One of the fun things about writing for Hackaday is that it takes you to the places where our community hang out. I was in a hackerspace in a university town the other evening, busily chasing my end of month deadline as no doubt were my colleagues at the time too. In there were a […]
Have you ever imagined what the Nintendo Switch would look like if Nintendo had produced it in the mid-1990s? [Joel Creates] evidently did, because that’s exactly what this retro CRT-toting Switch 2 dock looks like. Yes, it is portable, thanks to a 100W power bank torn apart and built into the 3D printed case. The […]
[Bob] calls his custom 16-bit computer “Bob’s Unnecessary Retro Processor” or BURP for short. While we suppose it is technically unnecessary, we love the look of it, and we hope he just used it to get the quirky acronym. When we build custom CPUs they look suspiciously like FPGA development boards, but not BURP. We […]
A while back [Clint Basinger] of Lazy Game Reviews fame purchased a rare 1980s Halikan laptop. When he received the parcel, at first glance, everything seemed in order. Upon opening the original laptop bag, however, it was found that the combination of the heavy power supply in a side pocket and the brittle plastic of the […]
If you’ve ever combed boxes of old tech detritus in search of a nugget of pure gold, we know you’ll appreciate the excitement of discovering, in a dusty University of Utah storeroom, a tape labelled “UNIX Original from Bell Labs V4 (See manual for format)”. If the tape contains what’s promised on the label, this […]
The Hackaday 2025 Component Abuse Challenge is all about abusing electronic components in the service of making them do things they were never intended to. It’s not the 2025 Food Abuse Challenge, so in the case of [Ian Dunn]’s hot dog pressed into service as an LED tester, we’ll take the ‘dawg to be a […]
Full disclosure. If you want a lathe capable of turning metal stock, you probably should just buy one. But what fun is that? You can do like [kachurovskiy] and build one with your 3D printer. If you are chuckling, thinking you can’t make 3D printed parts sturdy enough, you aren’t exactly wrong. [Kachurovskiy’s] trick is […]
There are few things that can keep a certain kind of mechanically-inclined mind entranced as well as a marble run, and few structures that look as interestingly organic as procedurally-generated designs – combine the two and you get [Will Morrison]’s Marble Fountain. [Will]’s first approach to generating a marble run was to have a script […]
In this era of cheap lithium pouch cells, it might seem mildly anachronistic to build AA batteries into a project. There are enough valid reasons to do so, however, and enough legacy hardware that still takes AAs, that it’s worth spending some time deciding which batteries to use. Luckily for us, [Lumencraft] over on YouTube […]