Lewis Latimer Drafted The Future Of Electric Light

These days, we have LED light bulbs that will last a decade. But it wasn’t so long ago that incandescent lamps were all we had, and they burned out after several months. Thomas Edison’s early light bulbs used bamboo filaments that burned out very quickly. An inventor and draftsman named …read more

Mazda Investing Big In Advanced Gasoline Tech With Skyactiv-X

Electric cars, as a concept, were once not dissimilar from the flying car. Promised to be a big thing in the future, but hopelessly impractical in the here and now. However, in the last ten years, they’ve become a very real thing, with market share growing year on year as …read more

Ethernet At 40: From A Napkin Sketch To Multi-Gigabit Links

September 30th, 1980 is the day when Ethernet was first commercially introduced, making it exactly forty years ago this year. It was first defined in a patent filed by Xerox as a 10 Mb/s networking protocol in 1975, introduced to the market in 1980 and subsequently standardized in 1983 by …read more

New Raspberry Pi 4 Compute Module: So Long SO-DIMM, Hello PCIe!

The brand new Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 (CM4) was just released! Surprised? Nope, and we’re not either — the Raspberry Pi Foundation had hinted that it was going to release a compute module for the 4-series for a long while.

The form factor got a total overhaul, but there’s …read more

Hackaday Podcast 089: 770 Potato Battery, Printing Resin Resist, And No-Internet Video Chat

Hackaday editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams weigh the hacking gold found across the internet this week. We can’t get over the epic adventure that went into making a battery from 100 pounds of potatoes. It turns out you don’t need Internet for video conferencing as long as you’re within …read more

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Battery Swap Gives Nissan LEAF New Lease On Life

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By Tom Nardi | October 23, 2020

It’s often said that one of the advantages of owning an electric vehicle is reduced maintenance costs, and for the most part, that’s true. That is, until the vehicle’s battery pack starts to show its age. Then you might be on the hook for a repair bill comparable to swapping …read more
Trick Or Yeet Cannon Will Give Them Candy Shell Shock

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By Kristina Panos | October 23, 2020

One of our favorite things about Halloween is the sheer number of hacks that come out of it each year. This year, hacking is almost a requirement to keep things physically distanced, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have fun. You want fun? How about a candy cannon that launches …read more
Cardboard Models Trace Design Process Of Vintage Tektronix Miniscopes

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By Dan Maloney | October 22, 2020

There aren’t many brands that inspire the kind of passion and fervency among its customers as Tektronix does. The venerable Oregon-based manufacturer of top-end test equipment has produced more collectible gear over the last 75 years than just about anyone else.

Over that time they have had plenty of innovations, …read more
Tracking Boats And Ships In Real Time At The Same Time

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By Bryan Cockfield | October 22, 2020

Software-defined radio came on the hacker scene in a big way less than a decade ago thanks to the discovery that a small USB-based TV tuner dongle could be used for receiving all kinds of radio transmissions. Two popular projects from that era are tracking nearby airplanes and boats in …read more
Digital Preservation For Old Batteries

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By Tom Nardi | October 22, 2020

The times they are a-changin’. It used to be that no household was complete without a drawer filled with an assortment of different sizes and types of batteries, but today more and more of our gadgets are using integrated rechargeable cells. Whether or not that’s necessarily an improvement is probably …read more
A Linear Stencil Clock Built For Quiet Operation

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By Dan Maloney | October 22, 2020

We around the Hackaday shop never get tired of seeing new ways to mark the passage of time. Hackers come up with all manner of interesting timekeeping modalities using every imaginable material and method of moving the mechanism once per whatever minimum time unit the hacker chooses to mark.

But …read more
Pulse Oximetry Sensor Judges Your Coffee Roast

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By Donald Papp | October 22, 2020

Parts designed and marketed for a specific application can nevertheless still be useful in other ways, and whenever that happens, it’s probably the start of a pretty good hack. Using a sensor for something other than its intended purpose is exactly what [Zach Halvorson] did to make the Roast Vision …read more