Recently AI risk and benefit evaluation company METR ran a randomized control test (RCT) on a gaggle of experienced open source developers to gain objective data on how the use of LLMs affects thei…

Magnetic Core memory was the RAM at the heart of many computer systems through the 1970s, and is undergoing something of a resurgence today since it is easiest form of memory for an enterprising ha…

Few electronic ICs can claim to be as famous as the 555 timer. Maybe part of the reason is that the IC doesn’t have a specific function. It has a lot of building blocks that you can use to cr…

Sometimes, all you need to make something work is to come at it from a different angle from anyone else — flip the problem on its head, so to speak. That’s what [Keizo Ishibashi] did to…

One of the tropes of the space race back in the 1960s, which helped justify the spending for the part of the public who thought it wasn’t worth it, was that the technology developed for use in spac…

There are many ways to learn, but few to none of them compare to that of spending time standing over the shoulder of a master of the craft. This awesome page sent in by [JohnU] is a fantastic corne…

If you’ve worked with germanium transistors, you’ll know that many of them have a disappointingly low maximum frequency of operation. This has more to do with some of the popular ones d…

Display technology has come a long way since the advent of the CRT in the late 1800s (yes, really!). Since then, we’ve enjoyed the Nixie tubes, flip dots, gas plasma, LCD, LED, ePaper, the li…

[Kevin Cheung] likes to upcycle old soda cans into — well — things. The metal is thin enough to cut by hand, but he’d started using a manual die-cutting machine, and it worked wel…

If you’re looking for a more open, unenclosed 3D printer design than a cubic frame can accommodate, but don’t want to use a bed-slinger, you don’t have many options. [Boothy Builds] recently found …

[Jared] managed to find a professional FAA-certified flight simulator at an auction (a disassembled, partial one anyway) and wondered, what would it take to rebuild it into the coolest flight sim r…

[Jackson Studner] wrote in to let us know about his ESP32-based media server: Jcorp Nomad. This project uses a ESP32-S3 to create a WiFi hotspot you can connect to from your devices. The hotspot is…

Normally when you hear the words “rope” and “dog” in the same sentence, you think about a dog on a leash, but in this robot dog, the rope is what makes it move, not what sto…

The Hurdy-Gurdy continues to worm its way into pole position as the hacker’s instrument. How else could you explain a medieval wheel fiddle being turned into a synthesizer? Move over, keytar …

[Jim Matthews] submitted his Ham Radio foxhunt transmitter project for the 2025 One Hertz Challenge. This is a clever Spartan build. In order to create a radio beacon for use in a “fox hunt&#…

There’s interesting news out of Wyoming, where a coal mine was opened this week. But the fact that it’s the first new coal mine in 50 years isn’t the big news — it’s t…

One of the simple pleasures of life is enjoying a drive to work… only to get stuck in traffic that you could’ve known about if you just checked before your daily commute. Who are we kidding? There’…

You are probably familiar with initiatives like Seti@Home, where you donate unused computer power to some science project that needs computer cycles. [Jeff Yoshimi] wants to borrow your most powerf…

Sure, Apple’s Lisa wasn’t the first computer released with a graphical user interface — Xerox was years ahead with the Alto and the Star workstation — but Lisa was the first…

It’s an unfortunate fact that when a scientist at MIT describes an exciting new piece of hardware as “low-cost,” it might not mean the same thing as if a hobbyist had said it. [Caden Kraft] e…