Category: Hackaday Columns

Robot cars, DIY or otherwise, are hot right now. To do this right, you’re going to need cameras, LIDAR, or some other way of sensing the the world. Intel is again getting into the fray with a RealSense tracking camera for simultaneous localization and mapping for robotics, drone, and augmented reality needs. The tech specs […]
Last month was NAMM, the National Association of Musical Something that begins with ‘M’, which means we’re synthed and guitarded out for the year. The synth news? Behringer are making cheap reproductions and clones of vintage gear. There’s something you need to know about vintage gear: more than half of everything produced today has a […]
Catch up on interesting hacks from the past week with Hackaday Editors Mike Szczys and Elliot Williams. This week we discuss the story behind falling lifetime ratings for LED bulbs, look at finite element analysis to strengthen 3D printed parts, admire the beauty of blacksmithing, and marvel at open source Lidar development. We delve into […]
Voja Antonic designed this fantastic retrocomputing badge for Hackaday Belgrade in 2018, and it was so much fun that we wanted to bring it stateside to the Supercon essentially unaltered. And that meant that Voja had some free time to devote to a new hardware giveaway: the Cube. So while his talk at Supercon in […]
Did you know Britain launched its first satellite after the program had already been given the ax? Me neither, until some stories of my dad’s involvement in aerospace efforts came out and I dug a little deeper into the story. I grew up on a small farm with a workshop next to the house, that […]
Join us on Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the high-altitude ballooning Hack Chat! The Cope brothers are our hosts this week. Jeremy, a computer engineer, and Jason, a mechanical engineer, have recently caught the high-altitude ballooning (HAB) bug. In their initial flights they’ve racked up some successes and pushed the edge of space with interesting […]
The wheels of government move slowly, far slower than the pace at which modern technology is evolving. So it’s not uncommon for laws and regulations to significantly lag behind the technology they’re aimed at reigning in. This can lead to something of a “Wild West” situation, which could either be seen as a good or bad […]
Once technology that was only available to expensive design teams, and high-end engineering work, 3D printers are now readily available to anyone. Designing a physical prototype with a 3D printer is now something anyone can afford. Did I say anyone? Yes, anyone, even the people trying to build perpetual motion machines. Here’s one on Kickstarter […]
You can define the word crazy in myriad ways. Some would say using SMD resistors and QFN microcontrollers as structural elements is  crazy. Some would say hand soldering QFN is crazy, much less trying to do it on edge rather than in the orientation the footprint is designed for. And of course doing it live […]
What if I told you that you can get rid of your headphones and still listen to music privately, just by shooting lasers at your ears? The trick here is something called the photoacoustic effect. When certain materials absorb light — or any electromagnetic radiation — that is either pulsed or modulated in intensity, the […]