Category: Hackaday Columns

Join us on Wednesday, August 7th at noon Pacific for the Kickstarter Hack Chat with Beau Ambur and Clarissa Redwine! For many of us, magic things happen on our benches. We mix a little of this, one of those, and a couple of the other things, and suddenly the world has the Next Big Thing. […]
When the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft reached orbit for the first time in 2010, it was a historic achievement. But to qualify for NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) program, the capsule also needed to demonstrate that it could return safely to Earth. Its predecessor, the Space Shuttle, had wings that let it glide home and […]
Is the hacking community facing a HOPEless future? It may well be, if this report from 2600 Magazine is any indication. The biennial “Hackers On Planet Earth” conference is in serious financial jeopardy after the venue that’s hosted it for years, the Hotel Pennsylvania in Manhattan, announced a three-fold increase in price. Organizers are scrambling […]
This has been an interesting week. First off, security researchers at Armis discovered a set of serious vulnerabilities in the vxWorks Real Time Operating System (RTOS). Released under a name that sounds like the title of a western or caper movie, Urgent/11. Not familiar with vxWorks? It’s a toss-up as to whether vxWorks or Linux […]
You may not know the name Abraham Wald, but he has a very valuable lesson you can apply to problem solving, engineering, and many other parts of life. Wald worked for the Statistical Research Group (SRG) during World War II. This was part of a top secret organization in the United States that applied elite […]
Need a bit more time to submit your talk proposal for the 2019 Hackaday Superconference? Okay, but we can only do this once. You now have until August 16th to submit your proposal. Supercon is the ultimate hardware conference. Take all the best conversations you’ve had about electronics, firmware development, industrial design, art, music, and […]
Before I got a license and a car, getting to and from high school was an ordeal. The hour-long bus ride was awful, as one would expect when sixty adolescents are crammed together with minimal supervision. Avoiding the realities going on around me was a constant chore, aided by frequent mental excursions. One such wandering […]
Machinists like to live on the edge, but they always want to know precisely where it is. If you’ve watched any machining videos (*cough*) then you’ve seen heavy use of digital readouts on machines. A “DRO” (as the cool kids call them) is a little computer that knows where the slides are, and thus where […]
Before swearing my fealty to the Jolly Wrencher, I wrote for several other sites, creating more or less the same sort of content I do now. In fact, the topical overlap was enough that occasionally those articles would get picked up here on Hackaday. One of those articles, which graced the pages of this site […]
I have a problem. If I go to a swap meet , or even a particularly well stocked yard sale, I feel compelled to buy something. Especially if that something happens to be an oddball piece of electronics. While on the whole I’m a man of few vices, I simply can’t walk away from a […]