It is hard to imagine that a handful of decades ago, TV wasn’t a thing. We’ve talked a few times about the birth of television. After an admittedly slow slow start, it took over like wildfire. Of course, anything that sells millions will spawn accessories. Some may be great. Then there are others. We wanted […]
This week, Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start things off by acknowledging an incredible milestone: 20 years of Hackaday! Well, probably. When a website gets to be this old, it’s a little hard to nail down when exactly things kicked off, but it seems like September of 2004 is about right. They’ll also […]
At the risk of stating the obvious, building big things can be difficult. Sure, parts that fit on the bed of a 3D printer are easy to make, if not particularly fast, and scaling up from there is possible. But if you need a long beam or structural element, printing makes little sense; better to […]
It looks like there’s finally hope for sane password policies. The US National Institue of Standards and Technology, NIST, has released a draft of SP 800-63-4, the Digital Identity Guideline. There’s password guidance in there, like “SHALL NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types) for passwords” and “SHALL NOT require […]
As if there weren’t enough worrying global news stories already, today the British press and media have been full of a story involving the public WiFi networks at some major railway stations. Instead of being faced with the usual don’t-be-naughty terms and conditions page, commuters were instead faced with a page that definitely shouldn’t have […]
It is a pretty common first project to use an Arduino (or similar) to blink an LED. Which, of course, brings taunts of: you could have used a 555! You can, of course, also use any sort of oscillator, but [Mustafa] has a different approach. Blinking an LED with three resistors and a capacitor. Ok, […]
The Faboratory at Yale University has set a number of stretch goals. We don’t mean that in the usual sense. They’ve been making, as you can see in the video below, clones of commercial devices that can stretch over 300%. They’ve done Ardunios and similar controllers along with sensors. The idea is to put computer […]
Do you live in the UK, have a VCR and capture card, and an interest in Teletext? [James O’Malley] needs your help! Teletext was, for many people around the world, their first experience of an electronic information system. The simple text and block graphics were transmitted on rotation as data bursts in the frame blanking […]
If you need an amplifier, [Hans Rosenberg] has some advice. Don’t design your own; grab cheap and tiny RF amplifier modules and put them on a PCB that fits your needs. These are the grandchildren of the old mini circuits modules that were popular among hams and RF experimenters decades ago. However, these are cheap, […]
While Texas Instruments maintains dominance in the calculator market (especially graphing calculators), there was a time when this wasn’t the case. HP famously built the first portable scientific calculator, the HP-35, although its reverse-Polish notation (RPN) might be a bit of a head-scratcher to those of us who came up in the TI world of […]