In our modern semi-dystopia, it seems like most companies add automation features to their products to lock them down and get consumers to buy even more proprietary, locked-down components. The few…

It is hard to remember a time when no one had a spreadsheet. Sure, you had big paper ledgers if you were an accountant. But most people just scribbled their math on note paper or, maybe, an enginee…

In a recent write-up, [David Delony] explains how he built a Wolfram Mathematica-like engine with Python. Core to the system is SymPy for symbolic math support. [David] said being able to work with…

Blaise Pascal is known for a number of things, but we remember him best for the Pascaline, an early mechanical calculator. [Chris Staecker] got a chance to take a close look at one, which is quite …

There was a bit of a kerfuffle this week with the news that an airliner had been hit by space junk. The plane, a United Airlines 737, was operating at 36,000 feet on a flight between Denver and Los…

We always enjoy videos from [w2aew]. His recent entry looks at vertical or VFETs, which are, as he puts it, a JFET that thinks it is a triode. He clearly explains how the transistor works as a cond…

If you ever wanted to win a bar bet about a world record, you probably know about the Guinness book for World Records. Did you know, though, that there are some robots in that book? Guinness pointe…

One of the lost pleasures of our modern world is the experience of going shopping at a grocery store, a mall, or a drugstore, and finding this month’s electronics magazine festooned with proj…

In an era where running a website without HTTPS is shunned, and everyone wants you to encrypt your DNS queries, you’d expect that the telecommunications back-ends are secured tightly as well.…

When the Channel Tunnel opened in 1994, the undersea rail link saw Britain grew closer to the European mainland than ever before. However, had things gone a little differently, history might have t…

Sometimes when you’re making a PCB that you plan on programming over USB, but you only plan on plugging in a couple of times, it would be nice to make that connection without another BOM item…

As a Hackaday writer, I see a lot of web pages, social media posts, videos, and other tips as part of my feed. The  best ones I try to bring you here, assuming of course that one of my ever-vigilan…

The basic principles of a motion picture film camera should be well understood by most readers — after all, it’s been well over a hundred years since the Lumière brothers wowed 19th cen…

For anyone who’s joined us for previous years, you’ll know that badge hacking and modification are core to the Hackaday Supercon experience. While you’re of course free to leave t…

Hydraulic gear pumps are deceptively simple: just two gears rotating together, forcing the hydraulic oil from one side to the other where the teeth don’t meet, and thus providing the ability …

Running suspicious software in a virtual machine seems like a basic precaution to figure out whether said software contains naughty code. Unfortunately it’s generally rather easy to detect wh…

No matter what kind of computer or phone you are reading this on, it probably has a graphics system that would have been a powerful computer on its own back in the 1980s. When the IBM PC came out, …

The earliest useful plastics were made out of natural materials like cellulose and casein, but since the Bakelite revolution, their use has dwindled away and left them mostly as curiosities and chi…

Fungi make up a massive, interconnected part of Earth’s ecosystems, yet they’re vastly underrepresented in research and public consciousness compared to plants and animals. That may change in the f…

These days, most of the media we consume is digital. We still watch movies and TV shows, but they’re all packaged in digital files that cram in many millions of pixels and as many audio chann…