Hackaday

3D printing has allowed the hobbyist to turn out all sorts of interesting chess sets with either intricate details or things that are too specialized to warrant a full scale injection molded produc…

DIY gaming handhelds have long been the purview of the advanced hacker, with custom enclosures and fiddly soldering making it a project not for the feint of heart. [Beth Le] now brings us a custom …

In the world of retro gaming, some legends never die – especially the ‘phantom’ PSP, Sony’s mythical handheld that never saw the light of day. While that elusive device remains a …

If you’re like us, you’ve got at least one bin dedicated to keeping the random hardware you just can’t bear to part with. In our case it’s mostly populated with the nuts and…

If you need to measure the temperature of something, chances are good that you could think up half a dozen ways to do it, pretty much all of which would involve some kind of thermometer, thermistor…

Sometimes, hardware projects get cancelled before they have a chance to make an impact, often due to politics or poor economic judgment. The Tsushin Booster for the PC Engine is one such project, p…

As cheap microcontrollers have given us an impressive range of test equipment trinkets to play with, it’s easy to forget some of the old standabys. A curve tracer for example, the relatively …

Let’s say you’ve got a fun little organization that does things together under a collective branding or banner. Maybe you want to celebrate that fact with some visually appealing signag…

The 2024 Hackaday Supercon is on in Pasadena, but if you couldn’t make it to sunny California this year, don’t worry. We’ve got a live stream of the main stage talks, and all of t…

Warping! It messes up your 3D printed parts, turning them into a useless, dimensionally-inaccurate mess. You can design your parts around it, or try and improve your printer in various ways. Or, yo…

A button that stopped working has probably led to more than a few smashed remotes over the years. Fortunately [pescado99] has shared a beautifully simple cure for dead or dying remote buttons: grap…

[David Shadoff] has a clear soft spot for the NEC console systems and has been collecting many tools and data about them. When developing with these old systems, having a way to upload code quickly…

Many MacOS users are probably used by now to the annoyance that comes with unsigned applications, as they require a few extra steps to launch them. This feature is called Gatekeeper and checks for …

Keyboards! They’ve been almost universally made out of plastic since the dawn of the microcomputer era. Meanwhile, wood is a rather desirable material and it lends itself rather well to touch…

In a world of digital monotony, the Avo DA14 digital multimeter, with its vintage J Nixie tube charm, is a refreshing gem. Recently refurbished by [Thomas Scherrer], this multimeter video review is…

Cameras are a funny rabbit hole to fall down as a hacker, because we have well over a century of items to pick and choose from, a lot of which can be had for relative pennies. In my case I have mor…

Nerf blasters are fun and all, but they’re limited by the fact they have to be safe for children to play with. [Flasutie] faced no such restrictions when building his giant 40 mm foam dart la…

TVs used to be round, and the GE M935AWL is a great example of that. [bandersentv] found one of these ancient sets, but found it had a “cataract”—a large ugly discoloration on the tube.…

At this point in the tech dystopia cycle, it’s no surprise that the initial purchase price of a piece of technology is likely not the last payment you’ll make. Almost everything these d…

Volumetric displays are simply cool. Throw some LEDs together, take advantage of persistence of vision, and you’ve really got something. [Nick Electronics] shows us how its done with his neat…

As far as hobbies go, ham radio tends to be on the more expensive side. A dual-band mobile radio can easily run $600, and a high-end HF base station with the capability of more than 100 watts will …

While most operating systems are written in C and C++, KolibriOS is written in pure x86 assembly and as a result small and lightweight enough to run off a standard 1.44 MB floppy disk, as demonstra…

Wired has a fascinating story this week, about the length Sophos has gone to for the last 5 years, to track down a group of malicious but clever security researchers that were continually discoveri…

Face it, we’ve all at some time or other looked at our hot glue guns, and thought “I wonder if I could use that for 3D printing!”. [Proper Printing] didn’t just think it, he…

A decade ago, [Jouke Waleson] bought a Dutch ‘model 1950’ PTT (The Dutch Postal Service) rotary-dial telephone of presumably 1950s vintage manufactured by a company called Standard Elec…

Gyroscopes are perfect to damper short impulses of external forces but will eventually succumb if a constant force, like gravity, is applied. Once the axis of rotation of the mass aligns with the a…

If you’ve ever wondered what goes on in the ground facilities of a satellite TV operation, you could go banging on the doors or your local station. You’d probably get thrown out in shor…

We hate to admit it, but whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios. One of these days, we’ll be forced to write obituar…

Out of curiosity, I redrew the Supercon Vectorscope badge schematics in KiCad last year. As you might suspect, going from PCB to schematic is opposite to the normal design flow of KiCad and most ot…

The name BeOS is one which tends to evoke either sighs of nostalgia or blank stares, mostly determined by one’s knowledge of the 1990s operating system scene. Originally released in 1995 by B…

For a first try at an electric vehicle conversion we’re guessing that most would pick a small city car as a base vehicle, or perhaps a Kei van. Not [LiamTronix], who instead chose to do it wi…

Most of us will probably have seen Nintendo’s latest gadget pop up recently. Rather than a Switch 2 announcement, we got greeted with a Nintendo-branded alarm clock. Featuring a 2.8″ co…

Electrostatic motors are now common in MEMS applications, but researchers at the University of Wisconsin and spinoff C-Motive Technologies have brought macroscale electrostatic motors back. [via MS…

From the 60s to perhaps the mid-00s, the path to musical stardom was essentially straight with very few forks. As a teenager you’d round up a drummer and a few guitar players and start jammin…

Most of us using desktop computers, and plenty of us on laptops, have some sort of fan or pump installed in our computer to remove heat and keep our machines running at the most optimum temperature…

Applying solder paste to a new custom PCB is always a little nerve-racking. One slip of the hand, and you have a smeared mess to clean up. To make this task a little easier, [Max Scheffler] built t…

This week, Jonathan Bennett and Dan Lynch chat with Josh Bressers, VP of Security at Anchore, and host of the Open Source Security and Hacker History podcasts. We talk security, SBOMs, and how Josh…

We see a fair few glitcher projects, especially the simpler voltage glitchers. Still, quite often due to their relative simplicity, they’re little more than a microcontroller board and a few …

Although we think of air-to-air radar as a relatively modern invention, it first made its appearance in WWII. Some late war fighters featured the AN/APS-13 Tail Warning Radar to alert the pilot whe…

Even in the advanced world of 2024, robots are still better in science fiction than in reality. Star Trek gave us the erudite and refined Data, Rogue One gave us the fierce yet funny K-2SO, and Big…