What If I Never Make Version Two?

When you make something, what does version one look like? What I mean is, how much thought do you put into the design? Do you try to make it look nice as you go along, or do you just build …read more

Real-Time OS Basics: Picking The Right RTOS When You Need One

When do you need to use a real-time operating system (RTOS) for an embedded project? What does it bring to the table, and what are the costs? Fortunately there are strict technical definitions, which can also help one figure out …read more

Increasing The Resolution Of The Electrical Grid

As a society in the USA and other parts of the world, we don’t give much thought to the twisting vines of civilization that entangle our skies and snake beneath our streets. The humming electrical lines on long poles that …read more

Paul Taylor Opened The Lines Of Telecommunication For The Hearing-Impaired

These days, nearly everyone communicates through some kind of keyboard, whether they are texting, emailing, or posting on various internet discussion forums. Talking over the phone is almost outmoded at this point. But only a few decades ago, the telephone …read more

Flapping Wings And The Science Of How Bees Can Fly

Jerry Seinfeld launched his career with Bee Movie, an insect-themed animated feature that took the world by storm in 2007. It posed the quandary – that supposedly, according to all known laws of aviation, bees should not be able to …read more

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Circle Full Of LEDs Becomes A Clock

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By Rich Hawkes | February 27, 2021

Building a clock of some sorts seems to be a time honored tradition for hackers and LED clocks seem one of the most popular. You can build anything from a seven-segment display to a binary clock or something even more …read more
Exploring The Open Source That Really Goes Into A RISC-V Chip

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By Jenny List | February 27, 2021

It’s an exciting time in the world of microprocessors, as the long-held promise of devices with open-source RISC-V cores is coming to fruition. Finally we might be about to see open-source from the silicon to the user interface, or so …read more
Printing Yoda Heads: Re-Makers Riffing!

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By Elliot Williams | February 27, 2021

We had a comment recently from a nasty little troll (gasp! on the Internet!). The claim was that most makers are really just “copiers” because they’re not doing original work, whatever that would mean, but instead just re-making projects that …read more
A Very Modern Tube Headphone Amplifier

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By Jenny List | February 27, 2021

Once a discarded relic, over the years the humble vacuum tube has been rehabilitated in the arena of specialist audio. There are plenty of tube amplifiers now being manufactured, with a popular choice being headphone amplifiers that use a tube …read more
Sounding The Humble LED

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By Kerry Scharfglass | February 27, 2021

Here at Hackaday we’re no strangers to the colorful glow of LEDs. But what if there was more to appreciate beneath the surface? Back in 2011 [Windell] over at Evil Mad Scientist dug into a certain variety of LED and …read more
Bottle Filler Perfectly Tops Your Cup

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By Mike Szczys | February 26, 2021

You know those bottle fillers at schools and airports? What if you had one of those at home?

We know what you’re going to say: “My fridge has one of those!” Well ours doesn’t, and even though [Chris Courses’] fridge …read more
The Famous Basic Computer Games Book Gets A 2021 Update

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By Al Williams | February 26, 2021

If you are a certain age, your first programming language was almost certainly BASIC. You probably at least saw the famous book by Ahl, titled BASIC Computer Games or 1010 BASIC Computer Games. The book, published in 1973 by [David …read more