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There are plenty of hard jobs out there, like founding your country’s nuclear program, or changing the timing chain on a BMW diesel. Making your own mechanical watch from scratch …read more

[mars91] had an interesting problem to solve—his girlfriend often requested Diet Coke, but yelling for one across the apartment was frustrating and impractical. A dedicated Diet Coke button seemed like …read more

Twas the week before Christmas when Elliot and Dan sat down to unwrap a pre-holiday bundle of hacks. We kicked things off in a seasonally appropriate way with a PCB …read more

Embossed leather belts can be deliciously stylish. However, the tooling for making these fashionable items is not always easy to come by, and it rarely comes cheap. What do we …read more

Analog radio broadcasts are pretty simple, right? Tune into a given frequency on the AM or FM bands, and what you hear is what you get. Or at least, that …read more

[Piffpaffpoltrie] had a problem. They found the InLine VA40R to be a perfectly usable multimeter, except for a couple of flaws. Most glaring among these were the tiny sockets for …read more

Not all 3D scanning is alike, and the right workflow can depend on the object involved. [Ding Dong Drift] demonstrates this in his 3D scan of a project car. His …read more

[Peter Mount] had a simple problem. He’d treated himself to a retro purchase in the form of a BBC Master 128—a faster sequel to the BBC Micro Model B. The …read more

Dial-up modems used to be the default way of accessing the Internet, but times have moved on. They’re now largely esoteric relics from a time gone by. With regular old …read more

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum+2 was the first home computer released by Amstrad after buying up Sinclair. It’s basically a Sinclair ZX Spectrum 128, but with a proper keyboard and a …read more

Don’t ask us why, but hackers and makers just love building clocks. Especially in the latter case, many  like to specialize in builds that don’t even look like traditional timepieces, …read more

What’s the best way to measure the depth of a well using a smartphone? If you’re fed up with social media, you might kill two birds with one stone and …read more

We talk a lot about patent disputes in today’s high-tech world. Whether it’s Wi-Fi, 3D printing, or progress bars, patent disputes can quickly become big money—for lawyers and litigants alike. …read more

If you program in C, strings are just in your imagination. What you really have is a character pointer, and we all agree that a string is every character from …read more

Recently there was a bit of a panic in the media regarding a very common item in kitchens all around the world: black plastic utensils used for flipping, scooping and …read more

Energy harvesting, the practice of scavenging ambient electromagnetic fields, light, or other energy sources, is a fascinating subject that we don’t see enough of here at Hackaday. It’s pleasing then …read more

If you want to build semiconductors at home, it seems like the best place to start might be to find a used scanning electron microscope on eBay. At least that’s …read more

Among us Hackaday writers, there are quite a few enthusiasts for retro artifacts – and it gets even better when they’re combined in an unusual way. So, when we get …read more

Extremophile lifeforms on Earth are capable of rather astounding feats, with the secret behind the extreme radiation resistance of one of them now finally teased out by researchers. As one …read more

Back in the bad old days, dealing with DNA and RNA in a lab setting was often fraught with peril. Detection technologies were limited to radioisotopes and hideous chemicals like …read more