Star Wars Mouse Droid is a Rebel Rave Machine
When does a droid need a party button? When it's an Imperial Mouse Droid that got a makeover from Sabine Wren. The post Star Wars Mouse Droid is a Rebel Rave Ma…
Get Hands On: Maker Faire Bay Area Is For Making
Maker Faire is at its best when you’re not just looking—you’re making. This weekend on Mare Island, you can solder a wearable EMF explorer, turn an old T-s…
Solar Powered Traffic Monitoring
[Marios Christoforou] recently undertook a Computer Engineering degree at the University of Cypress. His final year project involved implementing a solar-powere…
Reconstructing Device Firmware from SPI Reads
If you wanted to extract the firmware from a mystery device, you might pull the flash chip out of it and toss it into a reader. But if you only …read more
Audio Spectrum Analyzer on an ESP32 Display Board
A slick spectrum analyzer used to be the kind of thing that would have been tricky to include in a DIY project, but as [Mirko “mircemk” Pavleski] de…
A Tiny Toy Synth For Smaller Computers
Even for the non-musical among us there is a lot of fun to be had with a simple synthesiser and sequencer, as the different controls can be manipulated to show …
Modern USB Controllers On Win98 (and up)
[Yeo Kheng Meng] has a problem: he likes Windows 98, but he also likes his 2020 ThinkPad, which only has an xHCI USB controller– you know, the kind needed…
Smelting Bog Ore As It Should Be Done
Sometimes along comes a hack with a personal angle, and in a video showing Irish bog ore smelting, we find an appropriate follow up to a Hackaday expedition bac…
A Mini’s Infotainment System and the Joys of Aftermarket Car Parts
Although [Arkandas] disclaims any interest in being a ‘car guy’, this is somewhat ironic in light of the sheer amount of modding he has performed on…
Why AI Made Me a Better Principal
The true metric of AI in school leadership is not time saved, but the presence and clarity restored to daily decision-making.
The Cost of Unchecked Assumptions: Fewer Male Teachers, More Baby Slop
In this episode of This Week with EdSurge, two reporters explain why it is so important to trust but verify teacher motivations and educational videos.
I Used AI to Build AI-Resistant Assignments
A teacher created an app to fight cheating — and discovered a bigger takeaway.
High Schools Need a New Model for a New Economy
Career-connected learning, not just college readiness, will prepare students for jobs that keep shifting.
Why Would Anyone Opt for Virtual Kindergarten?
As a researcher, I knew the evidence. As a father, I learned that when making decisions for your child, emotions matter as well.
Reality Bites: Students Say They Face Stark Challenges After High School
A new national survey finds a widening gap between classroom preparation and postgraduation life.
What Should Students Still Have to Do for Themselves?
Two educators grapple with the same question from opposite perspectives.
Translating Dignity, Not Just Language
Automated platforms can translate messages in seconds, but as a school principal, I've learned that true belonging requires a human connection ...
I Went from Rising Senior to Teacher. Here’s What I Learned
A high school student creates an online class for middle schoolers — and gains perspective on teaching.
Early Childhood Education Teachers Grapple with Screen Time
The AAP’s new guidance helps, but putting it into practice in classrooms remains challenging.
We Must Stop Using AI to ‘Level-Down’ Our Students
How AI deprived my students of the reading struggle they needed to succeed — and five better ways to use it.
A JavaScript OS for the ESP32
Given the incredible power of modern microcontrollers, we’ve seen quite a few attempts to turn them into more general purpose computers over the years. Kr…
Myst on the Atari 2600
Although the Atari 2600 was a hugely popular game console in the late 70s, its hardware specs were limited, to say the least. For a dedicated game console of th…
Why Raindrops Make for Pretty Good Antennae
A good rule of thumb is that everything that can interact with electromagnetic (EM) radiation is an antenna, which includes our mostly-salty-water-containing bo…
ESP32 Replacement for Lighting Display Controller
As a company, NanoLeaf has been producing modular lights that can be easily snapped together into various geometric shapes for around a decade. Similar to the a…
What Does AI Cost When We Skip the Work?
This Week with EdSurge podcast examines what holds up when artificial intelligence moves fast.
The Language Barrier Is the Real Barrier in Edtech
The English-first bias in technology must be addressed.
These Hip-Hop Artists Were Already Teaching
A new degree program credentials hip-hop artists to bring communal, real-world learning to the classroom.
AI Meets ESL, and Teachers Are Intrigued
Can AI chatbots support K-12 emergent bilingual learners without widening gaps?
What Is the AI Cheating Panic Really About?
