Hacked Tea Lights Flicker Just Right

Flickering LED tea lights are a friendly and safe alternative to having flaming little pots of wax situated around your home, but sometimes the flicker scheme leaves something to be desired. [Roger…

Chip Shortage Engineering: Misusing DIP Packages

After years of seeing people showing off and trading their badge Simple Add-Ons (SAOs) at Supercon, this year I finally decided to make one myself. Now for a first attempt, it would have been enoug…

Nokia N-Gage QD Becomes Universal Bluetooth Gamepad

The Nokia N-Gage might not have put up much of a fight against Nintendo’s handheld dynasty, but you can’t say it didn’t have some pretty impressive technology for the time. [Beard…

Annoying Cicada Magnet Is Nonetheless Authentic

We’ve all heard of those chirper devices that randomly make annoying noises for no other reason than sending people insane. This project from [Kousuke Saito] brings altogether more art to thi…

Compact Mouse Jiggler Keeps Boss Off Your Back

The work-from-home revolution enabled many workers to break free from the shackles of the office. Some employers didn’t like the loss of perceived control though, and saddled workers with all…

Low Power Challenge: LCD Solar Creatures Live On Sunlight, Sleep At Night

With all those e-paper based projects doing the rounds these days, including in our Low Power Challenge, you’d almost forget that monochrome LCDs were the original ultra-low-power display. Wi…

ATtiny85 Automates Your Smartphone

It might not seem too impressive these days, but when microcontrollers with hardware USB support were more expensive and rare, the VUSB library was often used to create USB devices with an ATtiny85…

Swap The Clock Chip On The Mac SE/30 With An ATTiny85

As [Phil Greenland] explains in the first part of his excellent write-up, the lithium battery used to keep the real-time clock (RTC) going on the Macintosh SE/30 has a nasty habit of exploding and …

Mouse Whisperer Keeps You Working, Even When You Need A Break

When life hands you lemons, you make lemonade, right? What about when life hands you annoyingly intrusive work-from-home policies that require you to physically stay at your computer even though yo…

Circular Binary Clock Uses The Power To Tell Time

Should a clock be round? Depends on the style of clock, we suppose. After all, we wouldn’t expect to see a digital clock with a round readout just for fun. But a binary clock — that&#82…

Mini Ultrasonic Levitation Kit Is An Exercise In Sound Minimalist Design

For those that haven’t heard, ultrasonic levitation is a process by which two or more ultrasonic transducers are set opposite to each other and excited in such a way as to create a standing w…

A Cold Light To Warm Your Heart

Halloween is coming fast and what better way to add to your Halloween ornamentation than [Wagiminator]’s cute NeoCandle tea light simulator. [Wagiminator] has modified a 3D printed ghost alon…

Sleep Posture Monitor Warns You Away From Dangerous Positions

Age, we’re told, is just a number, but that number seems to be the ever-increasing count of injuries of a ridiculous nature. Where once the younger version of us could jump from a moving car …

A Customizable Macropad To Make Anyone’s Tail Wag

[Gili Yankovitch] has always wanted some kind of macro keypad for all those boss-slaying combos he keeps up the sleeve of his wizard robe while playing WoW. Seventeen years later, he finally threw …

Mindblowing Graphics From An ATtiny85

[Görg Pflug] wrote in with his really nice graphics library. It’s got multiple layers, two text consoles, greyscale, internal halftoning, and sprites. It can pull off a number of classic grap…

ATtiny85 Snake Game Is A Circuit Sandwich

If there’s any looming, unwritten rule of learning a programming language, it states that one must break in the syntax by printing Hello, World! in some form or another. If any such rule exis…

I2C To The Max With ATtiny

The Arudino is a powerful platform for interfacing with the real world, but it isn’t without limits. One of those hard limits, even for the Arduino MEGA, is a finite number of pins that the m…

Motorized Device Helps Swap Out Hard-To-Reach Light Bulbs

High ceilings can make a residence feel open and airy, but they often come with difficult-to-reach light fittings. To better deal with that, [mattwach] built a motorized light bulb changer which ma…

You Can Always Use An ATtiny Instead Of A 555

It’s a constant of writing for Hackaday, that whenever a project appears using a 555 timer, someone will say “You could have used a microcontroller to do that!”. It’s someth…

Cherry Pomodoro Timer Forces You To Follow

If you have trouble staying focused and getting work done, the Pomodoro Technique of working in 25-minute intervals with 5-minute breaks is pretty hard to beat. The only problem is that it requires…