We often think that if a piece of software had the level of documentation you usually see for hardware, you wouldn’t think much of it. Sure, there are exceptions. Some hardware is beautifully…

One of the practical upsides of improved computer vision systems and machine learning has been the ability of computers to translate text from one language or format to another. [Jchen] used this t…

It wasn’t that long ago that projects with cellular connectivity were everywhere, but with 2G no longer universally available, glory days of cheap 2G modules seem to be on their way out. So w…

Over on his YouTube channel [Construction General] shows us how to convert a drain into a hydropower facility. This type of hydroelectric facility is known as a gravitation water vortex power plant…

Al Williams wrote up a seemingly innocent piece on a couple of rules-of-thumb to go between metric and US traditional units, and the comment section went wild! Nothing seems to rile up the Hackaday…

The late 1970s were an interesting time for microcomputers. The rousing success of things like the 8080, the Z80, the 6800, and the 6502 made everyone wanted a piece of the action. National Semicon…

Many of us have run a Blink program on a microcontroller before. It’s effectively the “Hello, World!” of the embedded space. However, few of us have ever thought about optimizing …

In FDM 3D printing cycles TPU is a bit of a special filament. Not so much because of its properties, but because it’s rather stretchy even as a filament, which makes especially printing certa…

Some people like their homelabs to be as big and fancy as possible, with racks of new or surplus server hardware sucking down power. [Hardware Haven] evidently has the opposite idea, given he just …

Lately, this peculiar little single wheel monorail came to our attention. Built by [extraglide1976], all from Meccano. His build started with modest tests: one gyro obviously flopped. Two gyros gea…

It’s hard to argue with nostalgia, but you can toss a bucket of cold facts over it. In the case of the recent rescuing of the Commodore brand from the clutches of relabeling of generic electr…

When is a Raspberry Pi not a Raspberry Pi? Perhaps when it’s a Pi Zero-shaped board with an RP3A0 SoC from a Raspberry Pi Zero 2, made by [jonny12375]. Back in the early days of the Raspberry…

Organic Llamas have a rather restricted range, in nature: the Andes Mountains, and that’s it. Humans weren’t content to let the fluffy, friend-shaped creatures stay in their natural hab…

There’s long been a push to stop writing code as a sequence of lines and go to something graphical, which has been very successful in some areas and less so in others. But even when you use s…

Candle clocks were once an easy way to build a clock without using complex mechanical devices: just observe how quickly a thin candle burns down, mark an identical candle with periodic gradations, …

We’ve studiously avoided any mention of our latest interstellar visitor, 3I/Atlas, on these pages, mainly because of all the hoopla in the popular press about how Avi Loeb thinks it’s a…

An adult human can produce about 100 Wh of mechanical power whilst cycling, which is a not inconsiderable amount if you can convert that to electricity with reasonable efficiency. In a recent artic…

As long as there have been games, there have been crackers breaking their copy protections. “Digital Rights Management” or DRM, is a phrase for copy protection coined near the end of th…

Data centers and the electrification of devices that previously ran on fossil fuels is driving increased demand for electricity around the world. China is addressing this with a megaproject that is…

The fifth generation mobile communications protocol (5G) is perhaps the most complicated wireless protocol ever made. Featuring wildly fast download speeds, beam forming base stations, and of cours…