A conversation with Pat Yongpradit, general manager of global education and workforce policy at Microsoft.
Snapmaker Launches 3D Printing Repository With a Purpose
Do we need another 3D printing model repository? Snapmaker thinks so. The post Snapmaker Launches 3D Printing Repository With a Purpose appeared first on Make: …
Dumpster-dived Window A/C becomes Ground-Source Heat Pump
Heat pumps are great, because they pump heat around, and we often don’t want heat where it is. Need it somewhere else? Pump it! It’s great. It’…
Determining the Body Temperature of Tyrannosaurus rex
One of the most fun challenges in paleontology is determining characteristics of long-dead species like their behavior and body temperature based on nothing but…
Raspberry Pi RAM Restrictions No Big Deal, Frankly
Hacking on Raspberry Pi board internals is one of my favourite topics. I know a bunch of obscure things about these cute little boards. Three years ago, I cover…
Digital Upgrade Brings Medium Format Camera Into the 21st Century
Large format cameras can produce amazing shots, but are a bit too bulky to be practical. Medium format is a different story, as [Wenting] demonstrates with his …
Raspberry Pi Locks Down RAM Upgrades
In a recent video [Jeff Geerling] addresses an issue discovered with the Raspberry Pi firmware, specifically how since around 2024 the firmware locks down what …
Tiny Scratch-Built Cyberdeck is in Mint Condition
[Salim Benbouziyane] shows off his TN Deck, a tiny custom cyberdeck built into an Altoids tin. It’s a skillful build that really makes the most of the ava…
A Computer Terminal the Old Way
Here in 2026 if we need a terminal the chances are we fire one up on our computer and continue on our way without a thought. What we are doing …read more
Learning Commons Launches Open Platform for K-12 Edtech
The CZI-backed initiative helps educators and developers use state standards, curricula, and datasets to create and evaluate classroom AI, but critics ...
Navigating the Future of Work: A Conversation with JFF’s Maria Flynn
From baseline AI literacy to early career exposure, Jobs for the Future president Maria Flynn shares how education systems can prepare young people for ...
Searching for Dark Matter with a Levitating Magnet
Much of science is performed through inference, with the readings on instruments, a flash of light in heavy water, or the results of parsing through terabytes o…
The Sinclair Spectrum Gets A Desktop GUI
Of the popular 1980s 8-bit computers, it’s fair to say that Sinclair’s ZX Spectrum punched above its weight. Sir Clive’s love of squeezing mor…
Making a Copper-Oxide Photodetector from Scratch
Photodetectors come in a wide variety of constructions and materials, with the Cu2O-based photodetector that [Mad Scientist Creations] demonstrates in a recent …
Hackaday Links: September 20, 2026
Some sad news to start this week off — after 52 years in business, Sherline has announced they are winding down their manufacturing operations. By the end…
Reviving TEMPEST Attacks with an Injected Signal
TEMPEST attacks are often the most effective way to break air-gapped security: rather than directly accessing a computer, the attacker records the system’s unin…
Ski Lift Removes Mice from Chicken Coop
Getting rid of rodents like squirrels, mice, or groundhogs is a lot like digging a hole on the beach. No matter how much you remove, it’ll always fill bac…
World War I Coded Message Appears Cracked, Finally
When you think of wartime cryptography, you probably think of World War II and Enigma, although there were other famous codes used during that war. But in fact,…
Reverse Engineering A Sony Car Stereo LCD
For his own reasons, [Jose Luis Monteiro] (aka [emsyscode]) decided he needed to drive the LCD on a Sony CDX-A250 car stereo’s front panel using an Arduin…
A Bandpass Filter Pulls In The Signals
It’s an unfortunate side effect of proximity to a large transmitter that the received signal can overload a receiver’s front end even when tuned to …
No GPU, No Problem: Flagship LLMs on a GPU-less Teenaged Server
There are lots of reasons to run LLMs locally, from privacy concerns to just wanting to futz about with the technology, but if you want to run the big models, &…
Teardown and Repair of an Insoma Water Timer
Water timers are nifty devices that can water the lawn at set times or keep that vegetable garden from turning into a dustbowl. When [electronupdate] timer refu…
Laser Your Way into Debug Mode on the RP2350
The RP2350 is actually a pretty secure chip, all things considered. It has secure boot, ARMv8’s TrustZone to split secure and non-secure execution, and yo…
FilaDC i10 Cabinet Dries Filament in the Background
The FilaDC i10 filament dehumidifying cabinet from Inslogic/Sunlu takes a gentler approach to drying spools to solve stringy 3D prints. The post FilaDC i10 Cab…
Emulating Memory Access: How Hard Can It Be?
