New Parts, New Hacks

The biggest news this week is that Raspberry Pi is no longer synonymous with single-board Linux computers: they’re dipping their toes into the microcontroller business with their first chip: the RP2040, and the supporting breakout board, the Pico. It’s an …read more

Meet The Magic Eye Vacuum Tube

Vacuum tubes ruled electronics for several decades and while you might think of them as simple devices analogous to a transistor or FET, there were many special types. We’re all familiar with nixie tubes that act as numeric displays, and …read more

Hackaday Podcast 102: Raspberry Pi Microcontroller, Microphone Killswitch, And A 45-Degree 3D-Printer

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Mike Szczys sift through a week of excellent hacks. Big news is of course the Raspberry Pi microcontroller which Elliot had a few weeks to play around with on the bench before the announcement — …read more

This Week In Security: OpenWRT, Favicons, And Steganographia

OpenWRT is one of my absolute favorite projects, but it’s had a rough week. First off, the official OpenWRT forums is carrying a notice that one of the administrator accounts was accessed, and the userlist was downloaded by an unknown …read more

A Few Of My Favorite Things: Amateur Radio

Hackaday has among its staff a significant number of writers who also hold amateur radio licenses. We’re hardware folks at heart, so we like our radios homebrew, and we’re never happier than when we’re working at high frequencies.

Amateur radio …read more

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Your NES Classic Mini Controller, On Your Desktop Computer

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By Jenny List | January 24, 2021

The NES Classic Mini was one of the earlier releases in what became a wider trend for tiny versions of classic retro consoles to be released. Everybody wanted one but numbers were limited, so only the lucky few gained this …read more
A Big Set Of Logic Gates For Teaching The Basics

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By Lewin Day | January 24, 2021

Teaching students about logic gates is often done in two parts, once on the whiteboard for the theory, and again on the breadboard for the practice. [shurik179] wasn’t a fan of the abstraction between easy-to-understand symbols on the whiteboard, and …read more
An Alternator Powered Electric Bicycle Gives Rotor Magnetic Field Insight

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By Jenny List | January 24, 2021

For anyone involved in the construction of small electric vehicles it has become a matter of great interest that a cheap high-power electric motor can be made from a humble car alternator. It’s a conversion made possible by the advent …read more
When Appliance Hackers Hit The Music Scene

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By Anool Mahidharia | January 23, 2021

The art-music-technology collective “Electronicos Fantasticos!” (commonly known as Nicos) is the brain child of artist/musician [Ei Wada] in Japan. They revive old, retired and out-dated electrical appliances as new “electro-magnetic musical instruments” creating not just new ways to play music, …read more
Naming Names

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By Chris Lott | January 23, 2021

We have all heard that good variable names are important for creating readable programs — advice that will serve you well when you come back to your code two years later, or even twenty. Sometimes, when you are so deep …read more
OpenSCAD Prints Woodworking Aid

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By Al Williams | January 23, 2021

Home-based 3D printing is getting pretty unremarkable. Sure, printers aren’t as ubiquitous as, say, PCs. But you wouldn’t be any more surprised if your neighbor had a 3D printer than if you found out they had a drill press. In …read more
Obstacle Climbing Rover Built With The Power Of Lego

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By Danie Conradie | January 23, 2021

When we want to prototype a rover, we’ve developed a tendency to immediately reach for the 3D printer and Arduino or Raspberry Pi. It’s easy to forget the prototyping tool many of us grew up using: LEGO. The [Brick Experiment …read more