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Many of us grew up with dreams of piloting a forklift one day. Sadly, most warehouses take a dim view of horseplay with these machines, so few of us get …read more

Are you familiar with Huffman encoding? That’s where you pick shorter codes for more frequent letters. Morse code is the same way, in that the most-used letters are the shortest. …read more

What do you do with an old 3D printer? They’re full of interesting components, after all, from switches and motors to lovely smooth rails. [Mukesh Sankhla] had a great idea—why …read more

The ESP32 is s remarkably powerful microcontroller, where its dual-core processor and relatively high clock speed can do some impressive work. But getting this microcontroller designed for embedded systems to …read more

Vintage hi-fi gear can be very attractive, particularly compared to modern stuff. However, when this stuff starts getting into its third or fourth decade after production, things start to wear …read more

While you tend to think of diamonds as ornamental gemstones, diamonds also have many important industrial uses, and many of those diamonds are now synthetic polycrystalline diamonds. How are they …read more

Altermagnetism is effectively a hybrid form of ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism that might become very useful in magnetic storage as well as spintronics in general. In order to practically use it, …read more

[CNLohr] has been tinkering with some fun parts of late. He’d found out that ordinary LCD screens could be used as simple touch sensors, and he had to try it …read more

There’s a Blue Bendix in Texas, and thanks to [Usagi Electric] it’s the oldest operating computer in North America.  The Bendix G-15, a vacuum tube computer originally released in 1956, …read more

Readers may recall when we first covered the $5 Xiaomi LYWSD03MMC temperature and humidity sensor back in 2020. Prolific hacker [Aaron Christophel] wrote a custom firmware for the affordable gadget …read more

Although the world of the X86 instruction set architecture (ISA) and related ecosystem is often accused of being ‘stale’ and ‘bloated’, we have seen a flurry of recent activity that …read more

The Swiss Army knife is the most well-known multitool, combining a bunch of functionality into a compact package. [Jeff Gough] decided to build a custom example featuring a selection of …read more

There are certain tasks that humans perform every day that are notoriously difficult for computers to figure out. Identifying objects in pictures, for example, was something that seems fairly straightforward …read more

LEGO make lots of neat floral arrangements these days, and even little Christmas trees, too. While they’re fun to build out of tiny little blocks, they’re a little small for …read more

Every scout knows how to read a compass, and that there is a magnetic north and a true north. That’s because the Earth’s magnetic field isn’t exactly aligned with the …read more

Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], and [Johan Wheeler] (going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the challenge of outdoing their previous creations. Last year’s CH32 Fireplace brought an animated …read more

There are plenty of hard jobs out there, like founding your country’s nuclear program, or changing the timing chain on a BMW diesel. Making your own mechanical watch from scratch …read more

[mars91] had an interesting problem to solve—his girlfriend often requested Diet Coke, but yelling for one across the apartment was frustrating and impractical. A dedicated Diet Coke button seemed like …read more

Twas the week before Christmas when Elliot and Dan sat down to unwrap a pre-holiday bundle of hacks. We kicked things off in a seasonally appropriate way with a PCB …read more

Embossed leather belts can be deliciously stylish. However, the tooling for making these fashionable items is not always easy to come by, and it rarely comes cheap. What do we …read more