With Hackaday Europe no more than two days away, we want to help you wrap up all of the last loose ends. And that means last-minute changes in the workshop schedule, details on the Thursday night pre-party, and more! Some tickets for the event itself, the workshops, and the pre-party (reservations required) are still available […]
If you bought computer audio hardware a few decades ago, you may remember coming across products from Altec Lansing. That you probably haven’t thought of that name in some time doesn’t surprise us, the company has not fared well in recent years and has changed hands multiple times. [The Last Shift] tells the company’s history […]
The quest for true randomness has roots in cryptography and is a rabbit hole that gets surprisingly deep with alarmingly rapidity. Still, the generation of random-enough numbers is a popular hacker project. Part of the appeal is the way these devices strive to incorporate physical phenomena, and in [Joshua Coleman]’s case, his Neon Entropy (Pseudo) […]
As the foremost boffins of Europe toil deep underneath the border between Switzerland and France in their never-ending quest to truly understand the fabric of the Universe, they rely on a vast amount of electronics. The PCB layout team at the particle accelerator thus work with a huge array of parts, for which of course […]
Between 2000 and 2002 the Fisher Price Pixter was sold to children as an educational handheld toy with a touch screen that enabled drawing and listening to music in addition to cartridge-based games and more. It was followed up by multiple new iterations of the system, but as an ecosystem didn’t last beyond 2007. This […]
You normally think of fiber optic as something used in network cables. However, scientists employ dedicated fibers to detect earthquakes. In simple terms, they fire a laser down the fiber and watch reflections caused by imperfections. When vibrations hit the cable, it changes the defects, which show up in the return pattern. However, with the […]
If you ride a motorcycle, you know it is a bit of an art to manage the transmission on a typical bike. Electric motorcycles lose some of that. You usually just have a throttle and a brake. No transmission and, crucially, no clutch. Honda just patented a simulated clutch for those who want the old-school […]
Guess what time it is– that’s right, clock time! It’s always clock time, and when it’s clock time at Hackaday the weirder the better. So, how about a water clock that’s not actually a water clock? The water here has nothing to do with timekeeping, but is what’s driving the display. Fair to say that […]