If normal hallway lighting just doesn’t live up to your standards, this hack may be for you. When [Sean] fitted his kitchen, he replaced the flooring leading up to it.  In true hacker form, he decided to forgo (supplement?) traditional lighting and came up with his own solution. This solution involved embedding the skirting used [...]

The team over at Archonix frequently challenge themselves to create a full working project in under 20 minutes. [Andrew Armstrong] put together a blog post detailing their most recent “Quickproject” – a simple Twitter notifier built using their Boobie Board. They started by putting together a small notifier breakout module that could later be attached [...]

Check out this floating foam letter machine that was shown off at last year’s IFA show in Berlin, the German equivalent of CES. The contraption is called Flogos, and comes from a company named SnowMasters based out of Alabama. The Flogos machine consists of a helium and compressed air bubble generator positioned below a custom [...]

[Kelly] sent in a tip saying that Livescribe, the company behind a remarkable smartpen able to record handwriting, was shuttering the developer program by taking down their dev forums and removing the SDK, taking away the ability to write custom apps. [Kelly] posted about this on her blog. Livescribe has a thriving community around it [...]

It seems like receipt printers are pretty popular as hacking targets lately. Aside from the wasted paper, they cooler than plain old blinking LEDs and we’d image there’s a ton of them floating around out there as advances in technology have prompted retailers to trade in the bulky dinosaurs for slimmer thermal printers. [Philip Hayton] [...]

Instructables user [willnue] wanted to build a DIY Tweeting alarm system from the ground up, but reconsidered after taking a close look at the scope of such a project. He settled on using an off the shelf security system, taking care of the Twitter interface on his own. He bought a GE 45142 Wireless alarm [...]

Since he was a kid [Giorgos Lazaridis] has always loved the idea of having an electronic door locking mechanism, and now that he has the means, he’s decided to construct one for securing the door to his apartment. He calls the project “simple and cheap”, though we’re not sure about the first part. Taking a [...]

Once the Google ADK was announced, the team over at [ElectFreaks] jumped right in and started experimenting to see what they could do with the new Arduino/Android interface. While the ADK was great for allowing the two devices to interact over a USB connection, they felt that the system would be far better if it [...]

[Ed Nauman] runs a machine shop, which we imagine can be quite loud at times. Sick of never hearing the doorbell when he was busy working on things, he decided that the solution to his problem was a new doorbell…an incredibly loud doorbell. His Really Loud Doorbell (RLD for short) is actually a pretty simple [...]

The folks at Advancer Technologies just release a muscle sensor board with a great walk through posted on Instructables describing how this board measures the flexing of muscles using electromyography. Using the same electrode placement points as the remote controlled hand we covered earlier, the muscle is measured by sensing the voltage between the muscle [...]

One thing we can all probably agree on is that Tesla coils are one part high-voltage electricity and two parts pure awesome. [Rob Flickenger] thinks so too, and he built a pretty nice one in his workshop some time ago. He took a bunch of pictures showing off the coil’s capabilities, but he thought that [...]

Be sure to check out Part 1 of the KC Maker Faire photo series. In this post, we explore some of the big hitters of the show, including crowd favorites ArcAttack, as well as battling robots. Read on to see the wonders! ArcAttack!: We have seen these guys from Austin, Texas in the past, and they [...]

When you really want your feelings known, we always say that bigger is better. [Gavin Smith, aka The Mechatronics Guy] must come from the same school of thought, because there’s absolutely no mistaking what he is trying to say with his latest project. Inspired by this WiFi signal painter we featured a while back, the [...]

[Alex Busman] has been working with an old microcontroller board called the Handy Board. Recently, he figured out how to interface an NES controller to play music. With 8 buttons on an NES controller, [Alex] has control over an entire musical scale, so he demonstrates this in his video by covering the Dr. Mario Theme. [...]

While some people know that you should be wary of USB drives with unknown origins, the same care is rarely, if ever exercised with USB peripherals. The security firm Netragard recently used this to their advantage when performing a penetration test at a client’s facility. When the client ruled out the use of many common [...]

If you weren’t aware, Adafruit Industries is sponsoring the “Make it Tweet” contest over at Instructables, and this Twitter-enabled bird feeder is [quasiben’s] entry into the competition. His bird feeder not only sends messages to Twitter, it also sends a picture of each bird to Twitpic. The feeder itself is a standard off the shelf [...]

[John] got a shiny new solder paste dispenser for a steal, and before he hooked up the tool, he decided to take a look inside to make sure everything was on the up and up. Aside from a few questionable wiring practices he didn’t approve of, everything else looked to be in good working order. [...]

Most DSLR cameras have the ability to take pictures at set intervals, but sometimes the menu system can be clunky, and the options are often less than ideal. [Achim] is a big fan of time lapse photography and has been hard at work creating a hardware-based intervalometer to suit his needs. He has just finished [...]

As an avid gamer, [Pat Norton] uses Teamspeak with his friends when playing World of Warcraft. [Pat]‘s friends were annoyed with the voice-activated option for Teamspeak and the constant squeaking of dog toys, and [Pat] was annoyed with the questionable usability of a push-to-talk key. Dissatisfied with his options, [Pat] built footswitch-controlled teamspeak button using [...]

[Thanh] has spent some time flying quad-copters measuring 12” motor to motor, but wanted to build something smaller so that he could fly indoors. Instead of building just one, he actually constructed five different quad-copters, with motor to motor arm spans ranging from 10” to just 3”. In his forum post, he highlights the construction [...]

