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…
Handheld Atari 2600 Packs a CRT
We covered [Nick Bild]’s mini Atari console using original devices not so long ago, and today he’s back with the same console wrapped up with a CRT …
Repairing a Couple of Very Expensive Registered DDR5 RAM Sticks
It’s definitely a sign of the times when repair shops get handed sticks of registered ECC DDR5 RAM by businesses to try and fix, rather than just tossing …
2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Dungeons of Daggorath, But Without Quite So Much Typing
People mod games all the time, but it’s not every day someone mods Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80. [Nick Bild] did exactly that, adding joystick sup…
ESP32 As Your Raspberry Pi’s Linux Wireless Co-processor
A laptop with no wireless connectivity feels like a rarity – but when you shop for powerful Linux single-board computers (SBCs), it is pretty common to se…
How Coding Can Cultivate Deep Civic Engagement
Incorporating learning from historic social movements into tech education ignites student interest in shaping the future.
How Some Small, Rural Districts Are Winning the Attendance Struggle
New study finds that small and rural districts lead the fight against absenteeism.
Don’t Try this At Home, Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Edition
Transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of those things that seems too wacky to be true. Depression not responding to treatment? Let’s smack you upside t…
The Commodore 64 Keyboard Font, For Everyone
There are some classic fonts which appeared in one place and became almost iconic, yet never made it into the digital age. The font on the Commodore 64 keyboard…
Don’t Worry, This R/C Airship is Supposed To Be On Fire
We’ve had a lot of flying hacks here over the years, and that includes just about any way to get airborne you can think of — but very few of ……
Upgrading An iPhone Lens To The Max
The camera in a typical mobile phone is now at a standard at which it can be considered a serious device rather than a toy, such has been the effort …read…
DIY Algae Biodiesel is Harder Than You Think
There’s one thing [Silent H] wants you to know before you watch his video about making biodiesel, embedded below: he started this project before he’…
SmallTV Hacking With Surprisingly Little Fuss
We’ve seen the GeekMagic SmallTV line of devices before — these cheap gadgets combine a microcontroller and a display in a little plastic case that …
Scientists Create Hexagonal Packed Ice at Extreme Pressures
One of the problems with planetary science is that you generally cannot easily investigate the exact conditions in their interior, so you’re left to extra…
Why Do So Many Teachers Crash in October?
In this episode, author Mike Anderson discusses ways teachers can fight off the October Blues.
The Missing Middle: Why Kids Still Struggle to Read After Third Grade
What happens when middle school students hit the reading comprehension wall.
USB-C PD Tamed with this Analyzer
USB-C Power Delivery (PD) has been a boon to anyone working with low-voltage DC power, because at a stroke it replaces a vast array of wall warts, power supplie…
A New Type of LLM on the Block: Decision-Making Models
Large language models (LLMs) output language, but they are commonly tasked with making a decision or classification of some kind instead of writing an essay or …
Two Microcontrollers Talking, All It Needs is an LED
There are some projects that seem at first sight to be easy, but anyone who tries them finds a whole heap of unexpected problems and turns to the off-the-shelf …
3D-Printed Filter Removes Most Microplastics From Water
With the rise of synthetic polymers in everywhere from clothing, packaging and beyond, we have also seen a corresponding rise in fragments of these polymers in …
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 ...
Ambition, Thy Name is a 3D Printed Transonic R/C Jet
Building anything that flies from scratch is an ambitious undertaking, even if it’s ‘just’ radio-controlled. 3D printing the aircraft isn̵…
How to Grow a Giant Crystal from Copper Sulfate
Copper sulfate crystals are probably among one of the prettiest crystals you can grow at home, with even just a simple setup with some copper scrap and vinegar …
Failing to Make a Fanless PC
The discerning modern gamer’s quest is to find a quieter computer without sacrificing performance. That proves challenging when modern components are high…
How A British Engineer Homebrewed The Quietest Carbine
Hollywood has a lot to answer for when it comes to “silencers” on firearms. On screen, a suppressed pistol makes a pinging thud, and the bad guy in …
Building a Cheap, Dexterous Robot Hand
Most of the time, assuming nothing’s gone wrong with them, we take our hands so much for granted that it’s easy to forget what remarkable pieces of engineering …
The FPGA Chronicles: Open Source It
Last time, we looked at getting started with the GOWIN tools and a Tang Nano 20K FPGA. The software from GOWIN isn’t bad, but it isn’t open source, …
Will Kids Pay the Price for AI Panic?
