The Audiophile Carrot

The widely quoted carrot factoid that the vegetable’s orange colour is the result of patriotic Dutch farmers breeding them that way may be an urban myth, but it’s certainly true that th…

A Tube Stereo Amplifier, From Scratch

A conventional tube amplifier has a circuit whose fundamentals were well in place around a hundred years ago, so there are few surprises to be found in building one today. Nevertheless, building on…

Redbox Is Dead, But The Machines Are Kind Of Hanging On

Redbox was a service for renting DVDs from automated kiosks. The business was going well until it wasn’t anymore, and then the company went bankrupt in July this year. And yet… the mach…

Phoniebox: A Family-Friendly Simple Music Box

Ever hear of the Phoniebox project? If not – tune in, that’s a hacker’s project your entire family will appreciate. Phoniebox is a software suite and tutorial for building a jukeb…

Retrotechtacular: Another Thing Your TV No Longer Needs

As Hackaday writers we don’t always know what our colleagues are working on until publication time, so we all look forward to seeing what other writers come up with. This week it was [Al Will…

Curing CRT Cataracts Freshens Up Retro Roundy TVs

It’s been a long time since the family TV has had a CRT in it, and even longer since that it was using what was basically an overgrown oscilloscope tube. But “roundies” were once …

Want To Help Capture Some Digital Ephemera? Break Out Your VHS Player

Do you live in the UK, have a VCR and capture card, and an interest in Teletext? [James O’Malley] needs your help! Teletext was, for many people around the world, their first experience of an…

Broadcast TV Simulator Keeps The Nostalgia Flowing

Watch out, Gen X-ers — there’s a nostalgia overload heading your way, courtesy of this over-the-air TV simulator. And it has us feeling a little Saturday morning cartoon-ish, or maybe e…

A USA Feature For A Europe-Market Sony Receiver

A feature of many modern network-connected entertainment devices is that they will play streamed music while on standby mode. This so-called “network standby”is very useful if you fancy…

Reverse Engineering A Soundsystem’s API

We’ve all been stymied by a smart thermostat, coffee maker, or other device which would work fine on its own but ultimately seems to be worse off for having an Internet connection —  so…

How To Turn Cheap Speakers Into Something A Little Better

[Adam Francis] bought some cheap speaker drivers from AliExpress. Are they any good? Difficult to tell without a set of enclosures for them, so he made a set of transmission line cabinets. The resu…

Responsive LCD Backlights With A Little Lateral Thinking

LCD televisions are a technological miracle, but if they have an annoying side it’s that some of them are a bit lacklustre when it comes to displaying black. [Mousa] has a solution, involving…

An Open XBOX Modchip Enters The Scene

If you’ve ever bought a modchip that adds features to your game console, you might have noticed sanded-off IC markings, epoxy blobs, or just obscure chips with unknown source code. It’s…

Build Your Own Tape Recorder/Player

If you want to read something from magnetic tape, you need a tape head, right? Or you could do like [Igor Brichkov] and make your own. It looks surprisingly simple. He used a washer with a small sl…

Interfacing A Cheap HDMI Switch With Home Assistant

You know the feeling of having just created a perfect setup for your hacker lab? Sometimes, there’s just this missing piece in the puzzle that requires you to do a small hack, and those are t…

Take Control Of MS Flight Sim With Your Smartphone

Anyone with more than a passing interest in flight simulators will eventually want to upgrade their experience with a HOTAS (Hands On Throttle-And-Stick) setup that has buttons and switches for con…

Weird Old Stereo Accessories

Some people trick out their cars. Some, their computers. There are even people who max out their audio systems, although back in 1979, there was more of that going on, probably, than today where yo…

Here’s The Norwegian Tape Deck Teardown You’ve Been Waiting For

“They just don’t build ’em like they used to” is a truer statement every year. Whether your vice is CRTs, film cameras, or tape decks, you’ll know that the very best g…

Gather ‘Round This Unique 4-Player Arcade Cabinet

Usually when we see arcade cabinet builds, they’re your standard single-player stand up variety. Even one of them takes up quite a bit of room, so as appealing as it might be to link up two o…

A Portable DLNA Server Hack Helps You Tame OpenWRT

A good amount of hacks can be done with off-the-shelf hardware – what’s more, it’s usually available all over the world, which means your hacks are easier to build for others, too…