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[Ben Z] loves the Sphere computer, a very early entry in the personal computer boom of the mid 1970s. The 6800 CPU was unique in its day that it was a full system — at least in theory. If you could afford the whole...

If you were to name one of the most famous individual road cars in the world, what would it be? If you’re British and of a Certain Age, then it’s possible your nomination is for sale, because “The Beast”, the...

If you can explain what a USB PID, a J state, a K state, and an SOF are, you can probably stop reading now. But if you don’t know or you want a refresher, you can spend 15 minutes watching [Sine Lab’s]...

Designing devices that can operate in remote environments on battery power is often challenging, especially if the devices need to last a long time between charges or battery swaps. Thankfully there are some things...

A decent drill press is an essential machine tool for almost any kind of shop, and marks a significant step up in precision compared to a hand drill. The ability to drill square, true holes is one thing, but the added...

Along the road to developing his own cryocooler to produce liquid nitrogen, there are a number of interesting rabbit holes [Hyperspace Pirate] has found himself taking a look at. For example, using dry ice for a...

It was one of those weeks, where Elliot and Dan found a bounty of interesting hacks to choose from for the podcast, making it hard to pick. But pick we did, and we found so many deep and important questions. What good...

[Big Clive] picked up a keychain battery to charge his phone and found out that it was no bargain. Due to a wiring mistake, the unit was wired backward, delivering -5 V instead of 5 V. The good news is that it gave him...

One effect of the global pandemic was that there were relatively few events in our sphere for a couple of years. This and that other by-product of COVID-19, the chip shortage, meant that over the past year we’ve been...

The School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University has made [Bruce Land]’s lectures and materials for the Designing with Microcontrollers (ECE 4760) course available for many years. But recently...

Echo and reverb are now electronic audio effects done in a computer or an integrated circuit, but originally they were achieved through mechanical means. Reverb units used springs, and echo units used loops of magnetic...

[Jarrett] recently stumbled upon a class of drawing algorithms called force-directed graphs, which artificially apply forces to the elements. The final graph is then generated by applying the laws of physics and...

A solder fume extractor is something we could probably all use. While there isn’t much to them, [Steven Bennett] put a lot of thought into making one that was better for him, and we admired his design process, as well...

No matter your age or background, there’s an excellent chance you’ll recognize the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) at first glance. The iconic 8-bit system not only revitalized the gaming industry, but helped to...

If you are manufacturing something, you have to test it. It wouldn’t do, for example, for your car to say it was going 60 MPH when it was really going 90 MPH. But if you were making a classic Leica camera back in the...

Raspberry Pi has just introduced a new camera module in the high-quality camera format. For the same $50 price you would shell out for the HQ camera, you get roughly eight times fewer pixels. But this is a global...