Hacking Shelters And Swimming Pools

How would you survive in a war-torn country, where bombs could potentially fall from the sky with only very short notice? And what if the bomb in question were The Bomb — a nuclear weapon? This concern is thankfully distant for most of us, but it wasn’t always so. Only …read more

Tuning Into Atomic Radio: Quantum Technique Unlocks Laser-Based Radio Reception

The basic technology of radio hasn’t changed much since an Italian marquis first blasted telegraph messages across the Atlantic using a souped-up spark plug and a couple of coils of wire. Then as now, receiving radio waves relies on antennas of just the right shape and size to use the …read more

Counter-Strike At 20: Two Hackers Upend The Gaming Industry

Choices matter. You’ve only got one shot to fulfill the objective. A single coordinated effort is required to defuse the bomb, release the hostages, or outlast the opposition. Fail, and there’s no telling when you’ll get your next shot. This is the world that Counter-Strike presented to PC players in …read more

Say It With Me: Bandwidth

Bandwidth is one of those technical terms that has been overloaded in popular speech: as an example, an editor might ask if you have the bandwidth to write a Hackaday piece about bandwidth. Besides this colloquial usage, there are several very specific meanings in an engineering context. We might speak …read more

Exploring The Raspberry Pi 4 USB-C Issue In-Depth

It would be fair to say that the Raspberry Pi team hasn’t been without its share of hardware issues, with the Raspberry Pi 2 being camera shy, the Raspberry Pi PoE HAT suffering from a rather embarrassing USB power issue, and now the all-new Raspberry Pi 4 is the first …read more

See all blog entries

Designing Compact Gasoline Generator Prototype For Drone Use

No comments
By Lewin Day | July 20, 2019

Lithium batteries and brushless motors helped make multirotor drones possible, but batteries only last so long. Liquid fuels have far greater energy densities, but have not been widely applied in these roles. [Tech Ingredients] has been experimenting with a compact gasoline-fueled generator, with the aim to extend drone flight times …read more
The Case Of The Vintage Computer, The Blown Fuse, And The Diode

2 Comments
By Jenny List | July 20, 2019

If you are the operator of a vintage computer, probably the only one of its type remaining in service, probably the worst thing you can hear is a loud pop followed by your machine abruptly powering down. That’s what happened to the Elliott 803B in the UK’s National Museum Of …read more
A Microwave Kiln, From Scratch

7 Comments
By Jenny List | July 20, 2019

We are normally told that microwave ovens are strictly for food only, and that anything else will cause all sorts of bad things to come our way. There can be few readers who haven’t at some time seen the shower of sparks when an inadvertent metallic object finds its way …read more
Use A Digital Key To Deter Lockpicking

8 Comments
By Bryan Cockfield | July 19, 2019

Spending an hour or two around any consumer-level padlock or house deadbolt lock with a simple lockpicking kit will typically instil a good amount of panic and concern about security. While it’s true that any lock can be defeated, it’s almost comically easy to pick basic locks like this. So, …read more
Another Take On Harvesting Energy While Walking

9 Comments
By Maya Posch | July 19, 2019

Harvesting energy from the human body may sound scary, but fortunately a Matrix-style setup exists only as a cinematic fiction. Instead a typical path lies in external contraptions that use the body’s natural motions to drive a small generator, a bit of flexible piezo material, and so on. A …read more
Custom Bases Make LEGO Spacecraft Even Cooler

4 Comments
By Tom Nardi | July 19, 2019

If you’re reading Hackaday, we’re willing to bet that you either own the LEGO Saturn V and Lunar Module models, or at the very least know somebody who does. Even if you thought you’d finally outgrown playing with little plastic bricks (a critical mistake, but one we’ll ignore for now), …read more
DIY Scintillation Detector Is Mighty Sensitive

19 Comments
By Lewin Day | July 19, 2019

Geiger counters are a popular hacker project, and may yet prove useful if and when the nuclear apocalypse comes to pass. They’re not the only technology out there for detecting radiation however. Scintillation detectors are an alternative method of getting the job done, and [Alex Lungu] has built one of …read more