How Do You Build A Tradition?

I was struck by reading our writeup of the Zenit in Electronics contest – an annual event in the Slovak Republic – that it’s kind of like a decathlon for electronic engineers and/or hardware hacker…

AI Creates Your Spreadsheets, Sometimes

We’ve been interested in looking at how AI can process things other than silly images. That’s why the “Free AI Bot that Generates the Excel Formula for Any Problem” caught o…

Learning By Playing

Summer break has started over here, and my son went off to his first of a few day-camp-like activities last week. It was actually really cool – a workshop held by our local Fablab where they have t…

Ask Hackaday: What Was Your First Electronics Win?

Back in high school, I joined the stage crew — because of course I did. As student theater groups go, it was pretty active, and with two shows to produce each year, there was always a lot of …

Demonstrate Danger, Safely

Dan Maloney and I were talking about the chess robot arm that broke a child’s finger during the podcast, and it turns out that we both have extreme respect for robot arms in particular. Dan had a s…

Patents And The Missing Museum

A beautiful chapter of the history of invention in the United States ended with a fire in 1880. Well, the fire took place in 1877, but the wheels of government turn slowly. For the first 90 years t…

Fighting The Good Fight

We here at Hackaday are super-duper proponents of open source. Software, hardware, or firmware, we like to be able to see it, learn from it, modify it, and make it ourselves. Some of this is self-s…

When Is One Pixel Cooler Than Millions?

On vacation, we went to see a laser show – one of the old school variety that combines multiple different lasers of many different colors together into a single beam, modulates them to create diffe…

Not On The Internet

Whenever you need to know something, you just look it up on the Internet, right? Using the search engine of your choice, you type in a couple keywords, hit enter, and you’re set. Any datasheet, any…

Hacker Diary: Embedded World 2022

Yesterday I went up to the Embedded World trade fair in Nuremburg, Germany. As a lone hacker, you often feel more than a little out of place when you buy chips in single unit quantities and the peo…

NASA Called, They Want Their Cockroaches Back

News hit earlier this month that the infamous “cockroach moon dust” was up for auction? Turns out, NASA is trying to block the sale as they assert that they own all the lunar material b…

Office Life: The Old Gray Mare, She Ain’t What She Used To Be

Ding, dong; the office is dead. The real office is in your head. This is what I tell myself when working from home gets too weird, too stale, too impossible. By now, many of you know some version w…

Eliza And The Google Intelligence

The news has been abuzz lately with the news that a Google engineer — since put on leave — has announced that he believes the chatbot he was testing achieved sentience. This is the Turi…

Ask Hackaday: Is Bigger (E-mail) Better?

While pundits routinely predict the end of e-mail, we still get a ton of it and we bet you do too. E-mail has been around for a very long time and back in the day, it was pretty high-tech to be abl…

The Box: Think Outside Of It

There’s no single recipe for creativity, as far as I know. But this week on the Podcast, Tom Nardi and I were talking about a number of hacks that were particularly inventive, out-of-the-box,…

The Joy Of Broadcast Media Vs. The Paradox Of Choice

The rise of streaming services on the Internet was a revolutionary shift when it came to the world of media. No more would content be pumped in to homes in a one-way fashion, broadcast by major con…

One Solution, Many Problems

You might think you’re lucky when one of your problems has multiple solutions, and you get to pick and choose, but you’re even luckier when one solution has many problems! This week I s…

The Little Big Dogs Of Invention

This is a story about two dogs I know. It is also a story of the U.S. Navy, aviation, and nuclear weapons. Sometimes it is easy to see things in dogs or other people, but hard to see those same thi…

Who Is Thinking About Open Source Firmware?

Yesterday, we ran a post on NVIDIA’s announcement of open-source drivers for some of its most recent video cards. And Hackaday being huge proponents of open-source software and hardware, you&…

Will We Ever Shake The Polaroid Picture?

Today, most of us carry supercomputers in our pockets that happen to also take instantly-viewable pictures.This is something that even the dumbest phones do, meaning that we can reasonably draw the…