DIY Repair Brings An X-Ray Microscope Back Into Focus

Aside from idle curiosity, very few of us need to see inside chips and components to diagnose a circuit. But reverse engineering is another story; being able to see what lies beneath the inscrutabl…

Electro-Optical Control Of Lasers With A Licorice Twist

You’ve got to hand it to [Les Wright]; he really knows how to dig into optical arcana and present topics in an interesting way. Case in point: an electro-optical control cell that’s pow…

Little Ionic Thruster Blows Out Candles With Ease

Want to generate some thrust by way of an exposed high voltage discharge that looks great when you turn down the lights? [Integza] has a video showing how to do exactly that with some simple compon…

A Magnetohydrodynamic Drive In The Kitchen Sink

The magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) drive certainly sounds like something out of science fiction — using an array of magnets and electrodes, this high-tech propulsion technology promises to silentl…

Automatic Transfer Switch Keeps Internet Online

Living in a place where the electric service isn’t particularly reliable can be frustrating, whether that’s because of a lack of infrastructure, frequent storms, or rolling blackouts. A…

No Acid: Open ICs With A Tesla Coil

We’ve taken ICs apart before, but if they are in an epoxy package, it requires some lab gear and a lot of safety. Typically, you’ll heat the part and use fuming nitric acid (nasty stuff…

Build A Tesla Coil With Just Three Components

Tesla coils are beautiful examples of high voltage hardware, throwing sparks and teaching us about all kinds of fancy phenomena. They can also be quite intimidating to build. [William Fraser], howe…

High Voltage Ion Engines Take Trip On The High Seas

Over the last several months, we’ve been enjoying a front-row seat as [Jay Bowles] of Plasma Channel has been developing and perfecting his design for a high voltage multi-stage ionic thruste…

Siphoning Energy From Power Lines

The discovery and implementation of alternating current revolutionized the entire world little more than a century ago. Without it, we’d all have inefficient, small neighborhood power plants …

Modern Components Enable Cheap And Compact Nixie Driver Circuit

Nixie tubes can add some retro flair to any project, but they can also complicate your electronics quite a bit: after all, you need to generate a voltage high enough to ignite the tube and then swi…

High Voltage Power Supply From USB

Those who work in different spaces may have different definitions of the term “high voltage”. For someone working on the GPIO pins of a Raspberry Pi it might be as little as 5 volts, so…

Upgraded Plasma Thruster Is Smaller, More Powerful

When [Jay Bowles] demoed his first-generation ion thruster on Plasma Channel, the resulting video picked up millions of views and got hobbyists and professionals alike talking. While ionic lifters …

New Possibilities From Fading Lighting Technology

Like the incandescent bulb before it, the compact fluorescent (CFL) bulb is rapidly fading into obscurity as there are fewer and fewer reasons to use them over their LED successors. But there are p…

Playing Music On A Custom Flyback Transformer

We’ve seen a number of people create plasma speakers over the years here at Hackaday, so at first blush, the latest Plasma Channel video from [Jay Bowles] might seem like more of the same. Ev…

Building A Plasma Piano Ain’t Easy

Electronic arcs can be made to “sing” if you simply modulate them on and off at audible frequencies. We’ve seen it done with single Tesla coils, and even small Tesla choirs, but […

Domesticating Plasma With A Gorgeous Live Edge Table

If you’ve been reading Hackaday for any length of time, you’ll know we don’t often cover woodworking projects here. It’s not because we aren’t impressed with the skill…

Another Magnetron Teardown

[Electronoobs] has a healthy respect for the voltages and ceramics inside a microwave oven. But he still found the courage to tear one apart and show us the insides and characterize some of the com…

Restarting The Grid When The Grid Is Off The Grid

If you watch YouTube long enough, it seems like going “off the grid” is all the rage these days. But what if the thing that goes off the grid is the grid itself? In the video below the …

Enjoy The Beauty Of Corona Discharge With This Kirlian Photography Setup

In our age of pervasive digital media, “pics or it didn’t happen” is a common enough cry that most of us will gladly snap a picture of pretty near anything to post online. So if y…

Electric Guitar Shocks You For Missing A Note

Rocksmith is a popular video game that works like Guitar Hero, but with a real guitar. You have to play well and hit the right notes, or the game penalizes your score. [Lightwing] took the stakes u…