Category: Posts

[Project Farm] has a video in which a wide variety of AA cells are analyzed and compared in terms of capacity, internal resistance, ability to deliver voltage under load, and ability to perform in sub-freezing temperatures. Alkaline, lithium, and even some mature rechargeable cells with a couple thousand cycles under their belt were all compared. […]
According to [Joanna Goodrich]  in IEEE Spectrum, prior to World War II, soldiers who wanted to find land mines, simply poked at the ground with pointed sticks or bayonets. As you might expect, this wasn’t very safe or reliable. In 1941, a Polish signals officer, [Józef Stanislaw Kosacki], escaped to Britain and created an effective […]
You never know when inspiration is going to strike, and for [Ekaggrat Singh Kalsi], it struck while he was playing with one of his daughter’s hair ties. The result is a clock called “Bezicron” and it’s a fascinating study in mechanical ingenuity. The hair ties in question are simple objects, just a loose polymer coil […]
For one-off projects, adding a few integrated circuits to a PCB is not too big of a deal. The price of transistors is extremely low thanks to Moore and his laws, so we’re fairly free to throw chips around like peanuts. But for extremely space-constrained projects, huge production runs, or for engineering challenges, every bit […]
In the world of creation, few stories inspire as much as [Mrblindguardian], a 33-year-old who has been blind since the age of two, but refuses to let that hold him back. Using OpenSCAD and a 3D printer, [Mrblindguardian] designs and prints models independently, relying on speech software and touch to bring his ideas to life. […]
As the holiday party season fades away into memory and we get into the swing of the new year, Elliot Williams is joined on the Hackaday Podcast by Jenny List for a roundup of what’s cool in the world of Hackaday. In the news this week, who read the small print and noticed that Benchy […]
One of the problems facing any developer working on their own operating system is that of hardware support. With many thousands of peripherals and components that can be found in a modern computer, keeping up requires either the commercial resources of Microsoft or the huge community of Linux. For a small project such as SerenityOS […]
The mad lads at watchTowr are back with their unique blend of zany humor and impressive security research. And this time, it’s the curious case of backdoors within popular backdoors, and the list of unclaimed domains that malicious software would just love to contact. OK, that needs some explanation. We’re mainly talking about web shells […]
The LM3914 LED bar graph driver was an amazing chip back in the day. Along with the LM3915, its logarithmic cousin, these chips gave a modern look to projects, allowing dancing LEDs to stand in for a moving coil meter. But time wore on and the chips got harder to find and even harder to […]
Bluetooth is a good way to connect devices that are near each other. However, it can drain batteries which is one reason Bluetooth Low Energy — BLE — exists. [Drmph] shows how easy it is to deploy BLE to make, in this case, a doorbell. He even shows how you can refit an existing doorbell […]