Computers and cellphones can do so many things, but sometimes if you want to doodle or take a note, pencil and paper is the superior technology. You could carry a device and a pocket notebook, or y…

One of the categories we chose for the One Hertz Challenge is “Could Have Used a 555.” What about when you couldn’t have, but did anyway? The 555 is famously easy to use, but not …

Most research on electroplating tries to find ways to make it plate parts more uniformly. [Ajc150] took the opposite direction, though, with his selective electroplating project, which uses an elec…

Remember the 80286? It was the sequel to the 8086, the chip that started it all, and it powered a great number of machines in the early years of the personal computing revolution. It might not be a…

The switch from analog telephone exchanges to a purely digital network meant a revolution in just about any way imaginable. Gone were the bulky physical switches and associated system limitations. …

When you think of a tape recorder, you might think of a cassette tape. However, [Michael Simpson] has an old Star-Lite small reel-to-reel tape machine. It isn’t a repair so much as a rework t…

Reachy Mini is a kit for a compact, open-source robot designed explicitly for AI experimentation and human interaction. The kit is available from Hugging Face, which is itself a repository and host…

What color do you like your microcontroller boards? Blue? Red? Maybe white or black? Sadly, all of those are about to look old hat. Why? Well, as shared by [JLCPCB], this transparent Arduino looks …

There was a disturbance in the enterprise security world, and it started with a Pwn2Own Berlin. [Khoa Dinh] and the team at Viettel Cyber Security discovered a pair of vulnerabilities in Microsoft&…

CNCs come in many forms, including mills, 3D printers, lasers, and plotters, but one challenge seems universal: there’s always a project slightly too large for your machine’s work envelope. T…

What did you miss on Hackaday last week? Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Al Williams are ready to catch you up on this week’s podcast. First, though, the guys go off on vibe coding and t…

Most of us know that a quartz clock uses a higher frequency crystal oscillator and a chain of divider circuits to generate a 1 Hz pulse train. It’s usual to have a 32.768 kHz crystal and a 15…

Water cooling was once only the preserve of hardcore casemodders and overclockers. Today, it’s pretty routinely used in all sorts of performance PC builds. However, few are using large artist…

Zines (self-produced, small-circulation publications) are extremely DIY, and therefore punk- and hacker-adjacent by nature. While they can be made with nothing more than a home printer or photocopi…

Last year, [Deep Tronix] wished to teach colors to his nephew. Thus, he built a toy to help educate a child about colors by pairing them with sounds, and Color Player was born. The build is based a…

Modern musicians may take for granted that a wide array of musical instruments can either be easily connected to a computer or modeled entirely in one, allowing for all kinds of nuanced ways of cre…

Ethernet is how we often network computers together, particularly when they’re too important to leave on a fussy WiFi connection. Have you ever thought about listening to Ethernet signals, th…

Adding a camera to a project used to be a chore, but modern camera modules make it simple. But what if you want to read QR codes? [James Bowman] noticed a $7 module that claims to read QR codes so …

[Maya Posch] wrote up an insightful, and maybe a bit controversial, piece on the state of consumer goods design: The Death Of Industrial Design And The Era Of Dull Electronics. Her basic thesis is …

Repairing radios was easier when radios were simple. There were typically two strategies. You could use a signal tracer (an amplifier) to listen at the volume control. If you heard something, the p…