Make sure those tiny parts know their place by using this surface mount solder assistant (translated). It’s like a clamp for small packages; gravity and a needle to hold them in place while you do some hand soldering. [Red Devil] started the built by soldering together some brass rails into a hinged frame with a clamp [...]

As the Open Source Hardware movement gathers steam, it has become clear that the tools to work collaboratively on hardware are in the dark ages when compared with slick frameworks like Git used to work on software projects. We’ve read a fair amount about this lately, but the idea of visual difference generation for PCB [...]

As a recent Mech E grad, [Alessandro Timmi] knows a lot about moving bodies. His thesis, Virtual Sensei, aims to quantify those movements for better coaching and training in martial arts. Virtual Sensei uses a Kinect for motion capture during training. From there, the skeleton recorded by the Kinect has a little bit of processing [...]

Many of you are familiar with the Arduino. Many of you hate it…* This post isn’t about the Arduino. It is about the processor that is at the heart of many Arduino boards. If you are in the camp of people who can’t understand why others dislike the Arduino so much, this series is for [...]

[Ron’s] refrigerator broke shortly after he came home from his weekly grocery trip, and since this was his second dead fridge in three years, he wanted to fix it rather than buy a new one…again. It turns out that the thermostat was toast, and a replacement would cost him $80. That was well more than [...]

Do you think it’s not really possible to get amazing resolution from extruder-based 3D printers? You’re wrong, and this post about the attainable quality of prints on the Ultimaker proves it. The Yoda bust seen above was printed with a layer thickness of 0.02mm. This is a hack in itself because this process actually used [...]

As soon as the team at Revolt Labs heard Occupy Wall Street was coming to Boston, they decided to pick up their soldering irons in support of the throngs of protestors. They came up with a Solar charging USB box to keep those cell phones and digital cameras charged. The case came direct from an [...]

The weekend is almost here and if you’re looking for an afternoon project consider building your own binary wall clock. [Emihackr97] built the one you see above using parts on hand, but even if you put in an order for everything, it won’t cost you much. He used a cardboard box as the housing for [...]

Instead of the usual Jack-o-lanterns and creepy Halloween decorations, [Rick Murphy] built a dark ride in his garage a few years ago. In case you’ve never been fortunate enough to see one in person, a dark ride is a track-based haunted house meant to be experienced on a small cart. Usually featuring sound, light, and [...]

The crew at the Netherlands-based Bitlair hackerspace love their music, and have set up a digital jukebox for their workshop using mpd and fookebox. One problem that you run into with a bunch of different people working in one place is that everyone has their own distinct taste in music. The rhythmic “wub wub wub” [...]

[John] likes making things out of unusual junk, and decided to build something for the sole purpose of trolling others. He thought it would be funny to stuff a new digital camera into the body of an old, obsolete camera, just to see how people would react to it. He considered several different cameras, including [...]

[Simon] came up with an improved version of Lord Vetinari’s clock that begs to be installed in waiting rooms around the world. Last week, we were introduced to a real-life Vetinari Clock that keeps regular time but ticks at irregular intervals. It’s a great way to turn someone’s mind into porridge, but the original build [...]

There’s a new Kickstarter campaign that promises to launch a personalized satellite into orbit for 300 bones. The KickSat project is headed by [Zac Manchester], [Mason Peck], [Justin Atchison] and a few more contributors hailing from Cornell University. Their goal is to launch a CubeSat filled with hundreds of postage stamp-sized satellites and release these [...]

A year ago [Lochie] bought an Airwick automatic air freshener, and while he thought it was a cool gadget, the freshening spray and the novelty ran out in short order. The device collected dust in his room for some a while until he recently unearthed it, and noticed that a perfectly good PIR sensor was [...]

[Hazer] managed to take a PlayStation 3 SixAxis controller and modify it so that all of the buttons can be remapped in hardware. Aside from this being really cool, he had a good reason for doing it. Regular readers should remember the feature regarding [Chuck Bittner's] internet petition calling for button mapping as a feature [...]

If you’re looking for a piece of custom furniture to anchor your child’s playroom, this Rubik’s cube chest of drawers is just the thing. [Makendo] went the extra couple of miles on the project, building the entire thing from scratch and adding one clever feature after another to make it something special. It’s made up [...]

[Rossum's] still coming up with great ways to use his microtouch hardware. This time, he’s taken his inspiration from Amazon’s announcement that a full-color eBook reader (and movie player) is on the way. Judging from the video after the break, his fully functional reader is a big win for the device. You’re probably familiar with [...]

Ultrasonic rangfinders are a cheap and easy way to gather obstacle avoidance data. When added to a servo motor they form something of a scanning radar for near-proximity objects. In this implementation, [Rui Cabral] is driving the servo, and collecting data from the sensor using a PIC 18F4520. The servo rotates 180 degreees, taking sensor [...]

If you’re looking to build a really big Android tablet the trick is not to start from scratch. [Peter] pulled off a 23″ Android Tablet hack using a collection of easily acquired parts, leaving the hard work up to hardware that was designed to do it. He didn’t really build a tablet, as much as [...]

Last summer, we saw [Andres Guzman]‘s electric mountain board tearing around the University of Illinois campus. He’s back again, only this time the board isn’t controlled with a PlayStation controller. [Andres] built a wireless glove to control his mountain board. An Arduino and power supply is mounted to the glove. A 2.4GHz transceiver serves as [...]

