If you have a fear of heights and find yourself falling out of an airplane, you probably don’t want to look up to find your parachute full of holes. However, if the designer took inspiration from kirigami in the same way researchers have, you may be in better shape than you would think. This is […]
We have all no doubt at some point released the magic smoke from a piece of electronics, it’s part of what we do. But sometimes it’s a piece of electronics we’re not quite ready to let go, and something has to be fixed. Chris Greening had a board just like that, a 27 volt generator […]
It’s a well-known conundrum that while most computers these days are digital in nature, almost nothing in nature is. Most things we encounter in the real world, whether it’s temperature, time, sound, pressure, or any other measurable phenomenon comes to us in analog form. To convert these signals to something understandable by a digital converter […]
Finding, collecting, and restoring vintage tech is the rewarding pastime of many a Hackaday reader. Working with old-school gear can be tough, though, when documentation or supporting resources are hard to find. If you’re in need of an old manual or a little scrap of software, you might find the Vintage Technology Digital Archive (VTDA) […]
The concept of a 3D scanner can seem rather simple in theory: simply point a camera at the physical object you wish to scan in, rotate around the object to capture all angles and stitch it together into a 3D model along with textures created from the same photos. This photogrammetry application is definitely viable, […]
Occasionally a design requires capacitors that are much closer to being identical in value to one another than the usual tolerance ranges afford. Precision matching of components from parts on hand might sound like a needle-in-a-haystack problem, but not with [Stephen Woodward]’s Capacitor Matchmaker design. The larger the output voltage, the greater the mismatch between […]
Have you heard of the Sprengel pump? It’s how they drew hard vacuum back before mechanical pumps were perfected — the first light bulbs had their vacuums drawn with Sprengel pumps, for example. It worked by using droplets of a particular liquid to catch air particles, and push them out a narrow tube, thereby slowly […]
Why build a telescope? YOLO, as the kids say. Having decided that, one must decide what type of far-seer one will construct. For his 10″ reflector, [Carl Anderson] once again said “Yolo”— this time not as a slogan, but in reference to a little-known type of reflecting telescope. Telescope or sci-fi laser gun? YOLO, just […]
For most people, experimentation with film photography comes in the form of the 35 mm format. Its ubiquity in snapshot photography means cameras are readily available at all levels, and the film offers a decent compromise between resolution and number of shots per dollar spent. For those who wish to take their film photography further […]
In theory, all parts are ideal and do just exactly what they say on the box. In practice, everything has its limits, most components have non-ideal characteristics, and you can even turn most parts’ functionality upside down. The Component Abuse Challenge celebrates the use of LEDs as photosensors, capacitors as microphones, and resistors as heat […]