As the old saying goes, when the only tool you have is a 6 DOF industrial robotic arm, every problem looks like an opportunity to make it serve up adult beverages. [benkokes] found himself in this …

These days, surveillance cameras are all around us, and they’re smarter than ever. In particular, many of them are running advanced algorithms to recognize faces and scan license plates, comp…

When you think of a scope probe, you usually think of what is basically a wire with a spring hook and an attenuator. Those are passive probes. [Kerry Wong] shows off a pre-release active probe that…

While William Rowan Hamilton isn’t a household name like, say, Einstein or Hawking, he might have been. It turns out the Irish mathematician almost stumbled on quantum theory in the or around…

Although now mostly known as a company who cornered the market on graphing calculators while only updating them once a decade or so, there was a time when Texas Instruments was a major force in the…

The Las Vegas Sphere is great and all, but few of us can afford the expense to travel to out there to see it on the regular. If you’re looking for similar vibes you can access at home, you mi…

The Zune might have joined the portable media player game too late to ever really be competition for the iPod, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t pick up some devoted fans along the way. S…

Do you remember the global chip shortage? Somehow it seems so long ago, but it’s not even really been three years yet. Somehow, I had entirely forgotten about it, until two random mentions about it…

When you think of a Bluetooth speaker, you’re probably picturing a roughly lunchbox-sized device that pumps out some decent volume for annoying fellow beachgoers, hikers, or public transport …

In the early 1980s, there was the IBM PC, with its 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor. It was an unexpected hit for the company, and within a few years there were a host of competitors. Every self-respe…

It all started with a sarcastic comment right here on Hackaday.com: ” How many phones do you know that sport a 5 and 1/4 inch diskette drive?” — and [Paul Sanja] took that persona…

In Europe, where this is being written, and possibly further afield, news reports are again full of drone sightings closing airports. The reports have come from Scandinavia, in particular Denmark, …

There have been lots of haptic vest devices over the years, though the vast majority have been very simple. Many existing suits pack in a few speakers or vibration motors to give feedback to the we…

What do you get if you meld a Raspberry Pi, a chiptune synthesizer, and a case that looks like an imaginary Kenback-2000? Well, if you are [Artifextron], you get the NTRON. Part Nintendo console, p…

Voice assistants and smartphones are often the go-to interfaces for modern smart home systems. However, if you fancy more direct physical controls, you can go that route as well. To that end, [Sali…

[Simone]’s AI assistant, dubbed Max Headbox, is a wakeword-triggered local AI agent capable of following instructions and doing simple tasks. It’s an experiment in many ways, but also a…

These days, video cards are virtually supercomputers. When they aren’t driving your screen, they are decoding video, crunching physics models, or processing large-language model algorithms. B…

Over the years, we’ve brought you many stories of the creative artwork behind electronic event badges, but today we may have a first for you. [Spencer] thinks nobody before him has made a bad…

In today’s “News from the Dystopia” segment, we have a story about fighting retail theft with drones. It centers on Flock Safety, a company that provides surveillance technologies…

Can you play DOOM in Discord? At first glance, that may seem rather nonsensical, as Discord is a proprietary chat service and neither a hardware device nor something else that may seem like an obvi…

Do you remember the movie WALL-E? Apparently, [Leviathan engineering] did, and he wasn’t as struck by the title character, or Eva, or even the Captain. He was captivated by BURN-E. His workin…