Hackaday.com

Analog dials used to be a pretty common way of displaying information on test equipment and in industrial applications. They fell out of favor as more advanced display technologies became …read more

[MindYourDecisions] presents a Babylonian tablet dating back to around 1800 BC that shows that the hypotenuse of a unit square is the square root of two or 1.41421. How did …read more

[Folaefolc] was craving a new keyboard build a few weeks ago and got inspired by the humble 3.5″ floppy disk. So much so that he decided to make a split …read more

Most RC planes follow a simple control scheme: elevators for pitch, rudder for yaw, and ailerons for roll. This one-to-one mapping keeps things straightforward, and fewer actuators means less weight. …read more

Earlier this year [Skyhawkson] got ahold of a Apollo-era printed circuit board which he believes was used in a NASA test stand. He took high quality photos of both sides …read more

It is hard to imagine that there was a time when having a keyboard and screen readily available was a real problem for people who wanted to experiment with computers. …read more

What if GPS had existed in 1565? No satellites or microelectronics, sure—but let’s play along. Imagine the bustling streets of Antwerp, where merchants navigated the sprawling city with woodcut maps. …read more

[Kevin] doesn’t stock zener diodes anymore. Why? Because for everything he used to use zeners, he now uses TL431 bandgap voltage references. These look like zener diodes but have an …read more

When it comes to space exploration, we often think of billion-dollar projects—NASA’s Artemis missions, ESA’s Mars rovers, or China’s Tiangong station. Yet, a group of U.S. students at USC’s Rocket …read more

We received belated word this week of the passage of Ward Christensen, who died unexpectedly back in October at the age of 78. If the name doesn’t ring a bell, …read more

These days, oscilloscope hacking is all about enabling features that the manufacturer baked into the hardware but locked out in the firmware. Those hacks are cool, of course, but back …read more

A common part used to create a high voltage is a CRT flyback transformer, having been a ubiquitous junk pile component. So many attempts to use them rely on brute …read more

Last time we checked in on [Inkbox], he had made a 16-bit CPU in Excel. Impressive, but not really practical. Presumably, his latest project isn’t any more practical, but we …read more

Flight time remains the Achilles’ heel of electric multi-rotor drones, with even high-end commercial units struggling to stay airborne for an hour. Enter Modovolo, a startup that’s shattered this limitation …read more

While the Sahara Desert is an important ecosystem in its own right, its human neighbors in the Sahel would like it to stop encroaching on their environment. [Andrew Millison] took …read more

[My Ham Radio Journey] wanted to see if a “common person” (in his words) could build an effective vertical ham radio antenna. If you look at the video below, the …read more

[Dale Cook] has cats, and as he readily admits, cats are jerks. We’d use stronger language than that, but either way it became a significant impediment to making progress with …read more

[Japhy Riddle] was tired of creating pixel art. He went to subpixel art. The idea is that since each color pixel is composed of three subpixels, your display is actually …read more

When you tear into an old piece of test equipment, you’re probably going to come up against some surprises. That’s especially true of high-precision gear like oscilloscopes from the time …read more

Boats normally get around with propellers or water jets for propulsion. Occasionally, they use paddles. [Engineering After Hours] claims he is “changing the boat game forever” with his new 3D …read more