The Hackaday 2025 Component Abuse Challenge is all about abusing electronic components in the service of making them do things they were never intended to. It’s not the 2025 Food Abuse Challe…

We’re always a wee bit suspicious about articles that announce some sort of “World’s first” accomplishment. With a couple of hundred thousand years of history, most of which…

If you’ve ever combed boxes of old tech detritus in search of a nugget of pure gold, we know you’ll appreciate the excitement of discovering, in a dusty University of Utah storeroom, a …

A while back [Clint Basinger] of Lazy Game Reviews fame purchased a rare 1980s Halikan laptop. When he received the parcel, at first glance, everything seemed in order. Upon opening the original la…

[Bob] calls his custom 16-bit computer “Bob’s Unnecessary Retro Processor” or BURP for short. While we suppose it is technically unnecessary, we love the look of it, and we hope h…

Have you ever imagined what the Nintendo Switch would look like if Nintendo had produced it in the mid-1990s? [Joel Creates] evidently did, because that’s exactly what this retro CRT-toting S…

One of the fun things about writing for Hackaday is that it takes you to the places where our community hang out. I was in a hackerspace in a university town the other evening, busily chasing my en…

Have you ever looked at a small development board like an Arduino or an ESP8266 board and thought you’d like one with just a few different features? Well, [Kai] has put out a fantastic guide …

As humans, we tend to consider our emotional states as a direct response to the experiences of our lives. Traffic may make us frustrated, betrayal may make us angry, or the ever-grinding wear of mo…

Using a speaker as a microphone is a trick old enough to have become common knowledge, but how often do you see the hack reversed? As part of a larger project to measure the acoustic power of a sub…

With batteries being such an integral part of smartphones, it’s little wonder that extending the period between charging and battery replacement has led to many theories and outright myths ab…

Just because you are paranoid doesn’t mean people aren’t out to get you. Do you think your soldering iron is after you? Well, [nanofix] asks (and answers): Is My Soldering Iron Dangerou…

Years ago, no math education was complete without understanding how to compute a square root. Today, you are probably just reaching for a calculator, or if you are writing a program, you’ll p…

Over on YouTube, [Ben Eater] pursues that classic 8-bit sound. In this video, [Ben] integrates the MOS Technology 6581 Sound Interface Device (SID) with his homegrown 6502. The 6581 SID was famousl…

The arrival of cheap thermal printer mechanisms over the last few years has led to a burst of printer hacking in our community, and we’re sure many of you will like us have one knocking aroun…

If you have a Nest thermostat of the first or second generation, you probably noticed it recently became dumber. Google decided to pull the plug on the servers that operate these devices, turning t…

Back in the innocent days of Windows 98 SE, I nearly switched to Linux on account of how satisfied I was with my Windows experience. This started with the Year of the Linux Desktop in 1999 that sta…

Ever get to the train station on time, find your platform, and then stare at the board showing your train is 20 minutes late? Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) may run like clockwork most days, but a h…

Despite the best efforts of modern medicine, Huntington’s disease is a condition that still comes with a tragic prognosis. Primarily an inherited disease, its main symptoms concern degenerati…

If you’re familiar with electrical slip rings as found in motors and the like you’ll know them as robust assemblies using carefully chosen alloys and sintered brushes, able to take the …