How Gold Plastic Syndrome is Killing Toys and Game Consoles
In a recent video [Sqwerks] does a deep-dive into the problem of disintegrating plastic enclosures of Nintendo DS consoles. These original NDS handheld consoles…
Reactive Heat and Wind Come to VR, Thanks to Smart Plugs
Want to feel the heat of nearby fire, explosions, or radiation? Or even just the gentle warmth and breeze of a sunny day in the wasteland? If you said yes, R…
Hackaday Europe 2026: Playstation 4 to Psychometer
There are many ways to detect stress in an individual. You can use self-reporting checklists, you could try and measure various vital signs like respiratory rat…
It’s Teletext, But On The Radio
Old-school teletext with its pixelated text and block graphics may now be largely a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean it’s without enthusiast…
PETG: the PLA Filament Alternative that Just Works
A typical response to the previous article on why PLA filament is so darn brittle. This has led some people to not use PLA filament at all, while others promote…
The Science Behind Why We Love To Drive
A new study looks at what makes driving feel thrilling and why focus, control, and emotional response may matter more than speed alone. The post The Science Beh…
From Copper Foil to Custom PCB: Building a DIY Touch Piano with Sridhar Rajagopal
In a niche corner of the internet where creators still surprise audiences with real animatronics rather than CGI, Jesse Velez reveals the process behind the mos…
Crowdsourcing An Investigation Into Coil Whine
If you’ve heard the high-pitched whine or buzz from an electronic device when a current-carrying inductor is vibrating, you’ll know how unpleasant i…
Sliding Into Perfection: The Open Task Light
A few years ago Dyson released a desk lamp that could slide up and down, in and out, balancing itself at every position. [Steven Bennett] saw that lamp and want…
Tricking an Air Conditioner Into Cooling
Modern heat pumps, of which air conditioners are a subset, seem like simple machines in theory. They just move heat from one place to another. But in order to o…
ReactOS Gets An Upgrade
A perennial in the esoteric operating system space is ReactOS, a project with its roots in the 1990s which is doing a pretty good job of creating an open source…
Fixing an Expensive Amprobe Cable Tracer With Mystery Fault
Perhaps the most annoying kinds of faults are those that involve expensive equipment that just sit around in a cupboard, only for them to just stop working at a…
Review: ChompSaw Cardboard Cutter for Kids
Sure, ChompSaw — the kid-safe, desktop power tool for cutting cardboard — looks amazing in ads. But can it work for papercrafting adults? The post Review: Chomp…
Building An Energy-Harvesting Business Card
The hope is always that a good business card will leave a good impression. For those in the electronics field, they also serve as an opportunity to showcase cre…
Simulating UAVs In Unreal Engine
When it comes to building real-world flying vehicles, testing can be arduous and expensive. You have to find somewhere to fly, then you have to contend with env…
Defeating Bacteria In Hot Water Systems With A Heat Exchanger
The average hot water is a relatively simple appliance to understand. It uses gas or electricity to dump energy into water in the form of heat, keeping it at a …
USB-C Adapted for Legacy Sprinkler Systems
In the modern world USB has become a truly universal connector, with its inclusion on almost every major piece of consumer electronics. It has even expanded wel…
What’s Mu Metal?
If you tear into old TVs or recording equipment, you may see shields made from some exotic-looking metal. Old timers will tell you it’s called mu metal, a…
The Size of Your Kitchen Island Might Be Ruining Your Kitchen — Here’s How to Tell
An oversized kitchen island can make a kitchen harder to use. Learn how to choose the right size, clearance and layout for your space. The post The Size of Your…
Think You Know DIY Brands? Try Guessing These Blurry Logos
How well do you know these brand logos from the country's biggest DIY companies? The post Think You Know DIY Brands? Try Guessing These Blurry Logos appeared fi…
Digital “Film” For Your Pi Camera
The formula of a Raspberry Pi camera is such that it’s almost a self-assembly kit of parts. Over the years we’ve seen a lot of attempts to make one …
A Flip Disc Display That Does It Slow And Steady
Flip disc displays can be quite a task to drive, what with having some sort of actuator mechanism for each and every dot in the display. [Zimm] has built an …
Making a Robot to Serve Some Mean Badminton Shuttlecocks
Sometimes regarded as a less violent form of tennis, badminton is still a pretty challenging sport. One which suffers like so many sports from requiring at leas…
Get Your Monitor Transmitting VHF with a Browser Tool
If you’re intending to transmit on the VHF band, you’re probably going to reach for a handheld or some kind of rackmount rig in your ham shack. But …
Hackaday Links: August 30, 2026
The big news today is, of course, the successful launch and deployment of NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope earlier this morning. The space agency’…
Dissecting a Lethal Universal Travel Adapter
The world’s refusal to standardize on a single type of mains power outlet has led to a vibrant market of so-called travel adapters, all of which try to ou…
LLM Moats Quickly Evaporating
