Connected devices are ubiquitous in our era of wireless chips heavily relying on streaming data to someone else’s servers. This sentence might already start to sound dodgy, and it doesn&#8217…

We’ve all been there. You’ve found a beautiful piece of older hardware at the thrift store, and bought it for a song. You rush it home, eager to tinker, but you soon find it’s jus…

Assuming you’re not stuck in a prison cell without windows, you could feasibly keep track of the moon and tides by walking outside and jotting things down in your notebook. Alternatively, you…

During World War II, as the Allies planned the invasion of Normandy, there was one major hurdle to overcome—logistics. In particular, planners needed to guarantee a solid supply of fuel to keep the…

Learning something on YouTube seems kind of modern. But if you are watching a 1957 instructional film about slide rules, it also seems old-fashioned. But Encyclopædia Britannica has a complete 30-m…

Sometimes it makes sense to go with plain old batteries and off-the-shelf PVC pipe. That’s the thinking behind [Bertrand Selva]’s clever LoRaTube project. LoRa is a fantastic solution f…

Not every project has to be complicated– reinventing the wheel has its place, but sometimes you find a module or two that does exactly what you want, and the project is more than halfway done…

Wago connectors are somewhat controversial in the electrical world—beloved by some, decried by others. The company knows it has a dedicated user base, though, and has established the Wago Creators …

There are lots of switches that you can use with your smarthome. Some might not be compatible with the wiring in your house, while others are battery powered and need attention on the regular. [Wil…

One easy way to make a very accurate clock is with a WiFi-enabled microcontroller like an ESP32 and a display: set up NTP, and you’ll never be off by more than a minute. This water clock proj…

Ever wonder what happens to those digital price tags you see in stores once they run out of juice? In what is a prime example of e-waste, many of those digital price tags are made with non-replacea…

When I was a kid, I was interested in a number of professions that are now either outdated, or have changed completely. One of those dreams involved checking out books and things to patrons, and it…

An unlikely hit of the last few months’ consumer hardware has been a power bank branded by the German confectionery company Haribo. It first gained attention in backpacking circles because of…

Color 3D printing has gone mainstream, and we expect more than one hacker will be unpacking one over the holidays. If you have, say, a color inkjet printer, the process is simple: print. Sure, mayb…

This week Jonathan chats with Konstantinos Margaritis about SIMD programming. Why do these wide data instructions matter? What’s the state of Hyperscan, the project from Intel to power regex …

Back during WWII, Chrysler bodged five inline-6 engines together to create the powerful A57 multibank tank engine. [Maisteer] has some high-revving inline-4 motorcycle engines he’s trying to …

If you exclude certain companies like Peloton, the world of cycling technology is surprisingly open. It’s not perfect by any means, but there are enough open or open-ish standards for many di…

Ever heard of MUMPS? Both programming language and database, it was developed in the 1960s for the Massachusetts General Hospital. The goal was to streamline the increasingly enormous timesink that…

Over on YouTube [Drake] from the [styropyro] channel investigates what happens when you take an enormous tungsten incandescent light bulb and pump 30,000 watts through it. The answer: it burns brig…

Who’s interested in a brand new, from-scratch boundary representation (BREP) kernel? How about one that has no topological naming problem, a web-native parametric CAD front end to play with, …