There are so many things we approximate to make life simple. Wires, for example, have no resistance or other strange effects. Crystal oscillators output their e…
The Concertina Goes Electronic
The concertina is an instrument that features heavily in European folk music, of which there are a variety of types. [Xcott Craver] has built one, an anglo conc…
On Chip Debug for (Some) MicroPython
If you’ve used MicroPython much, you know that debugging usually amounts to printing a few things out, trying your code out, and then repeating. But [ghi-…
Sony’s First Computer
In 1982, desktop computers were coming into their own, and no clear leaders had emerged. But everyone knew they wanted a piece of the action. This led to, among…
Schools Scramble as Budget Cuts Force Reset of Free Lunch Programs
Parents, students and schools alike are navigating the changes in CEP eligibility after funding cuts.
Making a Digital Music Player for Cassette Decks
In the cross-over between the era of tapes into that of MP3s, you’d see quite a few of those special cassette tapes that were actually digital music playe…
Reconstructing a Pin on a Pin Grid Array Package
Before moving to land grid array (LGA) packaging whereby each pin on the substrate is just a copper pad, processors commonly used pin grid array (PGA) packaging…
Hackaday Podcast Episode 387: Superhuman Clocks, CAN in USB-C, and the Joys of Bare Metal
This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start the episode off by discussing the latest CircuitPython developments before covering some impress…
Brain Control Your Appliance, Sort Of
We aren’t sure we subscribe to [Upside Down Labs] description that their Neuro PlayGround Lite (NPG Lite) actually constitutes brain control in the scienc…
This Week in Security: Flock Cameras Are Old, Microsoft Patches Patches, and Researchers attack SSH
Leak site Distributed Denial of Secrets has released a dump of the filesystems of a Flock camera, and Micah Lee has published a dive into the contents. Apparen…
Meta Portal Given New Life As Extended Display
The Meta Portal and associated devices are effectively defunct, having been abandoned by the company in 2022. If you’ve still got one at home, you might b…
TV Audio Tube Makes a Transceiver
It’s not often we see a tube project here, so [Helge Fykse]’s PCL86 transceiver is a welcome find. If you know anything about the European Pro-Elect…
Robot Football Is Getting Serious At Maker Faire Rome
RoboCup’s humanoids have played their first 11-a-side match. This October, some of thesame problems — balance, vision, autonomy and plenty of debugging — …
Welcome To The Light…In The Maker Faire Dark Room
Makers have always been at the forefront of new technology, both as inventors and as innovators. From their beginnings in the early 20th century to their ubiqui…
Tour the Hidden Worlds of ILM
ILM's Rebel Hideout is the real-life galactic center of the Star Wars universe. But it isn't the only theme room there. The post Tour the Hidden Worlds of ILM a…
Keep Your Back Cool While Others Melt
With an El Niño event in full swing those of us in the northern hemisphere have just had a roasting hot summer, and those in the southern are about to …re…
Why Wave Energy is the Final Frontier of Renewable Energy
With the Earth’s atmosphere being effectively just a less dense fluid than the oceans around us, it’s reasonable to ask why we got wind turbines and…
Eye-D Badge Catches Your Attention
Head out to your next corporate conference, and you’ll probably be handed a little paper badge in a plastic holder so people can learn what to call you (o…
FCC ISM Rules May Shatter Lora Mesh Communities
Although everyone has their own reasons for exploring a new hobby, one of the driving factors behind the popularity of Meshtastic and MeshCore has been the incr…
An Enhanced Game Boy Advance
[Bucket Mouse] has long been a fan of the various iterations of the Nintendo Game Boy. Now, he’s turned his eye to the Game Boy Advance, building an enhan…
Printing a Clock Fit for a Pope
When it comes to clockwork, there is a spectrum — some people love the ticking, and some people hate it, while most fall into the broad middle of indiffer…
Recreating Unobtainable Diagnostic Tools For The Jaguar XJ220
If you own a Jaguar XJ220 or the rarer XJR-15, you’re probably not short on money or real estate. You may, however, be finding it hard to lay your hands &…
The Missing Middle: Why Kids Still Struggle to Read After Third Grade
What happens when middle school students hit the reading comprehension wall.