It looks like [Dino] is getting settled into his new digs, and while the moving process has kept him pretty busy, he’s slowly but surely getting his workshop area set up. One thing that he really wanted from his new bench was a better way to record video, for both his Hack a Week series [...]

For those of us that would like a good cup of coffee but don’t want to put up with the ‘burnt butt’ taste of Starbucks and don’t have a decent coffee shop nearby, we’ve had very few options. Most of us have been made to suffer with an el-cheapo espresso machine. [Joe] sent in a great [...]

[Brian Knoll] still uses his Super Nintendo with relative frequency, and he just can’t get enough Super Scope action. If you never owned one, the Super Scope can be a ton of fun, but it’s also an incredible battery hog. It eats through AA batteries by the caseful, so [Brian] wanted to make the switch [...]

Tinywrench is [Tanjent's] take on a motor controller board. It aims to replicate all of the functions that a standalone motor controller chip offers at as low a cost as possible. Early results are in. It works, and as seen can be assembled for about $8. The top of the device offers a terminal block [...]

The Zigroller is a Zigbee remote-controlled balance bot.  Although balance bots have been featured on [HAD] before, the Zigroller appears to be well-built and the project is well documented.  Besides a section on hardware, the software for this build is documented here.  The theory behind a balancing bot like this is given in this [MIT] [...]

For those of you that don’t know, the Makerbot is a 3D printer created by Bre Pettis. It is probably the best-known 3D printer that you can buy at a price point meant for the hobbyist. Although this article doesn’t go into how the MakerBot is made, it focuses instead about the business itself and [...]

[zmashiah] has a nice Nova tube amplifier in his living room, and he often forgets to turn it off once he’s done listening to music. He feels guilty when this happens, as it not only shortens the lifespan of his stereo, but it’s not exactly the greenest behavior either. Rather than let his receiver idle [...]

After futzing around with a cheap pico projector, a webcam and a little bit of software, [Jas Strong] built herself a 3d scanner. In spite of the dozens of Kinect-based scanner projects, we’ve seen structured light 3d scanners before. This method of volumetric scanning projects a series of gradient images onto a subject. A camera [...]

Buildlounge and Full Spectrum Laser have decided to give away a laser cutter to whoever comes up with the best project involving light. The contest is in part sponsored by  adafruit industries. The focus of the contest is light – just design something around light, submit it, and you’re in the drawing for your own [...]

If you weren’t aware, today is [Ada Lovelace] day, so [Ladyada] and Adafruit Industries are spending the day celebrating the achievements of women in the fields of technology, art, engineering, and electronics. Specifically, the focus is on fellow female makers/hackers who are helping shape and promote the industry. Once every hour, Adafruit Industries is profiling [...]

It’s no secret that the audio quality of the iPhone’s built-in speakers isn’t exactly what you would consider to be hi-fi. Sound quality aside, there are plenty of times where even the volume doesn’t do the music justice. While you can always go out and buy a fancy dock to amplify your iGadget’s sound, artist [...]

When we first saw the live cover of Skrillex Scary Monsters And Nice Sprites by the band Pinn Panelle, we had to know how a band is able to play live dubstep on real instruments. We emailed the band and they spilled the beans on how to process the hell out of an instrument in [...]

Here we see [Christopher Suprock] hanging out in his basement laundry area in order to show off his intelligent heat exchanger. The reason for the device is simple, when you use your clothes dryer , hot water heater, other other utilities that generate heat, energy is often wasted in the form of hot exhaust gases. [...]

Have a penchant for pain? Why not destroy your fingertips with a wire-wrap tool building a video card made entirely out of discrete components. When [Chris] decided to build an entry for the Dangerous Prototypes 7400 logic competition he already had his hands full. The 74xx chips he had on hand had a maximum clock [...]

[Autuin] wrote in to share a few things he’s put together using spare vacuum tubes he had sitting around. With no other practical use for the tubes in mind, he fiddled around and came up with a couple of items that could be neat to have around the house, depending on your style of decor. [...]

[Nav] wanted to change his keyboard mapping for one particular keyboard, rather than on each operating system. He used an AT90USBKey as a replacement PCB by soldering to all of the contacts on the key matrix. This allows him to remap the keys by following onscreen prompts. The board enumerates as an HID device, and [...]

Looking to make a quality light box more portable, [Hharry] designed a collapsible version complete with adjustable side lighting. Light tents are used by photographers as a stage for photographing small items. The use of multiple light sources, and a fabric that will diffuse them, means a reduction in shadows that might otherwise ruin a [...]

This Daft Punk helmet replica is beautiful to look at, but the deeper we delve into the build process, the more we begin to think that the entire project is a piece of artwork. [Harrison Krix] has been working on it for months, and just posted his three-part build log in September. Check out the [...]

A few months back, [Phil] was looking to get into PIC development, but he couldn’t seem to find a simple development board for the PIC16F883 microcontroller he wanted to use. Since no retail offering had exactly what he was looking for, he decided to put together a dev board of his own. He spent a [...]

The latest and greatest ambilight clone, the Adalight, comes from the fruitful mind and cluttered workbench of the sometimes Hack A Day contributor [Phil Burgess]. We’ve seen a few clones of the Philips ambilight tech, but [Phil] knocked this one out of the park. The hardware is a string of 12mm RGB LEDs connected to [...]