Not every impulsive purchase on eBay leads to possession of a wooden Dalek, but when a friend did exactly that, [Tony Goacher] did his part to turn ‘Dalek Bob’ into a motorized and remote-controlled unit of impressive stature. Fitting wheels to shafts and motors to a frame can be a bit tricky when none were […]
Physics simulations using classical mechanics is something that’s fairly easily done on regular consumer hardware, with real-time approximations a common feature in video games. Moving things to the quantum realm gets more complex, though with equilibrium many-body systems still quite solvable. Where things get interesting is with nonequilibrium quantum systems. These open systems are subject […]
The brushless DC-powered compressor. (Credit: Hyperspace Pirate, YouTube) When you think of air conditioners, you tend to think of rather bulky units, with the window-mounted appliances probably among the most compact. There’s however no real minimum size limit to these AC units, as long as you can get an appropriate compressor. If you also manage […]
[Nicholas Murray]’s Composite Test Pattern Generator is a beautifully-made, palm-sized tool that uses an ESP32-based development board to output different test patterns in PAL/NTSC. If one is checking out old televisions or CRTs, firing up a test pattern can be a pretty handy way to see if the hardware is healthy or not. The little […]
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) forms the bridge between the analog world of paper and the world of machines. The modern-day expectation is that when we point a smartphone camera at some characters it will flawlessly recognize and read them, but OCR technology predates such consumer technology by a considerable amount, with IBM producing OCR systems […]
This week the Hackaday Podcast is on vacation, but we’d like to wish you all happy holidays and a great 2026. Thanks for tuning in! We’ll be back next week. This wasn’t a real show, but that doesn’t prevent you from downloading it as an MP3 anyway. Where to Follow Hackaday Podcast Places to follow […]
There are all kinds of fun, glowing PC cases on the market these days. However, if you want something that focuses on serviceability over flash while still looking stylish, you might like the Makeyo MK01. It’s a PC case that you can print yourself, and [Marst_art] has published a video on what it’s like to […]
It’s no surprise that NVIDIA is gradually dropping support for older videocards, with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed. What’s more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example. On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell […]
Names and labels are difficult. Take this “3D Printed” water-cooling loop by [Visual Thinker] on YouTube. It undeniably uses 3D printing — but it also uses silicone casting and laser-cut acrylic, too. All of these are essential parts, yet only 3D printing gets top billing in his thumbnail. At least the version we saw, anyway; […]