9+ mon, 3+ week ago (264+ words) The Free Software Foundation is holding an auction to celebrate its 40th anniversary. You can bid on the original sketch of the GNU head by [Etienne Suvasa] and [Richard Stallman's] Internet Hall of Fame medal. There are some other awards, including the FSF's 1999 Norbert Wiener Award. There's even a katana that symbolizes the fight for computer user freedom. Continue reading "Your Chance To Get A Head (A Gnu Head, Specifically)" " Internal laptop modifications like this one remind us of the Ye Olden Days of Hackaday, when Eee PC modifications were all the rage and we still ran black and white pictures "taped" to the screen. Ah, the memories. The Free Sofware Foundation, the very same organization'responsible'for the GNU General Public License and open source advocacy on the part of the Free Software'stalwart'[Richard Stallman], has certified its first piece of hardware…...

10+ mon, 5+ day ago (398+ words) Continue reading "7 Segment Clockwork Display Made From Cardboard" " A pushcar is a great toy for a young child. They're great excercise, and kids love anything on wheels. However, the bigger kids might want something with a little more grunt. [Master Milo] has just the thing " an engine from a concrete saw and the fabrication skills to match. (YouTube, embedded below.) Mechanical parts are in ready supply, with bearings and shafts all sourced from INDI, a European equivalent to McMaster Carr. By purchasing gears, belts and other parts off the shelf, it's easy to make something that fits first time with a minimum of modification required. The testing video is worth a watch " with both top speed and handling tests. The platform's handling does leave something to be desired, but that's half the fun in a build like this. We're no…...

10+ mon, 1+ week ago (374+ words) We've seen several projects that add wireless controllers to a variety of classic consoles. If you've got a ColecoVision that turns out to be beyond salvaging, you can always just build your own from scratch. Plugging in something like an antique radio to see if it works is a good way to have a bad time, because some old components don't age well. For vintage electronics, inspection and repair are steps one and two. When it comes time to cautiously apply power, it's best to use what's called a dim-bulb tester and most hackers can probably put one together from scrap. These testers make it easier, and safer, to tell if there are any big problems with a device's power supply. In its simplest form, a dim-bulb tester puts an incandescent lamp in series between a device " like an old…...

10+ mon, 1+ day ago (388+ words) Whereas a typical scale would then simply show the resulting number on an LCD display, [Mirko] decided to use a moving coil meter driven by the Arduino's analog output. That meter was originally designed to show currents, so [Mirko] printed a new background image using kilograms instead. Continue reading "Hackaday Prize 2022: Arduino-Powered Weighing Scale Has A Real Analog Display" " We're all familiar with supply chain issues as they relate to chips and DIPs, but anyone who has requested an estimate for home improvements lately knows that the problems extend to things like plywood, and probably tile, marble, and Formica. Faced with adversity when it came to renovating the kitchen, [3DPC] decided to have a go at 3D printing custom countertops instead of buying tile. Are you still without a printer? Might as well make one that can use trash. Or if you…...

10+ mon, 5+ day ago (393+ words) It's Memorial Day in the US, so we thought we'd put together a collection of links we've covered in the past that might help you celebrate. The Apu 3000 is one of the finer examples of drug use leading to carpentry. It's a 4 gallon frozen margarita machine built out of a garbage disposal. A new garbage disposal. We don't have the time here to speculate on what sort chemical dangers you may expose yourself to by constructing this though. Continuing the trend of throwing horsepower at problems is the gas powered blender. It's good for people that love a refreshing beverage while inhaling the fumes of 2-stroke engines. We've covered a couple peltier based cooling projects in the past too. The first was a can cooler for the desktop. The second involved snaking a CAT5 cable across the yard to power a…...

9+ mon, 3+ week ago (386+ words) This project makes full use of the ESP32s capabilities, and the attention to detail that has gone into making it usable is particularly impressive. It certainly raises the bar against previous OCR meter reading projects. [Thanks for the tip Sascha] This is his first attempt at a "functional useful project, but he does love to build the occasional toy, such as this POV Top. Measuring the usage of domestic utilities such as water, gas or electricity usually boils down to measuring a repetitive pulse signal with respect to time. To make things easy, most modern utility meters have a pulsed LED output, which can be used to monitor the consumption by using an external optical sensor. But what do you do if your meter isnt so cooperative? If you are unfortunate enough to have an even older meter which doesnt use…...

9+ mon, 4+ day ago (328+ words) We're proud to announce the last round of speakers, as well as the two workshops that we'll be running at 2025 Hackaday Europe in Berlin on March 15th and 16th "read more We're proud to announce the last round of speakers, as well as the two workshops that we'll be running at 2025 Hackaday Europe in Berlin on March 15th and 16th " and Friday night the 14th, if you're already in town. The last two years that we've done Hackaday Europe in Berlin have been awesome, and this year promises to keep up the tradition. We can't wait to get our hands on the crazy selection of SAO badge addons that are going to be in each and every schwag bag. Tickets for the event itself are going fast, but the workshop tickets that go on sale at 8:00 AM PST sell out even faster. And you need…...

10+ mon, 3+ week ago (276+ words) It's been a good 2025 so far! I just got back from Chaos Communication Congress, which is easily my favorite gigantic hacker conference of the year. (Partisan Hackaday pride puts "read more It's been a good 2025 so far! I just got back from Chaos Communication Congress, which is easily my favorite gigantic hacker conference of the year. (Partisan Hackaday pride puts Supercon up as my favorite moderate-sized conference, naturally.) CCC is huge. And it's impossible to leave an event like that without your to-hack list at least doubling in length. And then I got back home and started prepping up for the podcast, which meant reading through about a week's worth of Hackaday in a single sitting. Which in turn adds a few more projects to the list. Thanks for that, y'all! All of this was possible because people who do…...

10+ mon, 8+ hour ago (268+ words) [Jake von Slatt] has sent along a few of his projects, but his timing never quite coincides with mine. It's about time I give this guy some coverage. His latest project was a pair telegraph ... We've had it with all these dark hardware hacking conferences. We're giving up on Hack-A-Day and becoming Craft-A-Day. From now on we'll be featuring great content like the latest knitting needle mods, yarn spinning and scrap booking. It's been a great ride, but from now on we'll see you at Hobby Lobby. Thanks for setting us straight, [Steve]. A while back, a friend of a friend supposedly used a USB microscopes to measure yeast activity in his beer brewing. If anyone runs across it, let me know. Apparently I'm on a nokia 3310 LCD kick. [Coniferous] submitted this nice little pic project/nokia LCD implimentation. It…...

4+ mon, 4+ week ago (275+ words) For the full breakdown, the original post has everything from firmware details to hibernation circuitry. Whether you're a retro purist or an off-grid prepper, the Evertop deserves a place on your bench. Check out [ericjenott]'s project on Github here. There's actually two write-ups for this particular story, with [Varun] documenting the modification of the Chromebooks and the software developed to play the video between them, and [Aksel] covering how the hardware was ultimately attached to the wall via bespoke 3D printed mounting brackets. Continue reading "Old Chromebooks Get Second Life As Video Wall" " A long-term project of mine is the the Sony Vaio new mainboard project. A year ago, I used it as an example to show you the cool new feature in KiCad 8, known as "background bitmaps". There are a heap of cool aspects to this specific Sony Vaio....