217…

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s jus…

Assuming you’re not stuck in a prison cell without windows, you could feasibly keep track of the moon and tides by walking outside and jotting things down in your notebook. Alternatively, you…

During World War II, as the Allies planned the invasion of Normandy, there was one major hurdle to overcome—logistics. In particular, planners needed to guarantee a solid supply of fuel to keep the…

Learning something on YouTube seems kind of modern. But if you are watching a 1957 instructional film about slide rules, it also seems old-fashioned. But Encyclopædia Britannica has a complete 30-m…

Sometimes it makes sense to go with plain old batteries and off-the-shelf PVC pipe. That’s the thinking behind [Bertrand Selva]’s clever LoRaTube project. LoRa is a fantastic solution f…

Not every project has to be complicated– reinventing the wheel has its place, but sometimes you find a module or two that does exactly what you want, and the project is more than halfway done…

Wago connectors are somewhat controversial in the electrical world—beloved by some, decried by others. The company knows it has a dedicated user base, though, and has established the Wago Creators …

There are lots of switches that you can use with your smarthome. Some might not be compatible with the wiring in your house, while others are battery powered and need attention on the regular. [Wil…

One easy way to make a very accurate clock is with a WiFi-enabled microcontroller like an ESP32 and a display: set up NTP, and you’ll never be off by more than a minute. This water clock proj…

Ever wonder what happens to those digital price tags you see in stores once they run out of juice? In what is a prime example of e-waste, many of those digital price tags are made with non-replacea…

When I was a kid, I was interested in a number of professions that are now either outdated, or have changed completely. One of those dreams involved checking out books and things to patrons, and it…

An unlikely hit of the last few months’ consumer hardware has been a power bank branded by the German confectionery company Haribo. It first gained attention in backpacking circles because of…

Color 3D printing has gone mainstream, and we expect more than one hacker will be unpacking one over the holidays. If you have, say, a color inkjet printer, the process is simple: print. Sure, mayb…

This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex …