How hard can it be to create your own inductors? Get a wire. Coil it up. Right? Well, the devil is definitely in the details, and [Nick] wants to share his ten tips for building “the perfect&…

Over on his YouTube channel our hacker [Jerry Walker] repairs a Tektronix 577 curve tracer. A curve tracer is a piece of equipment which plots I-V (current vs voltage) curves, among other things. T…

It’s not every day we hear of a new space propulsion method. Even rarer to hear of one that actually seems halfway practical. Yet that’s what we have in the case of TFINER, a proposal b…

A look underneath the water’s surface can be fun and informative! However, making a device to go under the surface poses challenges with communication and water proofing. That’s what th…

If you’re working with a microcontroller that reads a sensor, the chances are that at some point you’re faced with a serial port passing out continuous readings. The workflow of visuali…

Before you decide to click away, thinking we’re talking about some heart rate monitor that connects to a display using WiFi, wait! Pulse-Fi is a system that monitors heart rate using the WiFi…

Something rather significant happened on the Internet back in May, and it seems that someone only noticed it on September 3rd. [Youfu Zhang] dropped a note on one of the Mozilla security mailing li…

The Estes line of flying model rockets have inspired an untold number of children and adults alike, thanks in part to their simplicity. From the design and construction of the rockets themselves to…

Thunderstorms were raging across southern Germany as Elliot Williams was joined by Jenny List for this week’s podcast. The deluge outside didn’t stop the hacks coming though, and we&#82…

Even with teachers with names like Kirchhoff and Helmholtz, old Heinrich Hertz himself likely didn’t have the slightest idea that his name would one day become an SI unit. Less likely still w…

With the days of dial-up and pitiful 2G data connections long behind most of us, it would seem tempting to stop caring about how much data an end-user is expected to suck down that big and wide bro…

Knobs are ubiquitous in technology user interfaces, but touchscreens are increasingly replacing them for interface controls. The latest project from [upir] combines a rotating knob with a touchscre…

Semiconductor fabrication is complicated requiring nasty chemicals for everything from dopants to etchants. Working with such chemicals at home is dangerous and after releasing hydrochloride acid f…

Over on his blog our hacker [Scott Baker] has a Magnetic Bubble Memory Mega-Post. If you haven’t heard of magnetic bubble memory before it’s basically obsolete nonvolatile memory. Since…

For something non-explosive, this might be the most American project we’ve featured in a while. [Makerinator]’s domestic bliss was apparently threatened by the question “what shal…

Ever tear open a potentiometer? If you haven’t, you can still probably guess what’s inside. A streak of resistive material with some kind of contact that moves across it as you rotate t…

Designer furniture generally comes with excellent aesthetics and (sometimes) functionality. However, such furniture comes with a price to match. One such piece of furniture is the Magis Spun Chair.…

We like to think that we can do almost anything. Give me a broken piece of consumer electronics, and I’ll open it up and kick the capacitors. Give me an embedded Linux machine, and I’ll poke around…

When making a personal website, one will naturally include a personal touch. What could be more personal than creating a font from your own handwriting? That’s what [Chris Smith] has done, an…

Weekends can be busy for a lot of us, but sometimes you have one gloriously free and full of possibilities. If that’s you, you might consider taking a gander at [Peter Shirley]’s e-book…