If you’re getting PCBs professionally made, silkscreen usually comes free as part of the package. However, if you’re making your own, the job is on you. [Tony Goacher] makes his …read more
Building your own handheld gaming console has been a popular project for many years, but recently it has become significantly easier to get a lot of power into a small …read more
Here’s a question for you: when your PCB has a ground plane layer, where do return signals flow? It seems like a trick question, but as [Kristof Mulier] explains, there’s …read more
The Raspberry Pi has provided experimenters with many channels of enquiry, and for me perhaps the furthest into uncharted waters it has led me has come through its camera interface. …read more
The Chandra X-ray Observatory started its mission back in 1999 when Space Shuttle Columbia released it from its payload bay. Originally, it was supposed to serve only a five-year mission, …read more
Love it or hate it, I think this is a really cool idea. [Leo_keeb] has designed a new set of keycaps for the Happy Hacking Keyboard (HHKB). The keycaps’ stems …read more
The hurdy-gurdy is a fascinating string instrument dating from sometime around the 10th century. There is an active community of modern enthusiasts, but one can’t simply walk into a music …read more
RNode is an open source, unrestricted digital radio transceiver based on — but not limited to — the Reticulum cryptographic networking stack. It is another interesting project in what we …read more
What in the world could an accessory for an obsolete audio medium possibly have to do with keeping all your unruly bits and pieces in order? First of all, we’re …read more
For fans of the iconic anime Akira, there’s only one way to traverse the mean streets of post-apocalyptic neo-Tokyo, and that’s the futuristic mount of motorcycle gang leader Shôtarô Kaneda. …read more
A friend of ours once described computers as “high-speed idiots.” It was true in the 80s, and it appears that even with the recent explosion in AI, all computers have …read more
[Hunter Adams] has written a secondary bootloader for the RP2040 that uses an IR link and can be extended to behave like a polite worm virus. This allows the easy …read more
A great majority of hackers build a clock at some point. It’s a great way to get familiar with electronics and (often) microcontrollers, and you get to express some creativity …read more
Among all the amazing technologies that were promised to us, there is one that is much more egregious than the lack of flying cars and real hovering hoverboards: the lack …read more
Numbers stations are a weird phenomenon where odd voices read out long strings of numbers or random codewords to the confusion of the vast majority of the listening audience. If …read more
The study of audio technology has a lot of fascinating branches, and one or two of them even take the curious engineer not into electronics but into architecture. There’s the …read more
Video may have killed the radio star, but cell phones and smart phones all but killed the pager. They still exist, of course, but only in very niche applications. [João …read more
The actions of certain large social networks have recently highlighted how a small number of people possess significant power over the masses and how this power is sometimes misused. Consequently, …read more
For months, there has been a rising fear that we may have to say farewell to the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it began to send back garbled data. Now, in …read more
Full disclosure: [Óscar] isn’t nine now, but he was in 1988 when he wrote LOCS, a drawing program in Z80 assembly modeled after Logo. You can see a demo of …read more