[Andy Brown] has been working on a series of tutorials revolving around the STM32 processor family. He’s using the STM32plus development board, with an STM32F1 ARM Cortex M3 processor to drive a couple of different full color graphic LCD screens. His latest installment shows how to read from the touch screen included with both displays. [...]

They can put a man on the moon, but they can’t put a man in LEO Yeah, we’re enraged by that headline. Anyway, NASA put up a whole bunch of projects and made them open source. From the looks of it, there’s plenty of cool stuff: genetic algorithm libs, toolkits for astrodynamics simulations (on the Goddard site), [...]

Weekly Hack a Day feature [Dino] is back again, this time with his very own guitar pedal. It’s modeled on a three-transistor Fuzz Face clone and sounds very good in our humble opinion. Fuzz pedals were some of the first guitar pedals on the market, and for good reason. Their easy construction and simple theory [...]

[Chris Fenton] needs your help. After constructing a 1/10th scale, cycle accurate Cray-1 supercomputer and finding a disk with Cray software on it, he’s ready to start loading the OS. There’s a small problem, though: no one knows how to boot the thing. [Chris] posted a disk image for a Cray-1/X-MP with the help of the people at [...]

[Shameel Arafin, Sean McIntyre, and Reid Bingham] really dig rainbows. Going by the moniker the “RainBroz”, the trio built a portable display that can be used to add cool light painting effects to pictures. The group brings their Rainbow Machine all over the place, including parties, gatherings, and random spots on the street. Anyone is [...]

[Ricard Dias] wrote in to tell us about his guide for developing Linux applications on a Mac. He really enjoys the development environment provided by XCode, and it doesn’t take much to make it work as an all-in-one solution for Linux development. The real trick here is the use of SSH to access a Linux [...]

This is a Digital Salinometer which [Daniel Kramnik] built as a Science Olympiad entry. He’s a Junior in High School and when looking for a project to enter into the Water Quality event he was interested in achieving greater accuracy than a mechanical hydrometer provides. We think the circuit design is very impressive for anyone [...]

If you’re looking for a custom controller for a MAME cabinet build, CNC machine, or just want to control a robot build, you’re going to need to wire up some buttons. You could wire up a bunch of buttons to a microcontroller, but if you use an old computer keyboard the work is already done [...]

[Alex] was digging through his closet and came upon an old PS2 game pad for Dance Dance Revolution. He hated the idea of throwing it out just slightly more than the idea of playing DDR again, so he decided to find a way to reuse it. He was a big fan of the game Simon [...]

[Steven Dufresne] does a lot of tinkering with solar-powered applications, a hobby which can be very time consuming if done right. One process he carries out whenever building a solar installation is creating a sun chart to determine how much (or little) sun the target area will get. The process requires [Steven] to take elevation [...]

[George] just finished his first project: an 8×8 matrix “Board of Many Ping-Pong Balls” with 64 RGB LEDs. He started this project when he was 14 years old and finished the build over this last Christmas break. We won’t make any presumptions about [George]‘s age, but we couldn’t think of a better project to start [...]

[John Zitterkopf] is in the middle of restoring a vintage Sega Star Trek Captain’s Chair arcade game for the upcoming 2012 Texas Pinball festival, though one prerequisite for the show is that the game supports some sort of free play mode. At this point he doesn’t have the option of tracking down a freeplay ROM [...]

[Asher Glick] wrote in to share a project he has been working on with his friend [Kevin Baker], a 4x4x4 RGB LED cube. The pair are students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and also members of the newly-formed Embedded Hardware Club on campus. As their first collaborative project, they decided to take on the ubiquitous LED [...]

For a young geek in the 80s, the it computer was the IBM PCjr. On paper, it was a truly remarkable leap in technology. With a wireless keyboard, light pen, and optical mouse it was an impressive, if maligned, piece of hardware. There was a small problem with the optical mouse, though; it required a special [...]

Many companies today try to simplify life by over complicating the keyboard. Microsoft has been doing it since 2001. If you love your ergonomic keyboard, but hate that “function lock” key, there are plenty of options out there for you to try. The least complicated way is to either modify some XML or just set [...]

This isn’t an airplane, it’s a simulator. But you won’t find it at a flight school as this labor of love is a home build of a 737 cockpit (translated) that has been going on for more than two years. It started off as a couple of automotive bucket seats in a room with two computer [...]

[Mike] picked up a cheap USB hub for four pounds (about $6) including delivery. He wanted to know how it’s possible to get quality electronics for that price, and as you may have guessed it’s not possible. He cracked open the power supply that shipped with the hub and hooked it up for some testing. [...]

While being caught out in the rain skiing, [Andrew] was left with a pair of soaking wet gloves. Leaving them to air dry did little good, as after 3 days they were still wet, and blowing a fan at them did little to nothing to help the situation. Luckily [Andrew] had been thinking about ways [...]

If you’ve ever wanted to build an awesome tabletop game or model train layout scenery, you probably couldn’t do better than printing Minecraft worlds on a RepRap. This guide comes courtesy of [Nudel] who figured out how to use Mineways with his RepRap. While [Nudel]‘s landscape print doesn’t have the full color of something from Shapeways, he only spent $3 [...]

Now make it life size Here’s a scale model of the classic Playstation game Wipeout. It uses quantum levitation, superconductors, liquid nitrogen, and incredibly detailed models of the cars in Wipeout. They’re able control the speed and direction of the cars electronically. Somebody get on making one of these I can drive. Never mind, it’s totally [...]

