Having owned an Amiga microcomputer is apparently a little bit like having shaken hands with Shoggoth: no one can escape unchanged from the experience. Thirty-two years on, [Neil] at The …read more
We lost a true legend this week with the passing of NASA astronaut Jim Lovell at the ripe old age of 97. Lovell commanded the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back …read more
These days, if you want to flash some LEDs, you’d probably grab a microcontroller. Maybe you’d go a little more old-school, and grab a 555. However, [Jacob] is even more …read more
Designing a circuit is a lot easier on paper, where components have well-defined values, or lacking that, at least well-defined tolerances. Unfortunately, even keeping percentage tolerances in mind isn’t always …read more
Normally when you think solar projects, you think of big photovoltaic cells. But a photodiode is just an inefficient, and usually much smaller, PV cell. Since [Pocket Concepts]’s Solar_nRF has …read more
There are plenty of conventional timepieces out there in the world; we’ve also featured a great many that are aesthetically beautiful while being unreadably esoteric. This neat “shadow clock” from …read more
If you want to save a little money on a thermal camera, or if you just enjoy making your own, you should have a look at [Evan Yu’s] GitHub repository, …read more
We can’t throw stones. [Leaded Solder] picked up a SparcStation 1+ in 2018 and found it only produced illegal instruction errors. We’re sure he’s like us and meant to get …read more
Over on Hackaday.io our hackers [Angelo] and [Oscarv] are making a replica of the PDP-1. That is interesting in and of itself but the particularly remarkable feature of this project …read more
There was a time when making a cloud chamber with dry ice and alcohol was one of those ‘rite of passage’ type science projects every nerdy child did. That time …read more
Humanity pretty much has Pi figured out at this point. We’ve calculated it many times over and are confident about what it is down to many, many decimal places. However, …read more
Despite the availability of ready-made displays never being better, there are still some hardy experimenters who take on the challenge of making their own. In [Ben Holmen]’s case the display …read more
An old friend of mine at my hackerspace introduced me to the concept of Prototype Zero: The Version that Even Your Own Sweet Mother Isn’t Allowed to See. The idea …read more
Beyblade spinning tops are pretty easy to find at toy shops, department stores, and even some supermarkets. However, the arenas in which the tops do battle? They’re much harder to come …read more
One reason Forth remains popular is that it is very simple to create, but also very powerful. But there’s an even older language that can make the same claim: LISP. …read more
Normally, if you change a file’s extension in Windows, it doesn’t do anything positive. It just makes the file open in the wrong programs that can’t decode what’s inside. However, …read more
‘Hearing voices’ doesn’t have to be worrisome, for instance when software-defined radio (SDR) happens to be your hobby. It can take quite some of your time and attention to pull …read more
In his regular browsing on AliExpress, [Ben Jeffrey] came across something he didn’t understand—a $5 fiber optic to RF cable TV adapter. It was excessively cheap, and even more mysteriously, …read more
Like many early microcomputers, the Commodore VIC-20 did not come with an interna real-time clock built into the system. [David Hunter] has seen fit to rectify that with an add-on …read more