When you hear it said that “Modern steel is disposable by design”, your ears perk up, as you just caught the unmistakable sound of faux romanticism along with ‘lost ancient techno…

There are various CAD challenges out there that come with bragging rights. Some, like the Certified Solid Works Professional Exam (CWSP) might actually look good on a resume. [Deltahedra] is appare…

When you think of a US Nuclear accident, you probably think of Three Mile Island. However, there have been over 50 accidents of varying severity in the US, with few direct casualties. (No one died …

One of the joys of writing up the entries for the 2025 Component Abuse Challenge has come in finding all the different alternative uses for the humble transistor. This building block of all modern …

To our younger readers, a car without an all-touchscreen “infotainment” system may look clunky and dated, but really, you kids don’t know what they’re missing. Buttons, knob…

The header image above shows a completely unsupported 3D-printed bridge, believe it or not. You’re looking at the bottom of the print. [Make Wonderful Things] wondered whether unsightly unsup…

Handheld computers have become very much part of the hardware hacker scene, as the advent of single board computers long on processor power but short on power consumption has given us the tools we …

Spectravideo is not exactly the most well-known microcomputer company, but they were nevertheless somewhat active in the US market from 1981 to 1988. Their computers still have a fanbase of users a…

For those of us hackers who have gone down a machining rabbit hole, we all know how annoying it can be to over-machine a part. Thermal spraying, while sounding sci-fi, is a method where you can jus…

The older Raspberry Pi boards have had a long life, serving faithfully since 2012. Frankly, their continued support is a rarity these days — it’s truly incredible that an up-to-date OS …

When we talk about HDTV, we’re typically talking about any one of a number of standards from when television made the paradigm switch from analog to digital transmission. At the dawn of the n…

Economists have this idea that we live in an efficient market, but it’s hard to fathom that when disposable vapes are equipped with rechargeable lithium cells. Still, just as market economist…

Everyone has a standard for publishing projects, and they can get pretty controversial. We see a lot of people complain about hacks embedded in YouTube videos, social media threads, Discord servers…

Tagging wildlife is never straightforward in the best of times, but it becomes a great deal more complicated when you’re trying to track flying insects. Instead of trying to use a sensor package, […

Over the decades we have seen a lot of methods for powering LEGO-based contraptions, ranging from LEGO Technic pneumatics to electric motors, but what about steam power? We have all seen those cute…

For the Component Abuse Challenge our hacker [Tim Williams] observes that N-P-N reads the same way forwards and backwards, so… what happens if we reverse bias one? (Note: this remark about N-…

We get it, CAD software can be daunting to learn. Somehow [Boaztheostrich] found it so daunting he procrastinated his way into a AR voxel-based CAD app he calls “ABCCAD”, written in God…

The Playstation 3 had a dizzying number of variants from its first launch in 2006 to when they stopped selling the slim models over a decade later in 2017. Of all those, you’ve probably never…

Plastic recycling is something that many of us strive to accomplish, but we often get caught up in the many hurdles along the way. [Brothers Make] are experienced in the world of plastic recycling …

Have you ever seen photos of retro movie sets where the cameras seem to be bedazzled with lenses? Of course you can only film via one lens at a time, but mounting multiple lenses on a turret as was…