Hackaday.com

Even if almost tragically impractical in a world where digital calculators are cheap as chips, mechanical calculators and their big mechanical computer brethren remain an absolute marvel of engineering. Using …read more

In the era before PCB shops would make almost any PCB imaginable, as well making many other manufacturing processes for prototypes available to hobbyists, there were several ways of making …read more

A mechanical TV — the kind that makes an image with a Nipkow disk and a single lamp with some help from persistence of vision — is easy enough to …read more

You might think that if you dug some tunnels down into the ground where you could be out of the sunshine, that you might find them to be relatively cool …read more

How easy is it to build a simple demonstration at home that proves fundamental law of physics, such as Coulomb’s inverse square law, or Maxwell’s equations? This is one of …read more

If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and launched on the MSX, …read more

Although we often think that we got certain aspects of aerodynamics pretty much licked at this point, details like the optimal shape of a propeller remains hotly debated, both in- …read more

We often see scientific breakthroughs in journals or other media that’s reported on as if it’s a revolutionary technology guaranteed to reshape human existence, only to never hear about it …read more

The PICO-8 is what is known as a ‘fantasy console’– you can program it, and there are oodles of games, but it’s not actually the 8-bit console it pretends to …read more

It’s been more than a year since [Henrik Forstén] built the first iteration of his synthetic-aperture radar (SAR) imaging drone, and he’s certainly been productive in the meantime. Not only …read more

There are many benefits to spending time in the park, but perhaps few of them have a Hackaday angle. There’s a park in Germany you might want to make an …read more

Mipmapping is a good way to add a lot more detail to a 3D scene without overburdening the rendering hardware with detail that won’t be seen by the user. This …read more

FPGAs used to be mysterious, expensive devices, but these days you can buy surprisingly capable boards for very little money. Some years ago, I did an FPGA Bootcamp over on …read more

Although the Nintendo 64 was the first to bring real 3D graphics to the table in 1996, the Super Nintendo had an ace up its sleeve in the form of …read more

The speed that computers have gotten smaller is a bit mind-bending. Most of us now walk around with computers in our pockets that would have rivaled the supercomputers from a …read more

It isn’t quite hailing frequencies open, but researchers from Harvard claim they’ve picked up a radio signal directly from a nearby exoplanet. Before you get too excited, planets in our …read more

When flying over the United States, Australia, and a few other vast and relatively empty parts of the world, strange circular formations can be spotted. These are typically center-pivot irrigation …read more

Continuing their reverse-engineering of Intel’s 8087 FPU, [Ken Shirriff] and friends took a look at one of the trigonometric functions, specifically FPTAN.  The most exciting part with such reverse-engineering is …read more

Considering how important it is for everything from navigation to keeping clocks in sync, satellite navigation systems are surprisingly vulnerable to a variety of attacks, ranging from simple jamming to …read more

Every magnet has a north and a south pole, but which is which? Sometimes it matters. If a product one builds features a magnetic closure or other part, the polarity …read more