Makerspace Guides

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…

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…

Photodetectors come in a wide variety of constructions and materials, with the Cu2O-based photodetector that [Mad Scientist Creations] demonstrates in a recent …

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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 …

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, &…

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…

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…

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…

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 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…

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-…

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…

Parents, students and schools alike are navigating the changes in CEP eligibility after funding cuts.

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…

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…

This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start the episode off by discussing the latest CircuitPython developments before covering some impress…

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…

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…

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…

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…

RoboCup’s humanoids have played their first 11-a-side match. This October, some of thesame problems — balance, vision, autonomy and plenty of debugging — …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

[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…

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…

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 &…

What happens when middle school students hit the reading comprehension wall.

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'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…

[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…

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…

[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…

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 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…

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 …

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…

By viewing our classrooms as interconnected ecosystems, we can move beyond the surface-level debate over technology to focus on cultivating judgment, ...

Mike Anderson, author of “Rekindle Your Professional Fire,” believes new teachers are especially vulnerable to an emotional letdown after the start of ...

OSHWA developed a new certification process specific to open health devices. We are extremely proud to highlight the first Open Healthware Certifications. The p…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

[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 …

Being able to monitor voltages and currents is essential for many applications, with the national electrical grid being no exception. The obvious complication h…

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…

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…

The bans, coupled with a new APA report, signal a shift from rapid AI adoption toward more deliberate evaluation.

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 …

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…

As any science YouTuber or first-year physics student is quick to point out, the universe is mostly empty space. Not just space itself, but the amount of “…

After the Orion capsule of the Artemis I lunar mission returned to Earth, it was found that massive chunks of its heatshield had been ripped off, posing a serio…

We try to steer clear of politics and societal issues here at Hackaday, so a protest is not usually the sort of thing we’d cover. But we figure it’s…

It is a classic Hackaday situation. You have an Egret GT E-scooter. It has a screen that shows the usual dash stats, but that led to an annoyance. You could …

We’re at a fortunate moment: microcontrollers available at modest prices are edging into the capability level previously reserved for full-fat systems and…

During his continuing analysis of the architecture and microcode of Intel’s highly influential 8087 floating point unit (FPU) co-processor, [Ken Shirriff]…

Clocks are almost the ideal devices to inspire creativity in hackers — they have a simple, well-defined task, but there’s an almost unlimited number of wa…

We tend to think of breaking the sound barrier as a comparatively modern accomplishment, but on a smaller scale, cattle herders have been breaking it for centur…

If you’ve never heard of the Spin Semiconductors FP-1 digital signal processor chip, don’t worry– that just means you haven’t been deep …

You want Retro? We did, when we started our retrocomputing challenge. [Peter] decided that transistors weren’t retro enough, and sent us this lovely homeb…

Although building a table saw out of LEGO is probably not the first thing that comes to mind when you look at those colorful bits of plastic, [Jamie] has been &…

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…

[Andy Huot] has a fantastic-looking infinity mirror digital clock that really raises the bar. It uses high quality components, smart use of RGB LED animations, …

Apple hardware has always been proprietary, sometimes to an extreme. But that’s not to say that it’s impossible to make something that does the same…

The 2026 Hackaday Superconference is just around the corner in November. It’s hard to believe that we’ve been having an annual gathering for so long, but this i…

Launched in 1976, LAGEOS-1 (LAser GEOdynamic Satellite) is unusual in that it contains no instrumentation, no electronics, no power supply, and no means of prop…

Although hard disks weren’t a common feature yet in many home computers in the 1980s, they were becoming increasingly more affordable. For relative meanin…

Among all the machines of the 8-bit home computer era which booted straight to a BASIC prompt, there were a very few that went their own way with another langua…

Folding a sheet of metal in a straight line is one thing, but how does one fold multiple curved lines into a sheet of aluminum without fancy machines? [John] de…

When you see a listing for an Ethernet switch whose specification list is in effect ‘yes’, with a four-digit price tag when new, and with the seller…

For a little while vacuum tubes and semiconductors were fighting a heated battle for dominance, with bipolar junction transistors and 1959’s RCA Nuvistor …

Nintendo has made many game consoles in its long history — one that famously overlaps that of the Ottoman Empire — but only one of them was ever Sup…

In this specially-numbered podcast episode that lines up quite nicely with our Retrocomputing Challenge, Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos met over surprisingl…

The revival in film photography has brought a range of specialist films to tempt the experimenter, as well as increased the popularity of loading your own cartr…

Several times this summer, Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday, the monthly roundup of major security patches for Microsoft products, has included record-breaking n…

One of the things we used to appreciate about broadcast television is that… you kinda just got what you got. You didn’t have to choose beyond pickin…

Using AI in IEP meetings can benefit parents and teachers – if done correctly.

Expressif might not have intended the ESP32-S3 to become an emulation powerhouse, but that’s certainly what has happened. The little microcontroller seems…

Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These day…

As FDM printers keep getting faster, we are forced to deal with a range of bottlenecks, all of which conspire to hold us back from another Benchie world record.…

A fun part of modifying something like a motorbike is that you sometimes have to come up with creative solutions to basic questions, like how you can still acce…

Cytrence Kiwi turns your laptop into a KVM (keyboard/video/mouse), making it an excellent match for Raspberry Pi or other headless projects. The post Cytrence K…

Remember those tiny little droids skittering around the pristine corridors of the Death Star in Star Wars? [heychaostheory] has put together something vaguely a…

There are plenty of ways to capture 3D images or simulations of such if you know what you’re doing with camera hardware and fancy mathematics. However, a …

Nifty little AMOLED screens are easy to get nowadays, and [Sophie D] demonstrates they are both thin and light enough to be worn with OpenChoker, a design for a…

Usually in Tech In Plain Sight, we talk about technology you probably see every day, even if you don’t notice it. But we hope you don’t get to see o…

Drones have become a potent military threat, particularly on the small scale. Nimble multi-rotor drones are fast, difficult to spot, and can cause plenty of har…

E-ink is supposed to be the electronic version of dead-tree paper, but there’s one enormous difference: how you get your images and text onto it. For pape…

Origami is a wonderful art form, but as a new project from the Shibaura Institute of Technology demonstrates, it can also have applications in the world of wear…