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…

It’s a truism that a computer must boot before it begins to operate. Nowadays that bootstrapping process is automatic, but in the case of the very first home computers, it was very much a han…

In previous episodes of this long-running series looking at the world of high-quality audio, at every point we’ve stayed in the real world of physical audio hardware. From the human ear to th…

The flip-flop, in whichever of its several forms you encounter it, is a staple of logic design. Any time that you need to hold onto something, count, or shift bits, out it comes. We expect a flip-f…

Although most modern cars have moved to using proprietary components nearly everywhere, especially when it comes to infotainment systems, for a brief moment which peaked in the 90s and 00s most car…

One characteristic of adding PV solar to homes is a massive increase in high-voltage and high-current DC installations. With this comes a need for suitable breakers, but without the requisite knowl…

If you were asked to make an e-commerce website in 2025, what language would you reach for? Show of hands: JavaScript? Go? Pascal? Well, there was at least one taker for that last one: [jns], and h…

They say that, sometimes, less is more. That would certainly apply to photomicrography, where you want to take pictures of tiny things. Nikon agrees, and they sponsor the Small World contest every …

Such are the breadth of functions delivered by integrated circuits, it’s now rare to see a simple small-signal transistor project on these pages. But if you delve back into the roots of solid…

We often take for granted how easy it is to get information in today’s modern, Internet-connected world. Especially around electronics projects, datasheets are generally a few clicks away, as…

We’ll be honest. If you had told us a few decades ago we’d teach computers to do what we want, it would work some of the time, and you wouldn’t really be able to explain or predic…

Over on YouTube [CuriousMarc] and [TubeTimeUS] team up for a multi-part series E&L MMD-1 Mini-Micro Designer Restoration. The E&L MMD-1 is a microcomputer trainer and breadboard for the Int…

If I mention nuclear reactor accidents, you’d probably think of Three Mile Island, Fukushima, or maybe Chernobyl (or, now, Chornobyl). But there have been others that, for whatever reason, ar…

There’s a part you’ll find in almost every mains powered switch mode power supply that might at first appear to have only one application. An optocoupler sits between the low voltage an…