For our 2025 Component Abuse Challenge there have been a set of entries which merely use a component for a purpose it wasn’t quite intended, and another which push misuse of a part into defin…

One of the most frustrating parts about flying a quadcopter is having to regularly swap battery packs, as this massively limits what you can do with said quadcopter, never mind its effective range.…

If you’ve ever wanted to pump sound to all the rooms of your house, you might use any one of a number of commercial solutions. Or, you could go the more DIY route and whip up something like t…

Multitasking is something we take for granted these days. Just about every computer we use, from our desktops to our phones, is capable of multitasking. It might sound silly to implement multitaski…

Before a spectrometer can do any useful work, it needs to be calibrated to identify wavelengths correctly. This is usually done by detecting several characteristic peaks or dips in a well-known lig…

This project gives a whole new meaning to DIY PC. We don’t know how capable you were as a teenager, but could you have designed your own Ryzen-based mini PC? Whilst making repairs to laptop i…

If you’re really good, it’s possible to solve a Rubik’s Cube in under 10 seconds. For the rest of us, though, it can be an exceedingly tedious task. For that reason, you might lik…

Not every robot has to be big. Sometimes, you can build something fun that’s better sized for exploring your tabletop rather than the wastelands of Mars. To that end, [philosiraptor] built th…

A piezo disk transducer is a handy part for reproducing beeps and boops, and can also function as a rudimentary microphone. Being a piezoelectric element, it can also generate usable power. Enough …

Wouldn’t it be nice to 3D print an entire custom tire for small robots? It sure would, so [Angus] of [Maker’s Muse] decided to investigate whether nifty new filaments like expanding TPU…

[Prusa] have a number of announcements, and one of the more unusual ones is that liquid printing is coming to the Prusa XL. Specifically, printing in real, heat-resistant silicone (not a silicone-l…

Breadboards are great, but as the world moves more and more to having SMD as a standard, prototyping straight PCBs is becoming more common. If you’re mailing off to China for your PCBs, it&#8…

Marketplaces and e-waste recycling centers are practically overflowing with the things: ARM-based streaming TV boxes that run some — usually very outdated and compromised — version of A…

If you’re a musician and you want a reverb effect, there are lots of ways to go about it. You can use software plugins, all kinds of rack-mount effects, or pedals. Or, as [David] has done, yo…

VGA isn’t much used anymore, but it’s not hard to get a hold of monitors with that input. How about the older standards like EGA, CGA, or MDA? Well, it’s good luck on eBay or at t…

There are many incredible open-source robotic arm projects out there, but there’s a dearth of affordable, stable, and mobile robotic platforms with arms. That’s where XLeRobot comes in.…

When it comes to soldering on a PCB it almost always helps to have some way to hold the board off your workbench, allowing leads to pass though with out making it unstable and keeping it level whil…

[Dhananjay Gadre] happened across a useful little trick the other day. Take any old 1N4148 or 1N914 glass-package signal diode and wire it up right, and you’ve got yourself a nifty little IR …

We all know what a typewriter looks like, and how this has been translated directly into the modern day computer keyboard, or at least many of us think we do. Many cultures do not use a writing sys…

Modern motherboards don’t come with ISA slots, and almost everybody is fine with that. If you really want one, though, there are ways to get one. [TheRasteri] explains how in a forum post on …

The clicking of a Geiger counter is well enough known as a signifier of radioactive materials, due to it providing the menacing sound effect any time a film or TV show deals with radiation. What we…