3D Printed Caliper Extensions Make Hole Measurement Easier

If there’s anything more frustrating than mounting holes that don’t line up with the thing you’re mounting, we don’t know what it could be. You measure as carefully as possi…

Combination Safety Glasses And Measurement Tool

While rulers and tape measures are ubiquitous, they always seem to disappear when you need them. We know you’d never forget your safety glasses (safety first!), so what if they were also a me…

Digitally Reading A Micrometer’s Output

If you’re instrumenting your machine tools, or if you’re just curious, you might want to get granular access to the output of a digital micrometer or the like. [Tommy] set his mind to f…

Rulers Of The Ancient World — Literally!

If you were expecting a post about ancient kings and queens, you are probably at the wrong website. [Burn Heart] has a fascination with ancient measuring devices and set out to recreate period-corr…

Is This The World’s Smallest Multichannel Voltmeter?

The instrument which probably the greatest number of Hackaday readers own is likely to be the humble digital multimeter. They’re cheap and useful, but they’re single-channel, and diffic…

About Right

I really enjoyed reading Anne Ogborn’s piece on making simple DIY measurement devices for physical quantities like force, power, and torque. It is full of food for thought, if you’re building somet…

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 …

You Can’t Make What You Can’t Measure

What’s the most-used tool on your bench? For me, it’s probably a multimeter, although that’s maybe a tie with my oscilloscope. Maybe after that, the soldering iron and wire strippers, or my favorit…

Hackaday Prize 2023: AC Measurements Made Easy

When working on simple DC systems, a small low-cost multimeter from the hardware store will get the job done well enough. Often they have the capability for measuring AC, but this is where cheap me…

Checking Belt Tension Gets Easier For (Some) Prusa 3D Printers

Belts on a 3D printer should be tight enough, but not too tight. That can be an iffy thing to get right for someone who lacks familiarity with CNC platforms. Prusa Research aims to make it a bit ea…

A Deep Dive On Battery Life

There are all kinds of old wives’ tales surrounding proper battery use floating around in the popular culture. Things like needing to fully discharge a battery every so often, unplugging devi…

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…

Testing Part Stiffness? No Need To Re-invent The Bending Rig

If one is serious about testing the stiffness of materials or parts, there’s nothing quite like doing your own tests. And thanks to [JanTec]’s 3-Point Bending Test rig, there’s no…

Another Room-Temperature Superconductivity Claim And Questions Of Scientific Integrity

In early March of 2023, a paper was published in Nature, with the researchers claiming that they had observed superconductivity at room temperature in a conductive alloy, at near-ambient pressure. …

Elon & Twitter: How NOT to manage a software company

According to sources: Elon Musk is asking software engineers to print out the code they wrote during the last 60 days for review! this comes after reports that he threatened he will fire engineers if they don't develop the new paid verification...

DIY Comparatron Helps Trace Tiny, Complex Objects

Hackers frequently find themselves reverse-engineering or interfacing to existing hardware and devices, and when that interface needs to be a physical one, it really pays to be able to take accurat…

A Wheatstone Bridge Matches Your Pots

Sometimes the simplest hacks can be the most useful or ingenious, and such is the case with [Keri Szafir]’s method of ensuring that potentiometers used in audio devices are matched. If you co…

Dosimetry: Measuring Radiation

Thanks to stints as an X-ray technician in my early 20s followed by work in various biology labs into my early 40s, I’ve been classified as an “occupationally exposed worker” with…

Better Scope Measurements

There was a time when few hobbyists had an oscilloscope and the ones you did see were old military or industrial surplus that were past their prime. Today you can buy a fancy scope for about what t…