A backlash against classroom AI is sweeping public schools. But as New Mexico shows, blanket bans risk robbing students of early literacy interventions.
Porting Video Games to VHS
Although VHS-based games have existed for about as long as VHS players have sat in millions of living rooms, they always tended to be rather sparse gaming exper…
Conveyor Belt GBoard Brings the Keys to You
It must be April in October again, because Google Japan has a new, hilariously impractical reimagining of the keyboard: a conveyor belt. This time it’s on…
It’s GW-BASIC, Jim, But Not as We Know It
Back in the old days the IBM-PC, like most of its contemporary computers, shipped with BASIC in ROM. Even after it stopped living in ROM, IBM-Compatibles shippe…
Upgrading a Benchtop Laser for Megawatt Power
One fascinating thing about a pulsed laser is that, though the average power may be measured in watts or milliwatts, the peak power can easily reach millions of…
Hackaday Links: October 3, 2026
If you’re interested in aerospace, there’s an excellent chance you’ve heard the rumor that NASA is trying to get its SR-71 flying again. Or at…
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.
Tearing Down a Heavy Oscilloscope
When [Thomas] showed his 1960s-era Tektronix 545A oscilloscope in a recent video, it made us both nostalgic and happy. Nostalgic because we miss the days when o…
AVR Laptop Pushes the Limits of 8-Bit
If you saw a device that had a laptop form factor playing sound and video, alt-tabbing over to play a game or take some notes, then back to the video …rea…
Motion Control via Belt
[Tolko] wanted to encourage kids to have some physical activity, but noted that they only wanted to play games. That led to BlobJump, a Raspberry Pi-based game …
AI on Your Gaming PC
If you want to experiment with LLMs, you typically have a choice of sending your requests to someone else’s computer or fielding a very large GPU and CPU …
The Big Moon Plot
When you look into the night sky, you can’t help but wish to bring the outer worlds to your doorstep. One of the best ways to do that is to …read mo…
Debloat The Internet With a Self-Hosted Compressing Proxy
It’s no secret that the size of webpages has been slowly — or not so slowly — creeping up over the years. Does a simple website need to span m…
Play PlayStation 2 and XBox 1 Games on Your Jailbroken PS5
Whereas PlayStation 3 and earlier were rather specialized consoles, today’s consoles like the PlayStation 5 are essentially x86-based gaming PCs in a fanc…
Own The OSD Chip In Your Cheap Composite Monitor
[Ogrinz Labs] has built a Robbie the Robot suit, which is super-cool, but has a huge flaw. When inside the suit, he’s too tall to do what the original Rob…
That’s No Moon… That’s an Exoplanet!
It wasn’t that long ago that a science teacher would have told students that there was no evidence of planets around other star systems. Even more recentl…
Is This The Smallest Internet Radio?
Internet radios have been a thing in some form for the last quarter century, and the advent of cheap networked microcontrollers has made them easier than ever t…
2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Lunar Lander on the PDP-1
A lot of the retrocomputing world is focused on the 1980s, and for good reason– the home computer revolution was in full swing in that decade, and there i…
Electronic Busy Board is Fun for Kids and Hackers
While you may not be familiar with the term “busy board”, you’ve almost certainly seen one. It’s the sort of toy with a bunch of buttons…
2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: A Homebrew Computer In Only Three ICs
Homebrew computers don’t have to be retrocomputers, but [Just4Fun]’s all-through-hole, 68008-based “68k-MBC” certainly qualifies, so it …
Hackaday Podcast Episode 389: Spinning Lightfield Displays, and Jenny Visits a Blast Furnace
Another all-European podcast for you this week, as Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List for an evening looking at the past week in Hackaday. And this week th…
Using Vibration to Make Stuff Stick Contact-Free to Ceilings
Generally making stuff stick to something like a ceiling requires resorting to suction cups, glue or something much more permanent, but [Steve Mould] starts his…
This Week in Security: ShinyHunters Won’t Dox the FBI, Pentagon Data Stolen, and OBS Vulnerable
404 Media reports that the ShinyHunters group who stole multiple terabytes of FBI employee data say they do not plan to release the data. Known for ransomware a…
Teardown of an USB-C Cable with integrated LCD
The past years we have been seeing screens pop up in many new places, but seeing them in USB-C cables is still a bit of a novel thing. Out of …read more
The Game Boy Test Lab Provides a Cartridge-Sized Diagnostic Lab
Most of the time when you see a repair video of a Game Boy it’ll be demonstrated with a cartridge inserted and booting up into the game, but does this …
Gardening With…OpenSCAD?
