Category: classic hacks

We have to admit, we didn’t know that we wanted a desktop electric jellyfish until seeing [likeablob]’s Denki-Kurage, but it’s one of those projects that just fills a need so perfectly. The need being, of course, to have a Bladerunner-inspired electric animal on your desk, as well as having a great simple application for that […]
If a zipper breaks, a 3D printer might not be the first tool one reaches for — but it’s more feasible than one might think. [MisterJ]’s zipper slider replacement is the kind of 3D print that used to be the domain of well-tuned printers only, but most hobbyist printers should be able to handle it […]
Fruit bowls have an unavoidable annoyance– not flies and rotten fruit, those would be avoidable if your diet was better. No, it’s that the bowl is never the right size. Either your fruit is sad and lonely in a too-large bowl, or it’s falling out. It’s the kind of existential nightmare that can only be […]
There’s a meme which may have a basis in truth, of a teenager left clueless when presented with a rotary telephone. The dial, in reality a mechanical pulse chain generator, was once ubiquitous enough that having one in your parts bin was anything but unusual. If you’re curious about their inner workings in 2026 though, […]
[Michel Jean] asked a question few others might: what exactly is going on under the hood of a classic HP scientific calculator when one presses the ∫ key? A numerical integration, sure, but how exactly? There are a number of useful algorithms that could be firing up when the integral button is pressed, and like […]
IBM Selectric typewriters have a lot of unique parts that can be tricky to source, but one we didn’t think of was the clear acrylic(?) dust covers, that are apparently very hard to find in good shape. [Eric Strebel] has a few Selectrics that all have issues with these parts. While you could come close […]
[Diffraction Limited] has been working on a largely 3D-printed micropositioner for some time now, and previously reached a resolution of about 50 nanometers. There was still room for improvement, though, and his latest iteration improves the linkage arms by embossing tiny ball joints into them. The micro-manipulator, which we’ve covered before, uses three sets of […]
A lot of making goes on in this community these days, but sometimes you’ve just gotta do some old fashioned hacking. You might have grabbed an old Speak and Spell that you want to repurpose as an interface for a horrifyingly rude chatbot, or you’ve got a calculator that is going to become the passcode keypad […]
Picture this: you have an irregular opening you need to fabricate a piece to fill. Maybe it’s the stonework of a fireplace; maybe it’s the curved bulkhead of a ship. How do you get that shape? The most “Hackaday” answer would be to 3D scan the area, create a CAD model based on the point […]
Ever wanted to know how engineers made their calculations before digital calculators were on every workbench? [Richard Carpenter] and [Robert Wolf] have just the thing—a sliderule simulator that can teach you how to do a whole bunch of complex calculations the old fashioned way! The simulator is a digital recreation of the Hemmi/Post 1460 Versalog […]