In the business world, a moat is a quality of a business that makes it difficult for competitors to take that company’s profits. With how hard it is to tr…
Low(er)-Cost Humanoid Robot Leverages DIY Actuators
Humanoid robots, even scaled-down ones, tend to be expensive. The Berkeley Humanoid Lite offers a more accessible and economical option by centering the design …
Giving the NES an Optical Data Storage Add-On
The introduction of optical media in the form of CDs meant a revolution in the world of gaming consoles, escaping the restrictions of a few dozen MB of storage …
Woodstove Assistant Keeps the Heat on Safely
Those who have never lived in a cold climate might romanticize winters around a fire, keeping warm under blankets while snow gently falls outside. While it cert…
Laser Your Way to Smoother FDM 3D Prints
Now, not everyone minds the characteristic layer lines you get with Filament Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D prints, but sometimes you need a smooth surface. If so…
Fat Tire Brakes Get Wireless Upgrade
At first glance, wireless brakes seem like a recipe for disaster. For something as critical as braking, many bicyclists might prefer a physical connection to th…
Compact PCB Vise Uses Up That Leftover Filament
Needing less than 70 grams of filament, [Chefkoch]’s 3D printed PCB vise solder station might be a good way to use up some filament spool leftovers and ge…
Wikipedia on a Cheap Yellow Display
The Cheap Yellow Display (CYD) is a board carrying a slightly older ESP32 variant, a display with a resistive touchscreen, an SD card, and not much else. ItR…
Motorized Planer Height Adjustment Dials In
Having access to a planer opens up a lot of options for woodworking. It enables a craftsman to work with much rougher lumber and the finished results generally …
Maker Faire North Of 60: Making In The Yukon
INSTAGRAM I FACEBOOK I LINKED IN I YOU TUBE I WEBSITE Whitehorse, the capital of the Yukon Territory and traditional home to Kwanlin Dün First Nation and the Ta…
Wear Your Way Out Of AI Surveilance
For decades now many of us have lived in surveillance societies where it’s difficult not to be within the view of a camera. When being noticed depended on…
3D Printed Piano Action Faithful to the Original
A piano’s internal mechanism for translating a key press into sound is surprisingly complicated. It has to do a lot of things simultaneously and quickly: …
Playing Snake with a Pneumatic Display
[soiboi soft]’s vacuum-driven dot matrix display is part suction gripper, part touchscreen, and altogether impressive. Its display capabilities are entirely sha…
This Library Needs to Be At Least… Three Times Bigger
Many of us have noted a tremendous price increase in many computer components for some mysterious reason. Whatever this cause is will be debated among the vario…
Reviving an SD Card With Shorted Capacitors
A nice thing about SD cards is that even in their non-micro format they are conveniently small. This is however a bit of a problem when an SD card stops ……
DOOM Played on Series of 555 Timers
It’s technically true that any piece of software can be reproduced in hardware, although modern software’s size and complexity generally makes this …
Casting Engine Parts from 3D Prints
After building a couple of internal combustion engines by milling billet aluminium stock and cringing at the absolute waste of material this created, [Camden Bo…
Microducks Exude Macro Charm
Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics have launched Microduck, an adorable $400 open source, trainable robot. The post Microducks Exude Macro Charm appeared first on…
Hackaday Podcast Episode 384: OCR MOD Records, Magical PCBs, and the Gravity of Space Stations
What did Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams read in Hackaday last week? Probably everything, but you can tune in and hear about their favorites on…
Building a Headless Game Boy Emulator
[Artificial-Age] has built a rather unique way to play old Game Boy games. It’s an emulator, but it doesn’t work in quite the way you might think! S…
This Week in Security: Android Malware, VOIP Hijack, Signal Contact Discovery, and TeamPCP Arrests
On GitHub, [AyaanB] details buying a cheap Android TV streaming device, looking for, and finding, baked-in malware. Multiple warnings have been issued by the FB…
RAM and eMMC Prices Are So High, Pine64 Has Stopped Linux Device Production
We all know that the price of RAM and storage has shot up due to demand from the AI industry and other factors. In most cases that means we grumble …read …
Panoramic Photography with a Linear Scanner
Although digital photography took a big bite of the film industry’s lunch, it wasn’t able to completely eliminate the need — or desire —…
Support Bath Enables an Epoxy Benchy
There’s plenty of substances that can theoretically be extruded from a nozzle, but only a regrettably small subset of them can actually be used for 3D pri…
Running Multiple Linux Kernels Without Hypervisor
In a move that’s no doubt going to trigger a lot of confusion and nostalgia, Mklinux is back, in a sense. As the announcement makes clear, this is multike…
I’m a Lifelong DIYer, and the Best Thing I Ever Learned Was When to Walk Away
I used to think I could fix anything myself. One disastrous plumbing project taught me that knowing when to stop is the real DIY skill. The post I’m a Lif…
The Best and Worst Cities for Biking in 2026 — Is Yours on the List?
