We used to say that fixing something was easier than bringing up a design for the first time. After all, the thing you are fixing, presumably, worked at one time or another. These days, that’s not always true as fixing modern gear can be quite a challenge. Watching [Ken’s] repair of an old 1955 Silvertone […]
If you think about military crypto machines, you probably think about the infamous Enigma machine. However, as [Christos T.] reminds us, there were many others and, in particular, the production of a “combined cipher” machine for the US and the UK to use for a variety of purposes. The story opens in 1941 when ships […]
The tale of the Microsoft Xbox Kinect is one of those sad situations where a great product was used in an application that turned out to be a bit of a flop and was discontinued because of it, despite its usefulness in other areas. This article from the Guardian is a quick read on how […]
We’ve seen several methods of repairing plastic gears. After all, a gear is usually the same all the way around, so it is very tempting to duplicate a good part to replace a damaged part. That’s exactly what [repairman 101] does in the video below. He uses hot glue to form a temporary mold and […]
Many of us use touch pads daily on our laptops, but rarely do we give much thought about what they really do. In fact they are a PCB matrix of conductive pads, with a controller chip addressing it and sensing the area of contact. Such a complex and repetitive pattern can be annoying to create […]
If you’re coming to Hackaday Europe 2025, you’ve got just over a week to get your bags packed and head on out to Berlin. Of course you have tickets already, right? And if you were still on the fence, let us tempt you with our keynote talk and some news about the Friday night meetup, […]
We’ll take a guess that most readers have a set of digital calipers somewhere close to hand right now. The cheapest ones tend to be a little unsatisfying in the hand, a bit crusty and crunchy to use. But as [Matthias Wandel] shows us, these budget tools are quite hackable and a lot more precise […]
If you came of age in the 1990s, you’ll remember the unmistakable auditory handshake of an analog modem negotiating its connection via the plain old telephone system. That cacophony of screeches and hisses was the result of careful engineering. They allowed digital data to travel down phone lines that were only ever built to carry […]
If you’re familiar with Java here in 2025, the programming language you know is a world away from what Sun Microsystems planned for it in the mid-1990s. Back then it was key to a bright coffee-themed future of write-once-run-anywhere software, and aside from your web browser using it to run applications, your computer would be […]
For those who love systems and structure, owning a 19-inch rack with just one slot filled is just not it. But what if the rest of your gear isn’t 19-inch? Well, then you go out and make it so, just like [Cal Bryant] did recently. The goal was to consolidate multiple devices — DAC, input […]