Hands On With A Giant Nixie Tube

[Sam Battle] is no stranger to these pages, nor is his Museum is not Obsolete. The museum was recently gifted an enormous Nixie tube created by Dalibor Farný, a B-grade (well, faulty) unit that cou…

Mechanical Switch Sci-Calc Is Also A Macropad

Smartphones have replaced a desktop calculator for most folks these days, but sometimes that tactility is just what you need to get the mathematical juices flowing. Why not spruce up the scientific…

Reverse Time Back To The Days Of RPN

While Texas Instruments maintains dominance in the calculator market (especially graphing calculators), there was a time when this wasn’t the case. HP famously built the first portable scient…

Why Have Seven Segments When You Can Have 21?

IO user [monte] was pointed towards an 1898 display patent issued to a [George Mason] and liked the look of the ‘creepy’ font it defined. The layout used no less than 21 discrete segmen…

Rescuing High-Res Displays From Older Macs

When Apple started rolling out its Retina displays, it multiplied the amount of pixels compared to their standard, non-Retina displays by four. This increased pixel density while keeping the standa…

A Little Optical Magic Makes This Floating Display Pop

If there’s a reason that fancy holographic displays that respond to gestures are a science fiction staple, it’s probably because our current display technology is terrible. Oh sure, Ret…

Original Game Boy Gets Display “Upgrade”

Before LCD and LED screens were ubiquitous, there was a time when the cathode ray tube (CRT) was essentially the only game in town. Even into the early 2000s, CRTs were everywhere and continuously …

A Lenticular Clock Spells Out The Hours

So many are the clock projects which cross the Hackaday threshold, that it’s very rare indeed to see something that hasn’t already been done. We think we’ve not seen a lenticular …

Go Forth With This Portable Programmer

When choosing a low-level language, it’s hard to beat the efficiency of Forth while also maintaining some amount of readability. There are open source options for the language which makes it access…

An Easy Transparent Edge Lit Display

Displays are crucial to modern life; they are literally everywhere. But modern flat-panel LCDs and cheap 7-segment LED displays are, well, a bit boring. When we hackers want to display the progress…

Learning Morse Code With A DIY Trainer

Morse code, often referred to as continuous wave (CW) in radio circles, has been gradually falling out of use for a long time now. At least in the United States, ham radio licensees don’t hav…

Displays We Love Hacking: DSI

We would not be surprised if DSI screens made up the majority of screens on our planet at this moment in time. If you own a smartphone, there’s a 99.9% chance its screen is DSI. Tablets are l…

Displays We Like Hacking: HDMI

I don’t like HDMI. Despite it being a pretty popular interface, I find crucial parts of it to be alien to what hackers stand for. The way I see it, it manages to be proprietary while bringing…

Old Dot-Matrix Displays Give Up Their Serial Secrets

If there’s one thing we like better around here than old, obscure displays, it’s old, obscure displays with no documentation that need a healthy dose of reverse engineering before they …

Clock Mixes Analog, Digital, Retrograde Displays

Unique clocks are a mainstay around here, and while plenty are “human readable” without any instruction, there are a few that take a bit of practice before someone can glean the current…

Pixel Graphics From An HD44780, By Cutting Wires

[Felipe Tavares] wasn’t satisfied with the boring default fonts on an HD44780-based display. And while you can play some clever tricks with user-defined characters, if you want to treat the display…

ESP32-S3-Matrix board features 64 LEDs, GPIO pins, 9-axis "attitude" sensor for robotics and motion control applications - CNX Software

The Waveshare ESP32-S3-Matrix is a microcontroller development board designed for AIoT applications, featuring a larger 8x8 RGB LED matrix (64 LEDs)

Keep Tabs On PC Use With Custom Analog Voltmeter

With the demands of modern computing, from video editing, streaming, and gaming, many of us will turn to a monitoring system of some point to keep tabs on CPU usage, temperatures, memory, and other…