See which U.S. cities rank best for biking and which have the highest cyclist fatality risk, based on two recent national studies. The post The Best and Worst C…
Does Insurance Cover Your Stuff in a College Dorm?
Here's what is and is not insured in your college student's dorm room. The post Does Insurance Cover Your Stuff in a College Dorm? appeared first on Family Hand…
Can You Trust AI When It Comes to Pet Stain Removal? Experts Weigh In
AI is hailed as a fairly omniscient solution to your problems, but is it always right? We fact-checked its pet stain removal suggestions. The post Can You Trus…
ToAuto Unveils Smart Cutting Machine: Industrial Precision, Now on Your Desktop
For jewelry makers, ToAuto's Smart Cutting Machine offers control and consistency in a desktop saw for lapidary or metal cutting. The post ToAuto Unveils Smart …
All The Best Computers Boot To BASIC
Anyone whose first computing experience came in the form of an 8-bit home computer will tell you about booting straight into a BASIC interpreter. The machine in…
Australia’s Nationwide Phone Outage Was An Embarrassing Failure
The phones! They were one of the basic utilities of the 20th century, and were just about as reliable as death and taxes. Even when then power grid went down, &…
Analog Optical Feedback Generates 4K Fractals With No Computer
For users of a certain age, fractal patterns and computers are nearly synonymous. Typing in BASIC programs and seeing the Mandelbrot set or other fractals slowl…
eenk Provides eInk, ESP32 Powered Text Adventures
There’s a niche genre of text adventure that’s halfway between a traditional novel and a videogame. Think Zork if it had an extra few novels worth o…
Encoding MOD Files Optically On Paper, Because Amiga’s Legacy Will Outlast M-Disks
All but a few of our very youngest readers are surely familiar with music formats that rely on optical disks. When we say [RobDevBuilds] made a MOD tracker that…
Sloan Digital Sky Survey Releases New Map of Supermassive Black Holes
The Universe is a large place, yet despite it being mostly empty space, there are still a lot of things to find and catalogue. This includes mildly terrifying t…
Making An LCD UI Look More Like Classic Indicator Lamps
The TermDriver 2 is a USB-to-serial interface with a twist—it has a built-in screen for displaying relevant information. It can run at anywhere from 100 bit/s t…
Cheap Sip-and-Puff Controller Inspires Gamers
Caleb Kraft's cheap sip-and-puff game controller could be what a lot of quadriplegic gamers need. The post Cheap Sip-and-Puff Controller Inspires Gamers appeare…
FLOSS Weekly Episode 879: Easy Like Butter
This week Jonathan chats with Nathan Freitas of the Guardian Project! What is going on at the forefront of Open Source and privacy advocacy? Where are we on a t…
How Packaging Can Kill An Electronics Microbusiness
Quite a few in our community make a bit of cash on the side by selling our creations, and it’s not uncommon to find that a project which catches your R…
Hackaday Europe 2026: PCBs With A Plot
Printed circuit boards were developed first for function over form. They were a way to mount components and connect them in a stable, robust fashion, while taki…
Claude Plays DOOM
Large language models (LLMs) are generally thought of as machines that accept textual prompts and spit out textual content. However, if you’re creative in…
New Controller Makes Heavy Machinery Intuitive
As children, many of us looked wistfully into the cockpits of heavy machinery, wondering just how the series of knobs and levers would do something like operate…
Blow Those Pyros With A Telephone!
A pyrotechnic charge is set off by passing a high voltage through a filament within it, melting the filament and igniting the charge. We could think of a variet…
Cheap AI Token Resellers: The Secret Ingredient is Fraud
[Matt Lenhard] has an interesting writeup explaining exactly how fraudsters offer access to cutting-edge AI models at a tenth of the price. Perhaps unsurprising…
Behr’s Color of the Year Is So Timeless, It’ll Never Go Out of Style
Behr named Grounded its 2027 Color of the Year. Here's what to know about the earthy olive green and how designers recommend using it. The post Behr’s Col…
Can You Really Drive and Not Remember It? The Truth About Highway Hypnosis
Highway hypnosis can happen on long or familiar drives. Learn what causes it, how it differs from drowsy driving, and how to prevent it. The post Can You Really…
The Lightest FPV Whoop Drone
Build an ultralight FPV Whoop video drone that weighs less than three nickels! The post The Lightest FPV Whoop Drone appeared first on Make: DIY Projects and Id…
AI Book Scanning: Just What Is A Rare Book?
