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When I was a kid, I was interested in a number of professions that are now either outdated, or have changed completely.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 …

Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to …

If you exclude certain companies like Peloton, the world of cycling technology is surprisingly open. It’s not perfect by any means, but there are enough open or open-ish standards for many di…

Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that…

Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it. The answer: it burns brig…

Who’s interested in a brand new, from-scratch boundary representation (BREP) kernel? How about one that has no topological naming problem, a web-native parametric CAD front end to play with, …

Now, Rock 5 ITX+ is no x86 board, sporting an ARM Rockchip RK3588 on its ITX form-factor PCB, but reading this blog post’s headline might as well give you the impression. [Venn] from the [int…

The past few months, we’ve been giving you a quick rundown of the various ways ores form underground; now the time has come to bring that surface-level understanding to surface-level processes. Str…

One of the major difficulties in studying electricity, especially when compared to many other physical phenomena, is that it cannot be observed directly by human senses. We can manipulate it to per…

Some like it flat, and there’s nothing wrong with that. What you are looking at is the first prototype of Atlas by [AsicResistor], which is still a work in progress. [AsicResistor] found the …

Probably the biggest story in the world of old cars over the past couple of weeks has been the surfacing of a GM EV1 electric car for sale from an auto salvage yard. This was the famous electric ca…

Wi-Fi! It’s everywhere, and yet you can’t really see it, by virtue of the technology relying on the transmission of electromagnetic waves outside the visual spectrum. Never mind, though…

Have you ever tipped all the stray bits of solder out of your tip cleaner by mistake? [MisterHW] is here with a bit of paraffin wax to save the day. Hand soldering can be a messy business, especial…

It’s relatively easy to understand how optical microscopes work at low magnifications: one lens magnifies an image, the next magnifies the already-magnified image, and so on until it reaches the ey…

Probably most people know that when organic matter such as kitchen waste rots, it can produce flammable methane. As a source of free energy it’s attractive, but making a biogas plant sounds d…

An effective currency needs to be widely accepted, easy to use, and stable in value. By now most of us have recognized that cryptocurrencies fail at all three things, despite lofty ideals revolving…