We’ve been hinting at it for a few months now, running a series of articles on SAOs, then a Supercon Add-On Challenge. We even let on that the badge would have space for multiple SAOs this year, but would you believe six? Way back in 2017ish, Hackaday’s own [Brian Benchoff] and the [AND!XOR] crew thought […]
For serious high-voltage plasma, you need a serious transformer. [Jay Bowles] from Plasma Channel is taking his projects to the next level, so he built a beefy 6000:1 flyback transformer. [Jay] first built a driving circuit for his dream transformer, starting with a simple 555 circuit and three MOSFETs in parallel to handle 90 A […]
Starting a hacker con is hardly what anyone would describe as easy — but arguably, the truly difficult part is keeping the momentum going into the second year and beyond. For the first year, you can get away with a few missed opportunities and glitches, but by the time you’ve got one event under your […]
There’s no shortage of movies, TV shows, and books that show a dystopian future with corporations run amok in outer space with little or no effective oversight. Dune, The Expanse, and The Dispossessed spring to mind as predicting different aspects of this idea, but there are plenty of other warnings throughout sci-fi depicting this potential […]
If you’ve ever had to suffer through a call tree and a 9,000 hour wait on hold to cancel a subscription, we have good news for you if you live in the United States. The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has just finalized a rule that will “make it as easy for consumers to cancel their […]
In the past, building construction methods generally didn’t worry much about air quality. There were enough gaps around windows, doors, siding, and flooring that a house could naturally “breathe” and do a decent enough job of making sure the occupants didn’t suffocate. Modern buildings, on the other hand, are extremely concerned with efficiency and go […]
It is hard to imagine that much we built today will be used ten years from now, much less in a hundred. It is hard to make things that last through the ages, which is why we are fascinated with things like ancient pyramids in Mexico, Egypt, and China. However, even the oldest Egyptian pyramid […]
[Jeremy Weatherford] clearly has a knack for explaining projects well enough for easy reproduction but goes way further than most and has created a four-part YouTube series detailing every step from project inception to the final assembly, covering all aspects of 3D modelling and PCB design for a custom MacroPad design. Many tools are introduced along […]
In 1983, a 14-year-old [Will] saw an LED clock in The Sharper Image store. At $250, it stayed in the store. That was a lot of money back then, especially for most teenagers. But [Will] didn’t forget. After high school, he and a friend planned to build one from scratch. They worked out how they […]
[Ctrl-Alt-Rees] bought something strange on an auction site: a Japanese Cefucom-21 from 1983. No? Didn’t ring a bell for us either. The legend on the front boldly proclaims: “CCI Multipurpose SLAP Computer,” so maybe it is some kind of computer, but it is definitely strange. For one thing, the “screen” isn’t a screen at all. […]