One of the stories of the last few weeks has been that AI companies have been scanning books in very large numbers in order to train their models with content &…
Artificial Intelligence as It Once Was
One day, people will look back at what we call Artificial Intelligence and laugh. We do the same thing today, as chat bots totally outstrip what the computer in…
Anatomy of an SLA Resin Printing Disaster
When I got back into SLA resin printing recently, I knew that I’d inevitably have to deal with the agony of failed prints and of course resin spills. This…
Quest VR Headset Becomes Unlocked Hardware
The Quest virtual reality headset gets a fully unlocked bootloader thanks to the QuestStack tool, which automates a complex process of privilege escalation to p…
The Days Of Broadcast Digital TV Could Be Numbered
When the analog TV signals were turned off in most places around fifteen years ago, their replacement took the form of a set of digital multiplexes. ATSC for No…
What You’re Really Paying For When You Buy Premium Paint
Does premium paint really perform better? Professional painters explain what changes between paint tiers and when the upgrade is worth the cost. The post What Y…
The DIY Upgrades That Actually Mattered When We Sold Our Fixer-Upper
Buyers aren’t always impressed by the expensive renovations, but rather the projects that make a home feel functional and easy to imagine living in. The post Th…
Those Mysterious Black Tubes on the Road Have an Important Job
Black tubes across the road collect traffic data. Learn what they measure, how they work, and why transportation agencies use them. The post Those Mysterious Bl…
Straight Talk on 3D Printing Footwear At Home
Printed footwear is an intriguing idea, but as far as projects go it is somewhat more complex than it first appears. This guide to 3D printing your own clogs no…
3D-Printed Skin Gives Robots the Sensation of Touch
Hypoesthesia, more commonly referred to as numbness, is one of the more distressing ailments that can affect us humans, primarily because it reminds us of just …
A 1990s Homebrew OS With GUI And Web Browser, In AM29000 Machine Code
The AM29000 series of processors were AMD’s entry into the world of super-fast next-generation silicon of the late 1980s. It was a time when ARM was still…
An Electronic Explanation Of 1960s Fuzz Boxes
It’s likely that even those of us who have never picked up a guitar in our lives will recognize the sound of an electric guitar with a fuzz box effects &#…
100-Degree Heat Doesn’t Stop Landscapers — Here Are the Tips That Keep Them Going
Discover tips for staying cool while working on even the hottest days from the pros themselves. The post 100-Degree Heat Doesn’t Stop Landscapers — Here A…
The Coolest Castle to Visit in Every State
Discover the coolest castle in every U.S. state, from grand estates to historic fortresses, including when each landmark was built. The post The Coolest Castle …
Acmer SM 60W MOPA Split Laser Review
Acmer's SM MOPA laser comes with great power, but leaves responsibility to the user. The post Acmer SM 60W MOPA Split Laser Review appeared first on Make: DIY P…
At Last, A Gameboy Advance With Decent Audio
Many pieces of consumer electronics are build down to a price, and the corners cut show up in their performance. The Gameboy Advance from Nintendo is no excepti…
Tech in Plain Sight: Vacuum Blood Collection
If you’re blessed enough that you haven’t had blood drawn in a while, you might not have thought much about the process. You might imagine that a ne…
Combining Photogrammetry Utilities into a Simple GUI Tool
One of the fun aspects of open source software is that you can often find so many libraries and tools that implement the functionality you need, but ease of use…
An Early History of Space Stations: Where’s My Wheel?
Last time we found out the idea of space stations is surprisingly old. By the 1950s, everyone knew we’d be working in beautiful space stations that rotate…
Making Better Rubies At Home
Sapphires and rubies aren’t just pretty, they also got a range of practical uses. This makes it even more useful to be able to make them at home for obvio…
The Casio F-91W As A Contactless Payment Device.
The Casio F-91W digital watch is perhaps one of the most successful pieces of consumer electronics ever made, having quietly supplied the essential function of …
Neo-Cyclostyle: Automatic Document Copying Devices in 1890
Document duplication has been a highly desirable feature, long before medieval monks slaved over yet another illuminated manuscript by flickering candle light. …
3D Printing a Railway Pump Car
A staple of old movies featuring railways, many handcars – also called pump trolleys or pump cars – feature the characteristic seesawing beam. Requi…
Hackaday Links: August 23, 2026
We’ll start this week off with some disappointing, though not entirely unexpected, news — the ambitious commercial mission to save NASA’s Neil…
Using the Basic SNES Hardware to Play Minecraft
After previously putting a very basic version of Minecraft on the Game Boy Color, [Tobi] decided to have some fun and port that version also to the Super Ninten…
Race Car Tire Pyrometer
Log your tire temperatures with a race car tire pyrometer and tune your ride for faster times. The post Race Car Tire Pyrometer appeared first on Make: DIY Proj…