Category: Hackaday Columns

A remote Ethernet device needs two things: power and Ethernet. You might think that this also means two cables, a beefy one to carry the current needed to run the thing, and thin little twisted pairs for the data. But no! Power over Ethernet (PoE) allows you to transmit power and data over to network […]
Sometimes, mechanical parts can be supremely expensive, or totally unavailable. In those cases, there’s just one option — make it yourself. It was this very situation in which I found myself. My electric scooter had been ever so slightly bested by a faster competitor, and I needed redemption. A gearing change would do the trick, […]
Join us on Wednesday, October 23 at noon Pacific for the Open Hardware Month Hack Chat with Michael Weinberg! It seems like everything and everyone has a special day set aside on the calendar. You know the drill – a headline declaring it National Grilled Cheese Day (sorry, you missed it – April 12) or […]
It’s Nobel season again, with announcements of the prizes in literature, economics, medicine, physics, and chemistry going to worthies the world over. The wording of the Nobel citations are usually a vast oversimplification of decades of research and end up being a scientific word salad. But this year’s chemistry Nobel citation couldn’t be simpler: “For […]
For many of us, it’s difficult to imagine a world without Maker Faire. The flagship events in California and New York have served as a celebration of the creative spirit for a decade, giving hackers and makers a rare chance to show off their creations to a live audience numbering into the hundreds of thousands. […]
Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams opine on the coolest hacks we saw this week. This episode is heavy with 3D printing as Prusa released a new, smaller printer, printed gearboxes continue to impress us with their power and design, hoverboards are turned into tanks, and researchers suggest you pour used coffee grounds into […]
A government is going after a human rights activists in Morocco. It sounds familiar, but I don’t think Humphrey Bogart is running the gin joint this time around. Questionable Casablanca references aside, Amnesty International has reported another attack against human rights workers. In this case, a pair of Moroccan activists were targeted with what appears […]
As somebody who loves technology and wildlife and also needs to develop an old farmhouse, going down the bat detector rabbit hole was a journey hard to resist. Bats are ideal animals for hackers to monitor as they emit ultrasonic frequencies from their mouths and noses to communicate with each other, detect their prey and […]
It’s tough to find a project these days that doesn’t use an analog-to-digital converter (ADC) or digital-to-analog converter (DAC) for something. Whether these converters come as built-in peripherals on a microcontroller, or as separate devices connected over SPI, I2C, or parallel buses, all these converters share some common attributes, and knowing how to read the […]
When it comes to architectural features, there are probably not many as quintessentially memorable as arches. From the simplicity of the curved structure to the seemingly impossible task of a supposedly collapsable shape supporting so much weight in mid-air, they’ve naturally fascinated architects for generations. For civil engineers, learning to calculate the forces acting on […]