Launch And Track Your Model Rockets Via Smartphone

Building and flying model rockets is great fun. Eventually, though, the thrill of the fire and smoke subsides, and you want to know more about what it’s doing in the air. With a thirst for kn…

Hacking A Jack-in-the-Box To Be Extra Surprising

A Jack-In-The-Box is scary enough the first time. However, if you’ve seen the clown pop out before, it fails to have the same impact. [Franklinstein] decided that swapping out the clown for a…

How To Become A Lego Submariner

A submarine is by necessity a complex and safety-critical machine, but the principle upon which it depends is quite simple. The buoyancy is variable by means of pumping water in and out of tanks, a…

It Turns Out You Can’t Just Fly A Drone Under Water

The differences between a drone and an underwater remote-operated vehicle (ROV) aren’t actually that large. Both have powerful motors that move large volumes of fluid (yes, air is a fluid), a…

There’s A LEGO Suspension Dyno Now

When it comes to the development and testing of performance suspension, it’s helpful to have a test apparatus that lets you recreate certain conditions reliably. This LEGO suspension dyno doe…

Computer-Shaped LEGO Brick Brought To Life

In childhood, many of us wondered — wouldn’t it be cool if our miniature toys had “real” functions? Say, that our toy cars actually were able to drive, or at least, that the…

Slow Races On A Pinewood Derby Track Built From Scratch

Pinewood derby racing is a popular pastime for scouting groups and many others besides. [Mr Coster] whipped up his own track with the assistance of some 3D printed parts, and used it to run a compe…

PCB Linear Motors For Model Trains

Modeling a railroad is hard. Railroads are large, linear pieces of civil engineering. So many modelers are drawn to the smallest scale they can use. Recently a new scale, named T, at 1:450 has been…

Verbot Goes To The Dark Side

What happens to old, neglected 1980s toy robots? According to the [Randi Rain], they turn to the dark side! Way back in the ’80s, Tomy had an entire line of robots — from keychain wind-…

Building Reaction Wheels With Python And LEGO

Reaction wheels are useful things, typically used by satellites to keep themselves oriented the right way up in space. Turning the reaction wheel creates an equal and opposite torque in the spacecr…

2022 Sci-Fi Contest: A Star Wars Mouse Droid Of Your Very Own

The show-stealing droids of Star Wars, R2-D2 and C-3PO, are quite challenging to replicate at home, due to their size and complexity. [curiousmarc] had built the former, with much work going into d…

2022 Sci-Fi Contest: The Animatronic Baby Yoda You’ve Always Wanted

When it comes to sci-fi, it’s hard to go past Star Wars, and many submissions to our contest land in that exact universe. [Kevin Harrington]’s entry is one such example, with his animat…

Mini DarkTower Clone Restores Your Childhood

Remember DarkTower? No? Well, it’s a really cool combination board game, RPG, and computer game from 1981. Orson Welles pimped it on TV and explained it thusly: “collect three keys, lay…

Lego Fourteen-Segment Display Needs Plenty Of Motors

Hackers love 7-segment displays, and will gladly wax lyrical about the silly words you can almost spell on them and so on. Less appreciated are their bigger cousins, the fourteen and sixteen segmen…

This End Table Conceals A Close Encounter

If you’re of a Certain Age, perhaps you had a train set as a child. An oval of track, a loco, and some rolling stock; it matters not whether it was Thomas the Tank Engine or a large express t…

Magnetic Hockey Game Uses A 555

We love a good project here at Hackaday, particularly one that makes us want to pick it up and have a go at whatever it does for ourselves. And when we see such a project and find that it contains …

Building 7-Segment Displays With LEGO

Utter the words “7-segment display” amongst hackers and you’ll typically get people envisaging the usual LED and LCD versions that we all come across in our daily lives. However, …

LEGO String Winder Hints At Greater Possibilities

Unless you’re an avid fan of 1997’s box office hit Mouse Hunt, or actively working in the string industry, you probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about how those balls of…

Cheap Ghostbusters Toy Turned Convincing Prop

As you might expect, the release of last year’s Ghostbusters: Afterlife has not only lead to renewed interest in the old 1980s toys and tie-in merchandise, but has spawned a whole new generat…

How Fast Can You Spin A LEGO Wheel By Hand?

It’s not a question you ask yourself every day, but it’s one that the [Brick Experiment Channel] set out to answer: how fast can you spin a LEGO wheel by hand? In their typical way, the…