A (Maker Faire) Robot Party In The Foundry
There’s no party like a robot party! And this year at Maker Faire Bay Area that party will take place on the Foundry floor with (almost) every kind of rob…
Petoi Quaddle, a Robotic Pet for Everyone
Petoi's new Quaddle robot is their most capable and affordable quadruped yet. The post Petoi Quaddle, a Robotic Pet for Everyone appeared first on Make: DIY Pro…
Round AMOLED Badge Does All Kinds Of Cool Stuff
[curisama] has put together a project simply entitled The Badge. It’s simple enough, being a little round screen that you wear. Only, it does a wide varie…
A Super-Accurate Clock Using a Tiny Microcontroller
DCF77 is a German VLF transmitting station that broadcasts a time signal across Europe on 77.5 kHz. Thus a common sight in a European home is a clock emblazoned…
Tips To Model Your Next CNC Cabinet in CAD Before Buying Anything
[Clough42] has started a new CNC control cabinet build, and uses it as an opportunity to demonstrate why he models the whole thing out in CAD before ordering pa…
Coffee Maker Steam Wand Gets a Safe Outlet
Sometimes a hacker has a specific sort of problem, and uses the tools they have to solve it in a way that just might be helpful to someone else. That’s &#…
After 6 Years as Road Ornament a Widescreen Sony Trinitron Lives Again
After previously adopting a big Sony Trinitron CRT TV that had been trying to hitch a ride along the side of a road in Italy for at least six years, …read…
Sampling the Elephant’s Foot and Chornobyl’s Tedious Corium Clean-up
The site of the Chornobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) remains a unique location, as what’s left of the No. 4 reactor is the only place in the world where …
Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy
When we talk about programming in “bare metal,” it basically means writing software that runs right on the hardware with no operating system or abst…
Inside Alabama’s Next-Generation Cybersecurity Classroom
What Yellowstone, Rwanda and AI Taught Me About Change
By viewing our classrooms as interconnected ecosystems, we can move beyond the surface-level debate over technology to focus on cultivating judgment, ...
The “October Blues” Are Coming. Here’s How Teachers Can Beat Them.
Mike Anderson, author of “Rekindle Your Professional Fire,” believes new teachers are especially vulnerable to an emotional letdown after the start of ...
The First Open Healthware Certifications Are In
OSHWA developed a new certification process specific to open health devices. We are extremely proud to highlight the first Open Healthware Certifications. The p…
Make: Live – A Sneak Peek at Maker Faire Bay Area 2026
Join Dale Dougherty and Joan Horvath and Rich Cameron, authors of the new Make: Physics book, to discover how their hands-on physics experiments can transform p…
Makers Of Orange County Unite This Weekend!
INSTAGRAM I WEBSITE I FACEBOOK Maker Faire Orange County is back for another round at the OC Fair & Event Center this weekend, September 12th &13th. The…
Every ZX81 Expansion Card You Ever Wanted, All At Once
The Sinclair ZX81 was a masterpiece of Sir Clive’s desire to get the most out of the least hardware, being about as minimalist as it was possible to get a…
Fixing a Ubiquiti 16-Port PoE Switch With an Extra Hole
After saving a £300, 16-port Ubiquiti network switch from getting tossed into the trash, [Buy It Fix It] got the honor of trying to repair it. With four ports a…
An Open Heart Rate Monitor
If you spend any time near a gym, you may be familiar with Bluetooth heart rate monitors — a small pack of electronics mounted on a strap round the chest …
Writing an ESP32 Bluetooth Printer Driver In Two Acts
[Bas BotBerg] wanted to use a portable Bluetooth thermal printer to run off reports on sensor data collected by an ESP32-C3 microcontroller. But as is so often …
How High-Voltage Current Transformers Monitor the Grid
Being able to monitor voltages and currents is essential for many applications, with the national electrical grid being no exception. The obvious complication h…
A UPS For Your Pi That’s a Little Different
There are many uninterruptible power supply (UPS) solutions for the Raspberry Pi that take the form of HATs with a battery on board, but they’re not suita…
Pulse: a New VHDL Simulator
With VHDL being arguably more deterministic and bullet-proof than Verilog, it’s good to see another open source VHDL simulator joining the fray that is no…
New York and Los Angeles Ban Student-Facing AI (For Now). Should Other Schools Follow?
The bans, coupled with a new APA report, signal a shift from rapid AI adoption toward more deliberate evaluation.
It’s The Speech Synthesiser You Wanted, For The Computer You Had
If you had an 8-bit computer in the 1980s and bought a speech synthesiser for it, what you got was invariably an alophone-based synthesiser using the SP0256 or …
CircuitPython Goes Turbo With Precompiled Functions
It would not be at all original to declare that Python is the new BASIC. Like BASIC, it has been the first programming language for a whole generation of coders…