Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Folding Typewriter

Have you built yourself a macro pad yet? They’re all sorts of programmable fun, whether you game, stream, or just plain work, and there are tons of ideas out there. But if you don’t wan…

2024 Business Card Challenge: Make Them Shake Your Handiwork

Before COVID, people traditionally sealed their initial introduction to each other with a handshake. Nowadays, that activity seems kind of questionable. But you can still give them something to sha…

Linear LED Clock Looks Decidedly Vintage

We just love a good clock around here, and something about those triangles gives this linear LED clock a deliciously mid-century vibe. If you’ve read these pages for any length of time, you k…

RGB LED HexaClock Doesn’t Actually Light Up The Night

Who says a clock can’t be both useful and beautiful? That seems to be the big idea behind the lovely little HexaClock from [Bulduper]. And boy, is it both. Probably the most important part of…

Cyberpunk Guitar Strap Lights Up With Repurposed PCBs

Sometimes, whether we like it or not, ordering PCBs results in extra PCBs lying around, either because of board house minimums, mistakes on either end, or both. What’s to be done with these b…

RGB LED Disco Ball Reacts To Sound And Color

Although disco music and dancing may be long dead, the disco ball lives on as a staple of dance parties everywhere. [Tim van de Vathorst] spent a considerable amount of time reinventing the disco b…

1D Fireworks Are Nice And Quiet

Maybe you do it out of respect for the dogs and parents of young children in the neighborhood. Or maybe you do it because they’re harmful to the environment, or just because it’s too da…

Backyard UFO Is Out Of This World

Halloween may be over for another year, but UFOs in your yard are cool year-round. This one might take the cake. [frydom.john]’s excellent UFO is fully programmable and contains about 2000 ad…

2023 Halloween Hackfest: Musical Jack-o-Lanterns Harmonize For Halloween

Halloween is many things to many people. For some, it’s a chance to dress up and let loose. For others, it’s a chance to give everyone in the neighborhood a jump scare. For [Aaron], it&…

A Tale Of Two LÄMPs

Building with LEDs is a hacker pastime like no other – what’s more, if you keep playing with LED tech out there, you’re bound to build something elegant and noteworthy. For today&…

Spinning Holographic POV Christmas Tree Of Death

[Sean Hodgins] really harnessed the holiday spirit to create his very own Giant Spinning Holographic Christmas Tree (of Death). It’s a three-dimensional persistence-of-vision (POV) masterpiec…

Serial Cistercian Digit Module

There’s no doubt that the 7-segment display is a gold standard for displaying lighted digits. But what about a throwback to an older system of displaying numbers — Cistercian? With thir…

The Rollercoaster Of Developing The Ultimate Hackable Keyboard

When designing anything with “hackable” in the punchline, scope creep is an integral part of the process. You end up trying to create something to potentially be an infinite number of t…

Pico Chording Keyboard Is Simultaneously Vintage And New

On paper, chording — that’s pressing multiple keys to create either a single character or a whole word — looks like one of the best possible input methods. Maybe not the best for …

Stranger Things Message Board Passes The Time By Spelling It Out

Will Netflix’s nostalgic hit Stranger Things be back for a fourth series anytime soon? We could pull out a Ouija board and ask the spirits, but we’d much rather ask closer to the source…