[Craig Lindley] recently finished building his own RGB LED cube project. It’s made up of four layers of 4×4 LED grids, but you may notice that the framework that supports the structure is not the usual ratsnet of wires we’ve come to expect. They’re actually long, thin circuit boards. [Craig] grabbed the Rainbow Cube kit sold [...]

Need PID control in your next project? Perhaps this little beauty can help. It’s an Open Source PID controller that also follows the Open Hardware guidelines. [Brett Beauregard] based the project on the newly minted Arduino PID library which he wrote. In the video after the break [Brett] takes apart the device, walking through some of [...]

[Kubbur87] put together a guide to replacing the Non-touch Kindle 4 screensavers with your own images. We’ve already seen a way to remove the Special Offers banners from the newest version of Kindle Hardware, this hack lets you use your own 600×800 Portable Network Graphics (.png) file instead of the images pushed to the device by [...]

[Giorgos Lazaridis] needed an AC adaptor for his Canon PowerShot camera. He hit eBay and was excited to find this branded adaptor for just five bucks! It works and, even though it would sometimes reboot his camera if the cord was twisted around in the jack, he was satisfied that it did what it was [...]

The Chief Knock-a-Homer robot is [Psycho Freaky's] shout out to The Simpsons. The robot design appeared in an episode where [Homer] built [Bart] a fighting robot. Since he’s not robot builder, [Homer] actually climbed inside the shell and dished out sweet vengeance while suffering some severe injuries at the same time. But [Psycho] has the skills necessary to make this [...]

We love the extra touches that [Andrianakis Haris] added to his two-zone electronic thermometer. It includes features that you just wouldn’t find on a mass-market commercial product because of issues like added cost. For example, you can see that the PCB juts up above the LCD display, allowing the module to be mounted on a [...]

Building your first circuit is empowering, but make sure it’s not too empowering. [Jon] sent in a great tutorial of power protection circuits to make sure you don’t release the mystical blue smoke that make electronics work. There’s an in-depth tutorial of the classic series diode that’s the simplest of all power protection circuits. There’s not much to [...]

When he’s not being completely awesome hosting a radio show on electronic music, [Gaston Klares] is busy in his workshop coming up with some awesome stuff. One of his most recent builds is a laser gun shooting gallery that brings a classic carnival game to his back yard. (Google translate link) The laser gun itself is [...]

A few months ago, Buildlounge and Full Spectrum Laser started a contest to win a 40 Watt laser cutter. The only requirement? Submit a project that uses light in some way. The deadline is now over and voting is open, right on the buildlounge.com page. First place gets a 40 Watt laser cutter provided by Full Spectrum Laser. [...]

[Ian Cole’s] son is learning to play the drums on an electronic drum set, and he wanted a way to continue practicing during his frequent visits to his grandparents’ house. [Ian] had picked up a Spikenzielabs “Drum Kit Kit All-Inclusive” (DKKAI) earlier this summer, and set out to build an easily transportable drum set. The [...]

After taking the Stanford Machine Learning class offered over the Internet last year, [David Singleton] thought he could build something really cool. We have to admit that he nailed it with his neural network controlled car. There’s not much to the build; it’s just an Android phone, an Arduino and a toy car. The machine [...]

The worst computer keyboard, ever [Gerardus] found an old BBC Master Compact computer for $15. The only problem is the computer didn’t have a keyboard. It’s not a problem if you can make a keyboard out of an old breadboard. It’s not a Model M, but it works. Emergency ribbon cable repair [Thomas] works in [...]

So do you have an Atari 2600 laying around collecting dust? Perhaps you’d like to have a musical instrument to take up the time that you would spend playing video games if you had a modern console. Well, look no further than the GATARI 2600! [cTrix] made this device with a custom EPROM chip plugged [...]

The 28th Annual Chaos Communications Congress just wrapped things up on December 31st and they’ve already published recordings of all the talks at the event. These talks were live-streamed, but if you didn’t find time in your schedule to see all that you wanted, you’ll be happy to find your way to the YouTube collection [...]

Want to monitor how much a wheel has turned in your project? Then you need a rotary encoder! Here’s a way to add rotary encoding without changing the mounting method of your wheels (translated). [Jorge] added it as a way to improve the functionality of this line-following robot. It uses a paper encoder wheel which is [...]

The folks at The Quad Cities Collaboration and Hackerspace (QC Co-Lab) were trying to find something to build for their first big project, and had to look no further than the wall for inspiration. The north end of their facility is home to a huge 15×17 glass block wall that happens to face a well-traveled [...]

If you do a lot of SMD soldering, a reflow oven is the fastest and most efficient way to get all those tiny components attached to your PCB. [Frank Zhao] saw the reflow ovens we featured here over the last few weeks and figured he might as well show off his rig as well. We’re [...]

If you’ve ever thought about extracting caffeine from coffee beans, [Ben] is the guy for you. The last time we ran into him, he had already produced a few aerogel monoliths with a few chemicals, pipe fittings, and some CO2. We’re guessing he needed another use for his supercritical drying chamber, so after looking over a few patents, [...]

[Ch00f] has decided to ring in the new year with some el wire Kanye glasses. Technically the term for the glasses is either “shutter shades” or “slatted sunglasses”, invented around the 80s by [Alain Mikli] and originally given the nickname “Venetian Sunglasses”. Kanye West evidently got his own retro redesign by the original creator and the [...]