Unless it’s automated or using some other form of high-tech trickery, a vegetable garden isn’t exactly the sort of thing you’d expect to see o…
Power It With Sodium (But Please Don’t)
[Applied Science] has a new demo of an old 1970s patent for a portable generator that is both interesting and terrifying. The generator uses sodium and water, w…
Elgato Key Lights Get Matter Upgrade
[Michael H Thiesen] had a couple of Elgato Key Lights in his home streaming setup. The only problem was that they would stop responding regularly, requiring a p…
DLC Joystick for Your Keyboard
The 3D-printed KeyboaStick joystick by FunOrNothing instantly makes a boring keyboard fun, and a fun keyboard awesome. The post DLC Joystick for Your Keyboard a…
A Mechanical Radio, Sort Of
[The Mike Stuff] has an interesting proposition. He asserts that ancient people like the Greeks could have built a form of radio that was purely mechanical. We …
Drum Machina Go! as a New Music Tool for the Game Boy
The Nintendo Game Boy is quite possibly the most popular console in the international chiptune community. You might have seen musicians cranking out tunes with …
Archiving The World’s Oldest Webcam Feed
FogCam is the oldest webcam feed that’s still up and running. Installed at San Francisco State University, it’s been slowly uploading a new image to…
Vacuum Drying and Making Stuff Hot in a Vacuum
After previously exploring the impact of vapor pressure on the drying of desiccant and more, the conclusion was essentially that in order to drive moisture that…
The Whole Computer Is Vim
Love it or hate it, Vim, the vi-compatible minimalist editor, is a common denominator between a huge array of operating systems. If you need to edit a file, it&…
SDR– Lets You Patch Together Your Setup
It is often helpful to think of a radio as a series of interconnected functional blocks—hence the use of block diagrams to convey how a given radio operates. [J…
DIY Game Console Does It With Optical Discs
Optical media may be dead for video games on the big corporate consoles, but not in [Emmet]’s heart– or on his DIY game console, that he built speci…
Can Schools Trust AI Features in Edtech Products?
In this episode of This Week with EdSurge, two former educators join to discuss EdReport's recent brief and explain why it is so important to verify ...
Parents Are Bringing AI to the IEP Meeting. How Should Teachers Respond?
Using AI in IEP meetings can benefit parents and teachers – if done correctly.
Sheety Turns Spreadsheets Into Binaries, For Some Reason
Ever wanted a spreadsheet as an executable with a built-in terminal interface? No? Well, that’s a pity because [Roberto Alsina]’s Sheety project doe…
A Simple Solution for Streamlining Battery Recycling
Lithium batteries have become the backbone of many modern devices ranging from toothbrushes to semi trucks, so what are we going to do with them when these rech…
No More Windows For The Dutch Government, Ze Kiezen Nu Linux
The events of the last few years have caused many in Europe to re-evaluate their reliance on large offshore technology companies, with a corresponding move to h…
Determining Diamond’s Properties Under Extreme Pressures
Although graphene gives diamond a solid run for its money when it comes to being the most useful assembly of carbon atoms, both have the distinct property of ma…
The Deep Magic of 3D Graphics Perspective
Many of us of a certain age will have had their first true, good 3D video game experience with Super Mario 64. Unlike previous 3D games, the camera was an ̷…
Traditional PD Wasn’t Enough. So I Used TikTok to Create an Engaging Alternative.
Tired of compliance-driven workshops, one teacher took to TikTok to turn literacy research into actionable classroom strategies.
