Although plenty of us have our preferred language for coding, whether it’s C for its hardware access, Python for its usability, or Fortran for its mathematic prowess, not every language is specifically built for problem solving of a particular nature. Some are built as thought experiments or challenges, like Whitespace or Chicken but aren’t used […]
We love Arduino here at Hackaday; they’ve probably done more to make embedded programming accessible to more people than anything else in the history of the field. One thing the Arduino ecosystem is rarely praised for is its speed. That’s where [Playduino] comes in, with his video (embedded below) that promises to make everyone’s favourite […]
An ongoing refrain with modern movies is “Why is all of this CG?”– sometimes, it seems like practical effects are simultaneously a dying art, while at the same time modern technology lets them rise to new hights. [Davis Dewitt] proves that second statement with his RC movie star “robot” for an upcoming feature film. The […]
A common ratchet from your garage may work wonders for tightening hard to reach bolts on whatever everyday projects around the house. However, those over at [Chronova Engineering] had a particularly unusual project where a special ratchet mechanism needed to be developed. And developed it was, an absolutely beautiful machining job is done to create […]
[Charmed Labs] are responsible for bringing numerous open-source hardware products to fruition over the years, and their latest device is an adorably small robotic camera platform called Goby, currently crowdfunding for its initial release. Goby has a few really clever design features and delivers a capable (and hackable) platform for under 100 USD. Goby embraces […]
Spectroscopy seems simple: split a beam of light into its constituent wavelengths with a prism or diffraction grating, and measure the intensity of each wavelength. The devil is in the details, though, and what looks simple is often much harder to pull of in practice. You’ll find lots of details in [Gary Boyd]’s write-up of […]
If you made something blink, and now it’s time for you to make something move, something like a point-to-a-satellite tracker is a great idea. [Farid] made this moving arrow that always points at the ISS, and documented it nicely to boot. And there’s a little bit of everything here, from orbital mechanics and fetching the […]
When attempting to secure something, whether it’s a computer, sensitive data, or valuables, there’s always going to be a way to break that security. It might be impossibly hard, like taking centuries to brute-force an encryption algorithm, but it’s weakness is still there. And, like the future might make certain encryption obsolete, modern electronics has […]
In many ways, living here in the future is quite exiting. We have access to the world’s information instantaneously and can get plenty of exciting tools and hardware delivered to our homes in ways that people in the past with only a Sears catalog could only dream of. Lasers are of course among the exciting […]
Getting a robot to stand on two wheels without tipping over involves a challenging dance with the laws of physics. Self-balancing robots are a great way to get into control systems, sensor fusion, and embedded programming. This build by [mircemk] shows how to make one with just a few common components, an Arduino, and a bit […]