Homebrew Reader Brings Paper Tape Programs Back To Life

We may be a bit biased, but the storage media of yesteryear has so much more personality than that of today. Yes, it’s a blessing to have terabyte SD cards smaller than your pinky nail and be…

Flexures Keep This Printed Displacement Sensor In Line

When the job at hand is measuring something with micron-range precision, thoughts generally turn to a tool with a Mitutoyo or Starrett nameplate. But with a clever design and a little electronics k…

Optical Guitar Pickup Works With Nylon Strings

Electric guitar pickups rely on steel strings interfering with a magnetic field, the changes in which are picked up with coils of wire. That doesn’t work with nylon strings, because they don&…

Souped-Up Reflective Sensor Uses Itself For Wireless Programming

Proximity sensors are common enough in automation projects that we hardly give them a second thought — pick something with specs that match the job and move on. But they can be fussy to get a…

Glow In The Dark Computer Memory Illuminates The Fundamentals

Computer memory has taken on many forms over the years, from mercury-based delay-line tubes to handwoven magnetic core. These days, volatile storage using semiconductors has become ubiquitous with …

Take A Look At This Optical Keyboard

Making keyboards is easy, right? Just wire up a bunch of switches matrix-style to a microcontroller, slap some QMK and a set of keycaps on there and you’re good to go. Well, yeah, that might …

One Man’s Quest To Build A Baby Book With Brains

Regular readers will know that Hackaday generally steers clear of active crowdfunding campaigns. But occasionally we do run across a project that’s unique enough that we feel compelled to dus…

Measuring LED Flicker, With Phototransistor And Audio App

No one likes a flickering light source, but lighting is often dependent on the quality of a building’s main AC power. Light intensity has a close relation to the supply voltage, but bulb type…