Hackaday

Although you can do basic floating point format operations like addition and subtraction just fine on any CPU, having specialized hardware for it can provide a significant speed boost.

The Nokia E6 is a smartphone from back in the old days when Symbian was a thing.

QR codes can be a handy way to send a link or contact details without all that tedious mucking about with typing in a link, but they aren’t very useful without a smartphone to decode them.

Before the advent of effective semiconductor LEDs many display types existed to display things like numbers and other characters.

Measuring electric currents is an essential element of many electrical systems, but doing so in a way that is as nonintrusive as possible is not an easy problem to solve.

The Philips CD-i was not popular upon its launch in 1991, and is barely acknowledged today.

We don’t generally think of 3D printing and knitting in the same sentence.

Broadcast radio isn’t as popular as it once was, its popularity suffering in turn due to technologies like MP3 players and music streaming services.

I recently got the Amazon Christmas toy book in the mail, and it is definitely the modern version of the Sears Christmas Wish Book for last century’s youth.

[kati]’s Clotty might run DOOM and game-ify the menstrual tracking process with a playful Tamagotchi-like aspect, but don’t let that distract you.

It’s plenty easy to do lots of vision tasks with a single camera, but using two cameras gives you lots of magical abilities, like depth perception!

With the ESP32 series of microcontrollers having had hidden software-defined radio (SDR) facility revealed, we’re now moving on from the announcement into projects making use of the finding.

Although we generally do not look at bubbles in fluids as more than a curiosity – if not an outright annoyance – in certain contexts they can be very useful.

If you have developed in Pascal or Delphi in the past decades, you’re probably familiar with the Lazarus IDE that provides an interface to the Free Pascal Compiler (FPC), much like Delphi’s IDE.

When most radio enthusiasts start trying to pick up signals from satellites, they might put together a quick-and-dirty Yagi antenna and try to catch a repeater as is passes overhead, or they might grab a small unused dish from a satellite TV service and p…

One could make a joke about how an astronaut walking on the lunar surface is rather akin to a cat walking on the carpet in the living room, but out in space the resulting triboelectric discharge can do a lot more damage than just some stinging fingers and…

Coral bleaching is a major problem for ocean ecosystems as the ocean gets warmer.

Joining the ranks of fresh backported Nintendo games is Super Mario Galaxy for the Nintendo Game Boy Advance (GBA), courtesy of [Tobias Friedly], AKA [Tobi].

If you are one of those people who visualize things physically better than in the abstract, then Regex Marble Run by [bottomless] might be for you.

All [Hannah Robertson]’s Birduino needs is for one to tap an NFC-enabled card to the reader, and the device plays one of the vocalizations associated with the bird shown on the card.

Although solar panels may seem like a kind of magic, they’re really quite simple devices, in their silicon form featuring nothing but the p-type silicon wafer and an n-type layer doped with e.g. phosphorus.

Bicycles are the ultimate form of transportation freedom.

Meshtastic has gained a lot of popularity over the last few years thanks to its low barrier of entry.

If you need a micro-manipulator, you probably already have a good idea of what it does.

Just-in-time, or JIT, compilation could be considered a fundamental backbone of modern computing.

As Director of the Software Engineering Division at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, Margret Hamilton was responsible for the software for the Apollo program.

Making one’s own power tools can be a rewarding way to upcycle parts, and [bluesyann] does exactly that with a belt file made from an old mixer.

We imagine that electroplating is like making PC boards or soldering surface-mount chips.

Most home security sensors require a chemical battery or external power source to operate, which can be a point of weakness.

Repurposing old smartphones for more general purpose computing isn’t a new thing, but the project by [LastComputer] ups the ante by going from a Samsung Galaxy S23 that looks like it got run over by at least a few cars to a very serviceable gaming compute…

Like more than a few of us , [Kevin Noki] is sick of being pulled out of flow state by that annoyingly addictive black rectangle we all carry around.

There are many ways to display text on a computer screen, but most require at least some manual effort from the user.

Although the feature has been deleted from newer models, there was a time when Amazon’s Echo devices included a 3.5 mm “aux” input jack that let you connect other audio sources to the smart speaker.

The Internet, and large groups of people in general, tend to have a remarkably short collective memory.

We’ve seen plenty of game console projects here, many of them that seek to produce a miniature game console.

Retrocomputing is more than just hardware.

Before HDMI and DVI there was VGA, and before that?

As the legacy AM broadcast bands fade away, what happens to the millions of devices built to receive them?

There comes a point where you have to acknowledge that your beloved console is out of date and– barring the odd homebrew title– won’t be playing new games ever again.

We covered [Nick Bild]’s mini Atari console using original devices not so long ago, and today he’s back with the same console wrapped up with a CRT as a handheld.

It’s definitely a sign of the times when repair shops get handed sticks of registered ECC DDR5 RAM by businesses to try and fix, rather than just tossing the defective ones and slotting in a fresh bunch.

People mod games all the time, but it’s not every day someone mods Dungeons of Daggorath for the TRS-80.

A laptop with no wireless connectivity feels like a rarity – but when you shop for powerful Linux single-board computers (SBCs), it is pretty common to see one skimp on WiFi.

Transcranial magnetic stimulation is one of those things that seems too wacky to be true.

There are some classic fonts which appeared in one place and became almost iconic, yet never made it into the digital age.

We’ve had a lot of flying hacks here over the years, and that includes just about any way to get airborne you can think of — but very few of those have been airships.

The camera in a typical mobile phone is now at a standard at which it can be considered a serious device rather than a toy, such has been the effort put in by the phone manufacturers.

There’s one thing [Silent H] wants you to know before you watch his video about making biodiesel, embedded below: he started this project before he’d even heard of the Strait of Hormuz.

We’ve seen the GeekMagic SmallTV line of devices before — these cheap gadgets combine a microcontroller and a display in a little plastic case that can be used to show the time or weather.

One of the problems with planetary science is that you generally cannot easily investigate the exact conditions in their interior, so you’re left to extrapolate what is happening inside them based on surface scans.