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Robot Harvesting Machine Is Tip Of The Agri-Tech Iceberg
Harvesting delicate fruit and vegetables with robots is hard, and increasingly us humans no longer want to do these jobs. The pressure to find engineering solutions is intense and more and more...
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Using Super-Efficient Solar Cells To Keep Your Electric Car’s Battery Topped Up
Who hasn’t thought of sticking a couple of solar panels onto an electric car’s roof to keep its battery at 100% charge while it’s parked out in the sun? While usually deemed impossible due to the...
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New Part Day: Two Millimeter Addressable LEDs
The WS2812, or “Neopixels”, or whatever you want to call them, are the standard when it comes to adding blinky to anything. These chips are individually addressable RGB LEDs, which you’ve seen in many...
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Maker Media Reboots Itself As Make Community
At a community meeting this week, Dale Dougherty, former CEO of Maker Media announced the relaunch of the Make brand. Maker Media is dead, but the brand may live on as Make Community, LLC. Dougherty...
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Old CDs Create A Haunting Rainbow Vortex
The 1960s were, in Western culture, a time of great social and political upheaval, and the dawning of the psychedelia subculture. This resulted in an art style consisting of bright colours in wild,...
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Measure Your YouTube Importance
How do you hack your motivation? Do you put red marker Xs on a paper calendar every day you exercise? Do you use an egg timer to sprint through dozens of emails? Do you lock all the doors and shut off...
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A Drop-In Controller Replacement For Commercial Reflow Ovens
If you need a reflow oven, you can very easily head down to Walmart or Target and pick up a toaster oven for fifteen bucks or so. Even without any control electronics, a bone-stock toaster oven works...
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Make A Compatible Raspberry Pi Clone – But Your Pi Must Die
The world is awash with Raspberry Pi clones that boast fruity names, but those looking for a piece of the real thing will find their compatibility only goes so far. Shaky Linux distros abound and,...
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This Nerf Gun Is Terrifyingly Huge
Gatling guns were an early attempt at creating a rapid-firing weapon, and were popular amongst armies in the 19th century. Today, the basic design remains in use as a heavy weapon for putting many...
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Motorized Lens Controller Techs Up Your Webcam
If you’re familiar with the DSLR camera market, you’d know that modern lenses are works of technological art. Crammed full of motors and delicate electronic assemblies, they’re bursting with features...
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The Physics Behind Antennas
If you have done any sort of radio work you probably have a fair idea about what antennas do. It is pretty easy to have a cursory understanding of them, too. You probably know there’s something magic...
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Lessons Learned From An Art Installation Build
Art installations are an interesting business, which more and more often tend to include electronic or mechanical aspects to their creation. Compared to more mainstream engineering, things in this...
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Preserving Precious Laptop Stickers
Stickers belong on laptops. That’s not just because all developers are issued a 2015 MacBook Pro at birth to zealously hold and cherish for the rest of their careers, and the vast uniformity of laptop...
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Keep Pesky Cats At Bay With A Machine-Learning Turret Gun
It doesn’t take long after getting a cat in your life to learn who’s really in charge. Cats do pretty much what they want to do, when they want to do it, and for exactly as long as it suits them. Any...
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You Are Probably Using NASA Technology
You often hear people — especially non-hacker types — complain that money spent on space travel would be better off spent here on Earth. Of course that ignores one big factor, that space programs have...
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Simple Simon Says Looks Sharp
Simon was a popular toy, launching at the very end of the 1970s, and cribbed from earlier work by Atari with their game Touch Me. The gameplay is simple, and while we suspect it won’t last quite as...
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3D Printing An Old-School Coherer
Coherers were devices used in some of the very earliest radio experiments in the 19th century. Consisting of a tube filled with metal filings with an electrode at each end, the coherer would begin to...
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A Wedding Gift Fit For A Hardware Hacker
If you read Hackaday on a regular basis, there are some names you will have seen more than once. People who continually produce fascinating and inventive projects that amaze and delight us, and who...
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A Lot Of Volts For Not A Lot
There was a time when high voltage in electronic devices was commonplace, and projects driving some form of vacuum or ionisation tube simply had to make use of a mains transformer from a handy tube...
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Fourier Explained: [3Blue1Brown] Style!
If you ask most people to explain the Fourier series they will tell you how you can decompose any particular wave into a sum of sine waves. We’ve used that explanation before ourselves, and it is not...
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