Ask Hackaday: How Much Would You Stake On An Online Retailer

On the bench where this is being written, there’s a Mitutoyo vernier caliper. It’s the base model with a proper vernier scale, but it’s beautifully made, and it’s enjoyable …

Ask Hackaday: How Do You Make Front Panels?

We’ll admit it. The closer a project is to completion, the less enthusiasm we have for it. Once the main design is clearly going to work on a breadboard, we’re ready to move on to the n…

Ask Hackaday: Do You Calibrate Your Instruments?

Like many of you, I have a bench full of electronic instruments. The newest is my Rigol oscilloscope, only a few years old, while the oldest is probably my RF signal generator that dates from some …

Ask Hackaday: What If You Did Have A Room Temperature Superconductor?

The news doesn’t go long without some kind of superconductor announcement these days. Unfortunately, these come in several categories: materials that require warmer temperatures than previous…

Ask Hackaday: Why Are Self-Checkouts Failing?

Most people who read Hackaday have positive feelings about automation. (Notice we said most.) How many times have you been behind someone in a grocery store line waiting for them to find a coupon, …

Ask Hackaday: What Do You Do When You Can’t Solder?

Ah, soldering. It’s great for sticking surface mount parts to a PCB, and it’s really great for holding component legs in a plated through-hole. It also does a pretty great job of holdin…

Ask Hackaday: Why Retrocomputing?

I recently dropped in on one of the Vintage Computer Festival events, and it made me think about why people — including myself — are fascinated with old computer technology. In my case,…

Ask Hackaday: What’s Linux Anyway?

Any time we mention Linux, it is a fair bet we will get a few comments from people unhappy that we didn’t refer to it as GNU/Linux or with some other appellation. To be fair, they aren’…

Ask Hackaday: Learn Assembly First, Last, Or Never?

A few days ago, I ran into an online post where someone pointed out the book “Learn to Program with Assembly” and asked if anyone had ever learned assembly language as a first programmi…

Ask Hackaday: Split Rail Op Amp Power Supply

Water cooler talk at the office usually centers around movies, sports, or life events. Not at Hackaday. We have the oddest conversations and, this week, we are asking for your help. It is no secret…

Ask Hackaday: The Ten Dollar Digital Mixing Desk?

There comes a point in every engineer’s life at which they need a mixing desk, and for me that point is now. But the marketplace for a cheap small mixer just ain’t what it used to be. W…

Ask Hackaday: Stripping Wires With Lasers

Most of us strip the insulation off wires using some form of metal blade or blades. You can get many tools that do that, but you can also get by with skillfully using a pair of cutters, a razor bla…

Ask Hackaday: Would A Scooter Get You Back To The Office?

So we’re two plus years into the pandemic at this point. Are you still working from home in the most comfortable clothes ever sewn? We figure that of the lot of you who said goodbye to that d…

Ask Hackaday: What’s Your Worst Soldering Job?

Soldering! It’s the primary method for attaching one component to another in the world of electronics. Whether you’re free-forming a circuit, attaching connectors to cables, or populati…

Ask Hackaday: Are Extruders The Only Feasible Tools For Toolchanging?

Toolchanging in 3D printers is no longer something from the bleeding edge; it’s going mainstream. E3D has a high-quality kit for a toolchanger and motion system, our own Joshua Vasquez has sh…

Ask Hackaday: Why Don’t Automakers Make Their Own EV Batteries?

Sales of electric vehicles continue to climb, topping three million cars worldwide last year. All these electric cars need batteries, of course, which means demand for rechargeable cells is through…

In Search Of The First Comment

Are you writing your code for humans or computers? I wasn’t there, but my guess is that at the dawn of computing, people thought that they were writing for the machines. After all, they were …

Ask Hackaday: What’s The Best Way To Heat A Tent With A Laptop?

For Europeans, August is usually a month of blistering heatwaves, day after day of cloudless skies and burning sun that ripens fruit and turns we locals a variety of shades of pink. Hacker camps du…

Ask Hackaday: What Is Amazon Thinking By Entering The Palm-Reading Business?

Have you heard about this One? At least three United States senators have, and they want to know what Amazon plans to do with all the biometric data collected by the Amazon One program. It’s …

Ask Hackaday: How Is The Chip Shortage Affecting You?

Some friends of mine are designing a new board around the STM32F103 microcontroller, the commodity ARM chip that you’ll find in numerous projects and on plenty of development boards. When the…