Right now, you can get a diode laser engraver on eBay for around $100 USD. That sounds like a deal, but it’ll probably use some arcane proprietary software, won’t be terribly accurate, and the laser itself will almost certainly be fully exposed. Of course there’s no shortage of DIY builds which improve upon this situation […]
[Jakob Kilian] is working on a glove that he hopes will let the blind “see” their surroundings. One of the most fascinating examples of the human brain’s plasticity is in its ability to map one sense to another. Some people, for example, report being able to see sound, giving them a supernatural ability to distinguish […]
Google has announced that it will no longer index Flash files. Journey with me to a time in a faraway internet; a time before we had monetized social media. A time when the page you shared with your friends was your page and not a page on someone’s network. Way back when Visual Basic was […]
Hackaday has open-source running deep in our veins — and that goes for hardware as well as software. After all, it’s great to run open-source software, but if it’s running on black-box hardware, the system is only half open. While software has benefited mightily from all of the advantages of community development, the hardware world […]
Don’t write off your weird ideas — turn them into reality. For years, woodworkers have used pen bodies as a canvas for showing off beautiful wood. But what’s the fun in that? [JPayneWoodworking] made a pen out of Ramen noodles just to see if he could. The process is pretty straightforward, as he explains in […]
Long-haul flights can be a real pain when you’re trying to get around the world. Typically, they’re achieved by including a stop along the way, with the layover forcing passengers to deplane and kill time before continuing the flight. As planes have improved over the years, airlines have begun to introduce more direct flights where […]
In one of the cooler hacks we’ve seen recently, a bunch of hacking academics at the University of Michigan researched the ability to flicker a laser at audible sound frequencies to see if they could remotely operate microphones simply by shining a light on them. The results are outstanding. While most Hackers will have heard […]
We’ve all gotten pretty adept at 3D printing keychains and enclosures. Some people can even 3D print circuit boards to an extent. But the real goal is a Star Trek-style replicator that just pushes out finished products. Printing different components would be a key technology and unless you want to supply external power, one of […]
[Michael Horne] recently shared his thoughts on the RedBoard+, a motor controller board for the Raspberry Pi aimed at robotic applications. His short version for busy people is: if you’re at all into robotics, get one because it’s fantastic. At heart the RedBoard+ is a motor controller, but it’s packed with I/O and features that […]
The last time we visited the Hackaday shooting range we were all psyched up to get the right posture, breathe correctly, lower our heart rates and squeeze the trigger at exactly the right moment that the wandering cross hairs align with the target ……. and lastly accommodate the inevitable recoil. But never did we think […]