[ad_1] What is it about tangible media? There’s just something neat about having an individual thing that represents each game, each album, each whatever. Sure, you can have a little console with a thousand games loaded on it, but what’s the fun in that? Enter the ATtinyBoy. [Bram]’s entry into the Tiny Games Contest is […]

[ad_1] Spirographs can make some pretty groovy designs on paper, but what if you want to take it a step further? [Uri Tuchman] has used the pantograph on his milling machine to duplicate the effect in harder materials. [Tuchman] starts with a quick proof-of-concept using an actual plastic Spirograph toy to make sure it isn’t […]

[ad_1] Beyond the power variant, it sometimes seems as though we rarely encounter a discrete transistor these days, such has been the advance of integrated electronics. But they have a rich history, going back through the silicon era to germanium junction transistors, and thence to the original devices. if you’ve ever looked at the symbol […]

[ad_1] Here’s a novel ratchet mechanism developed by researchers that demonstrates how a single object — in this case a gear shaped like a six-pointed star — can rectify the disordered energy of its environment into one-way motion. The Feynman–Smoluchowski ratchet has alternating surface treatments on the sides of its points, accomplished by applying a […]

[ad_1] One of the most troubling trends of almost every modern consumer product that uses electricity is that the software that controls the product is likely to be proprietary and closed-source, which could be doing (or not doing) any number of things that its owner has no control over. Whether it’s a computer, kitchen appliance, […]

[ad_1] The 8-bit home computers of yore that we all know and love, without exception as far as we are aware, had an off the shelf microprocessor at heart. In 1983 you were either in the Z80 camp or the 6502 camp, with only a relatively few outliers using processors with other architectures. But what […]

[ad_1] Docker and other containerization applications have changed a lot about the way that developers create new software as well as how they maintain virtual machines. Not only does containerization reduce the system resources needed for something that might otherwise be done in a virtual machine, but it standardizes the development environment for software and […]

[ad_1] Making microcontrollers produce video has long been a staple of hardware hacking, but as the resolution goes up, it becomes a struggle for less capable silicon. To get higher resolution VGA from an Arduino, [Marcin Chwedczuk] has produced perhaps the most bulletproof solution, to create dual-port RAM with the help of a static RAM […]

[ad_1] Even when the boss is away, the show must go on, so Dan slid back behind the guest mic and teamed up with Tom to hunt down the freshest of this week’s hacks. It was a bit of a chore, with a couple of computer crashes and some side-quests down a few weird rabbit […]

[ad_1] The Hackaday comments section is generally a lively place. At its best, it’s an endless wellspring of the combined engineering wisdom of millions of readers which serves to advance the state of the art in hardware hacking for all. At its worst — well, let’s just say that at least it’s not the YouTube […]