Using A Smartphone As A Touchscreen For Arduino

If you want a good display and interface device for an embedded project, it’s hard to look past an old smartphone. After all, you’ve got an excellent quality screen and capacitive touch…

Microfluidic Motors Could Work Really Well For Tiny Scale Tasks

The vast majority of motors that we care about all stick to a theme. They rely on the electromagnetic dance between electrons and magnets to create motion. They come in all shapes and sizes and typ…

Reusing An Old Android Phone For GPIO With External USB Devices

Each year millions of old smartphones are either tossed as e-waste or are condemned to lie unloved in dusty drawers, despite the hardware in them usually being still perfectly fine. Reusing these l…

Easily Program RP2040 Boards With Your Android Device

You could write your microcontroller code on your desktop PC, or you could do it on your laptop on the go. Or, if you want to get really portable about things, you could write your embedded code on…

Lindroid Promises True Linux On Android

Since Android uses Linux, you’d think it would be easier to run Linux apps on your Android phone or tablet. There are some solutions out there, but the experience is usually less than stellar…

The Moondrop MIAD 01: A Smartphone With Balanced Audio Output

Over the past several years we have seen smartphones regrettably lose features which were once standard, such as FM radios, IR blasters, status LEDs, physical buttons, micro SD card slots, and of c…

Android-Powered Rigol Scopes Go Wireless

The Rigol DHO800 and DHO900 series use Android underneath, and as you might expect, this makes them easier to hack. A case in point: [VoltLog] demonstrates that you can add WiFi to the scope using …

Servo Claw Game Puts Your Muscles To The Test

As fun as claw games are, the jaws are always disappointingly weak, and you usually end up with bupkis. What if the jaws were completely within your  control? That’s the idea behind [Upside D…

Android: Coming Soon To A RISC-V Processor Near You

In the roughly decade and a half since the Android mobile operating system appeared on the scene it has been primarily sold on devices with an ARM core at their heart, but along the way it has also…

Doom On IPhone OS, On Android

So you want to play some games from the early days of 32-bit iPhone OS that no longer run on recent OS versions? [Hikari-no-yume] wrote a sweet high-level emulator, touchHLE, to do so on modern iOS…

Probably The Most Over-Specified Calculator To Ever Be Manufactured

It’s possible quite a few of our older readers will remember the period from the 1960s into the ’70s when an electronic calculator was the cutting edge of consumer-grade digital technol…

The TAK Ecosystem: Military Coordination Goes Open Source

In recent years you’ve probably seen a couple of photos of tablets and smartphones strapped to the armor of soldiers, especially US Special Forces. The primary app loaded on most of those dev…

Hackable $20 Modem Combines LTE And Pi Zero W2 Power

[extrowerk] tells us about a new hacker-friendly device – a $20 LTE modem stick with a quadcore CPU and WiFi, capable of running fully-featured Linux distributions. This discovery hinges on a…

Revive Your Old E-Ink Tablet For Timetable Helper Duty

In our drawers, there’s gonna be quite a few old devices that we’ve forgotten about, and perhaps we ought to make them work for us instead. [Jonatron] found a Nook Simple Touch in his d…

Nokia 5110 Gets Android Stowaway And A Keyboard

Even though Nokia is largely an afterthought in the phone market now, there was a time when their products represented the state-of-the-art in mobile devices. Some of the their handsets even featur…

Quick Hack: The Phone To Stream Deck Conversion

What do you do with those old Android or iPhone phones and tablets? You have plenty of options, but it is pretty easy to build your own stream deck with a little off-the-shelf software. What’…

Robot Arm Has The Touch

[Maurizio] built a robot arm, which is always a great accomplishment. But his project includes a very cool touch interface for an Android device that sets it apart from many other similar projects.…

Developing A Custom WearOS Watch Face

When you think about customizing the face of a smartwatch, you probably imagine something akin to selecting a new wallpaper on an Android device, or maybe tweaking the color scheme a bit. But not […

Metal Detector Gets Help From Smartphone

[mircemk] is quite a wizard when it comes to using coils of wires in projects, especially when their application is within easy-to-build metal detectors. There are all kinds of ways to send signals…

Smart Home Hack Breaks Down Walls Figuratively And Literally

Are you ready for a tale of poorly supported hardware, clueless contractors, and bad coding? Look no further than [Neighborino]’s excellent write-up where he details his pursuit of smart home…