It is a common grade school experiment to wind some wire around a screw, power it up, and watch it pick up paper clips or other ferrous materials. It is …read more
Though it suffered through decades of naysayers, these days you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would still argue that the commercialization of space has been anything but a …read more
Although the components of wood – cellulose and lignin – are exceedingly cheap and plentiful, combining these into a wood-like structure is not straightforward, despite many attempts to make these …read more
While most of us carry cell phones that have GPS and other location services, they require a significant amount of infrastructure to be useful. Drive from Washington to Alaska like …read more
Want to see cosmic rays? You might need a lot of expensive exotic gear. Nah. [The ActionLab] shows how a cup of coffee or cocoa can show you cosmic rays …read more
These days, you can’t throw a USB stick without hitting something that’s running Linux. It might be a phone, an embedded device, or your TV. Either way, it’s running Linux, …read more
[Dave] wanted an old pickup, and he found a GMC Sierra Grande truck vintage 1970. While it had an unusual amount of options, there weren’t that many high-tech options over …read more
Hackaday.io user [mabe42] works during the week away from their home city and rents a small apartment locally to make this life practical. However, the heating system, a night-storage system, …read more
There are only a few weeks left until Hackaday Europe takes place in Berlin on April 13th and 14th. With only one full day of programming, we simply can’t run …read more
The custom car phenomenon is as old as the second-hand car, yet somehow the decades which stick in the mind as their heyday are the 1960s and 1970s. If you …read more
Solid state electronics have provided lighter weight night vision units that work better than the old-fashioned gear that used photomultiplier tubes, but there was an even older technology as [Our …read more
We’re looking to go back to the Moon. Not just with robots this time, but with astronauts, too! They’ll be doing all kinds of interesting things when they get there. …read more
Not every computer can make use of a disk drive when it needs to store persistent data. Embedded systems especially have pushed the development of a series of erasable programmable …read more
The MAX30105 is an optical sensor capable of a great many things. It can sense particulate matter in the air, or pick up the blinking of an eye. Or, you …read more
During the 1980s, a moral panic swept across the landscape with the mistaken belief that there were Satanic messages hidden in various games, books, and music that at any moment …read more
Finding extraterrestrial life in any form would be truly one of the largest discoveries in humankind’s history, yet after decades of scouring the surface of Mars and investigating other bodies …read more
These days, the bar for home-built projects is high. With 3D printers, CNC, and cheap service providers, you can’t get away with building circuits in a shoe box or an …read more
If you’re big into the soldering iron scene, you’ve probably heard of the AxxSolder project. Now, it’s been updated with a whole host of nifty new features. It’s AxxSolder 3.0! …read more
[Sean Haas] is a “dangerous freelance historian,” and his recent talk at the Vintage Computer Festival in Southern California covers the cryotron — a strange detour on the road to …read more
The unstoppable [jefmer] wrote in to alert me to Pickle Pi, their latest Keebin’-friendly creation. Why “Pickle Pi”? Well, the Pi part should be obvious, but the rest comes from …read more