[Owen] just finished putting together a portable helicopter game. It’s pretty impressive, especially since he used an ATtiny13 microcontroller. That chip uses an 8-pin dip package, offering only five I/O pins (six if you use the reset pin) and 1k of programming space. The game runs on a small cellphone-type LCD screen. The helicopter remains [...]

Those following the ProtoStack tutorials will be happy to hear that there is a new installment which explains Pulse Width Modulation. If you’ve never heard of PWM before, it’s a method of generating a signal that is logic 1 for a portion of the time and logic 0 for the remainder of the time. It [...]

This one’s a bit abstract. Remember those LCD games that became quite popular sometime in the 1990′s? You know, the ones that had only one game, usually a character that could be moved back and forth to catch, hit, or block objects falling from the sky or being thrown by some villain? [Tobie Nortje] sure remembers [...]

We saw this one a few days ago when it was first bouncing around the interwebs but never took a close look at it. Today, when we ran across a direct link in the tips box it was the promo video (embedded after the break) that won us over. Once you dig into the particulars [...]

[Bill] Decided that his living room could use some more light, or at least some more colourful light. To meet his needs [Bill] has designed and build what he describes as a modern/contemporary chandelier. The chandelier uses about 250′ of fibre optic cable to distribute the light from eight LED’s, light from the fibre optics [...]

[joe] and [ryan] built Thumper for their high school FIRST robotics team. The cannon itself is a solenoid-fired compressed air launcher that gets its juice from three large PVC tanks stored in the box below the turret, and the cannon is able to be fired nine times between visits to the air compressor. It was [...]

[Arao] wanted to measure the RPM of a spinning wheel using parts that he could scavenge from his junk box. A bit of thought led him to build a reflective sensor which can measure the spinning of a wheel (translated). He got his hands on an infrared phototransistor which had been used as part of the [...]

Kiss the days of breaking bits while drilling through-hole PCBs goodbye thanks to this semi-automatic drill press (translated). Now it’s not going to line up the bit with the exact location of the hole (that would make it a fully automatic drill press). This works by lining up the board manually, then stepping on a pedal [...]

[Stephen’s] daughter has a pair of mice she keeps as pets, who happen to be quite active at night. After they kept her awake for an entire evening by running like mad in their treadmill, they were moved from her bedroom. Since they were so active in the treadmill, [Stephen] thought it would be cool [...]

There’s something quite satisfying about building your own computer. Nowadays, constructing your own desktop PC is relatively easy, so if you really want to get your hands dirty, you have to take a step back in time and give some vintage hardware a spin. [YT2095] has spent a good portion of the last two months [...]

For those of you that are extreme sports participants, this “MikroKopter” may be the solution you’ve been waiting for.  When combined with a helmet mounted camera, this additional view should do a great job of capturing your every trick. This setup attaches a camera to a six-rotor mini helicopter to follow and video the action. [...]

[manuka], aka [Stan Swan] is a teacher in New Zealand who enjoys enlightening his students on the wonders of electrical circuits. He primarily uses “snap connector” circuit kits, sold under the BrainBox name in NZ, for his interactive labs as they can be easily manipulated by pupils of all ages. While the kits are great, [...]

Hackaday reader [Louis] wrote in to call our attention to a neat project over at Kickstarter that he thought would interest his fellow readers. The AlienCortex AV is a pre-built FPGA board from [Bryan Pape] with gobs of ports and a ton of potential. At the heart of the board is an Xilinx PQ208 Sparte [...]

So you hear that someone is building a clock that will run for 10,000 years and you think ‘oh, that’s neat’. Then you start looking into it and realize that it’s being built on a mountain-sized scale in a remote part of the US and things start to get a bit strange. As much as [...]

Instructables user [Rohit] had an out-of-warranty microwave with a broken membrane keypad. Much like our friend [Alexandre] from Brazil, he found the cost of replacement parts beyond reasonable, so he had to find a way to repair it instead. He disassembled the front cover of his microwave to get at the main controller board. Once [...]

The plotter featured above was, according to the author, made almost entirely of salvaged parts. In addition to what he had accumulated, only $20 in parts was needed to complete this build. Pretty good considering the thousands of dollars that a new plotter goes for. Control of all axes is accomplished using unipolar stepper motors.  [...]

[Nicolás] often rides his bike in the city, and on more than one occasion has ended up with a flat tire. A flat tire might not sound like a big deal, but imagine if you are a few miles from your destination and running late – now your day has gone from bad to worse. [...]

[J8g8j] has been playing around with an old cellphone. He wanted to control it using a microcontroller but since there’s 24 buttons he wasn’t thrilled about hooking up a couple dozen relays to do the switching. Instead, he managed to control all 24-buttons using just 6-pins of a microcontroller. The proof-of-concept video that he posted [...]

If you are planning on using more than a handful of BlinkMs in a project, you will likely find that their $15 price tag quickly adds up. Instructables user [jimthree] found himself in that position and opted to create his own homebrew version of a BlinkM instead. He calls his creations “Ghetto Pixels”, and while [...]

The Gado project is part of the Johns Hopkins University Center for African Studies. It has been tasked with archiving documents having to do with the East Baltimore Oral Histories Project. In short, they’ve got a pile of old pictures and documents that they want digitized but are not easily run through a page-fed scanner [...]