Designing a Fully 3D-Printed Mechanical Calculator
Even if almost tragically impractical in a world where digital calculators are cheap as chips, mechanical calculators and their big mechanical computer brethren…
Improved Double-Sided Toner Transfer Method
In the era before PCB shops would make almost any PCB imaginable, as well making many other manufacturing processes for prototypes available to hobbyists, there…
Electromechanical TV Goes 3D with This Light-field Display
A mechanical TV — the kind that makes an image with a Nipkow disk and a single lamp with some help from persistence of vision — is easy enough to &#…
Geothermal Cooling For New York’s Subways
You might think that if you dug some tunnels down into the ground where you could be out of the sunshine, that you might find them to be relatively cool ……
Study: EdTech Is Rushing AI Integration Before Proving It Works
As AI features flood K-12 curricula, educators are left to filter proven quality from marketing hype.
Testing Coulomb’s Law and Similar Fundamentals Yourself Remains Tricky
How easy is it to build a simple demonstration at home that proves fundamental law of physics, such as Coulomb’s inverse square law, or Maxwell’s eq…
Metal Gear Solid Moves From PlayStation to ESP32
If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and l…
Pitting a CFD-Optimized Toroidal Propeller Against a Conventional One
Although we often think that we got certain aspects of aerodynamics pretty much licked at this point, details like the optimal shape of a propeller remains hotl…
Two-Dimensional Material Now Easier to Manufacture
We often see scientific breakthroughs in journals or other media that’s reported on as if it’s a revolutionary technology guaranteed to reshape huma…
This PICO-8 Handheld is No Fantasy
The PICO-8 is what is known as a ‘fantasy console’– you can program it, and there are oodles of games, but it’s not actually the 8-bit c…
Two Students, Two Questions They Wouldn’t Let Go
Students asking why learning matters in the age of AI forces two teachers to respond.
Stitching the Future: Technology as a Sacred Trust
By grounding our digital strategy in the same values as our ancestors, we can ensure technology serves our school community rather than consuming it.
AI Videos Are Warping Early Learning, Teachers Say
The rise of so-called “baby slop” is turning early childhood educators into media critics.
Very Important Partners Behind Maker Faire Bay Area
Fun sponsor activities to check out at Maker Faire Bay Area. The post Very Important Partners Behind Maker Faire Bay Area appeared first on Make: DIY Projects a…
Synthetic Aperture Radar Drone Gets Interferometric Imaging
It’s been more than a year since [Henrik Forstén] built the first iteration of his synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imaging drone, and he’s certainly been product…
Places To Visit: Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord
There are many benefits to spending time in the park, but perhaps few of them have a Hackaday angle. There’s a park in Germany you might want to make an &…
Jet Megatextures Demo for ESP32-S3
Mipmapping is a good way to add a lot more detail to a 3D scene without overburdening the rendering hardware with detail that won’t be seen by the user. T…
The FPGA Chronicles: Exploring the Tang Nano 20K
FPGAs used to be mysterious, expensive devices, but these days you can buy surprisingly capable boards for very little money. Some years ago, I did an FPGA Boot…
Using the SNES Super FX Chip to Run Super Mario 64
Although the Nintendo 64 was the first to bring real 3D graphics to the table in 1996, the Super Nintendo had an ace up its sleeve in the form of …read mo…
An IR Blaster Project, in a Nutshell
The speed that computers have gotten smaller is a bit mind-bending. Most of us now walk around with computers in our pockets that would have rivaled the superco…
Hackaday Links: September 27, 2026
It isn’t quite hailing frequencies open, but researchers from Harvard claim they’ve picked up a radio signal directly from a nearby exoplanet. Befor…
Self-Repairing Conductive Material from Liquid Metal
PCB circuits are cool, but you know what is cooler? Terminator circuits that’s what! And what if the same material that makes Terminator circuits could also be …
A Pocket-Sized Digital Fish Tank
The problem with trying to make a fish tank fit in your pocket is that you’ll either end up with water everywhere or a bunch of dead fish. Perhaps that…
The Least Annoying of All Evils
If you missed the hubbub this week, it was discovered that the Raspberry Pi Foundation added code in the firmware that locks the boot process up if non-original…
You Can Make a Microprocessor That’s All Your Own
For a while now we’ve followed the slow progression of affordable integrated circuit fabrication, and through the likes of Tiny Tapeout we’ve seen i…
Joy And Mayhem at Maker Faire Bay Area
Friday at Maker Faire Bay Area was full of joy, mayhem, and delightful inventions that entertained visitors. The post Joy And Mayhem at Maker Faire Bay Area app…