[Ben] is showing off some results from his Software-Define Radio project. The board seen above, which he designed from the ground up, is receiving a WWV radio broadcast. This is the atomic clock signal from Fort Collins, Colorado. The audio heard in the clip after the break is a bit noisy, but since he’s about [...]

Here’s a neat 4x4x4 LED cube made with an ElecFreaks Flower Protoboard. A few days ago, we posted a neat new prototyping board made specifically for SMD work. Instead of the usual ‘holes-with-circles’ protoboard layout, the ElecFreaks team decided to go with a flower-shaped pad. This makes it especially easy to deal with SMD components when building [...]

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, long-time defenders of the common man’s rights in the electronic realm, has published a guide to keeping your digital devices private when entering the United States. It seems the defenders of freedom and liberty (ICE, DHS, TSA, and CBP) are able to take a few freedoms with your liberty at a border [...]

[Ch00f] spent some serious time figuring out how the Icebreaker POV toy works. This is a pretty cool device about the size of a toothbrush holder. It’s in a clear plastic case, which lets the row of 32 surface mount LEDs shine through. But making light isn’t their only function. You can use the device [...]

In our digital age prying eyes are everywhere. The sad thing is that they may even belong to your own government. But no matter who it is, there are some things you can do to keep your private digital devices and content as secure as possible. The link above goes to [Jerry Whiting's] discussion on [...]

Here’s a camera mount that moves smoothly along a motorized sled. [Bart Dring] created the system and was surprised by it’s popularity, having received several sales requests from photographers. He originally designed the linear bearing system, called the MakerSlide as an inexpensive alternative to other CNC machine solutions. Allowing a computer to map out timed [...]

We figured it wouldn’t be long before someone figured out how to remove the ads from the ‘Special Offers’ versions of the Amazon Kindle hardware. There are two things that made this obvious to us, the huge flaw that lets code be easily run as root, and the MP3 tag forming that makes it possible [...]

You’re out at night and playing a boisterous game of flashlight tag. But how can you tell if you’ve been mortally wounded by your opponents light beam? [Kenyer] solved this problem by building a flashlight tag damage sensor which is worn by each participant. It adds a bit of the high-tech equipment used with laser [...]

So you’re really looking for that [Norman Rockwell] Christmas and want to set up your train to encircle the Christmas tree this year. The problem is that all you’ve got is an old LEGO train set and not enough track for it. You can’t just buy some more, because the technology has changed; or can [...]

Grab some scrap metal and a microwave oven and you’ll be casting your own metal parts in no time. [Mikeasaurus], who is known for doing strange things like making Silly Putty magnetic or building his own spray paint bottles, doesn’t disappoint this time around. He read about microwave smelting in Popular Science and is giving it a [...]

[Arnuschky] was looking for a network storage solution that included redundancy. He could have gone with a new NAS box, but didn’t want to shell out full price. Instead, he picked up a Dell PowerEdge 2800 and hacked it for SATA drives and quiet operation. It’s not surprising that this hardware can be had second-hand [...]

[Martin] sent in two videos he found while cruising the tubes. The first video is a simple circuit with a resistor, three switches, and three LEDs. All the components are soldered together right in front of the camera. When a battery is connected, turning the first switch on makes the first LED light up. Turning [...]

[Bill Porter] is helping a friend out by designing a simple security system for her home. It relies on Xbee modules to alert a base station when doors are opened, or a pressure mat is stepped on. The door sensors are quite simple, and you’re probably already familiar with them. One part mounts to the [...]

This mirror has a large monitor behind it which can be operated using hand gestures. It’s the result of a team effort from [Daniel Burnham], [Anuj Patel], and [Sam Bell] to build a web-enabled mirror for their ECE 4180 class at the Georgia Institute of Technology. So far they’ve implemented four widget for the system. You [...]

14 year-old [Connor Smith] has been busy this holiday season, thinking up ways to improve the lighting situation at home. A few weeks ago he put together this 3-channel light controller to toggle his parents’ external lights, incorporating an Arduino for control. The Arduino was used to switch the channels on and off at specified [...]

Hack a Day alum [Will O’Brien] recently upgraded his phone, and was trying to find a use for his old one. He always wanted a remote starter for his Subaru Outback, but wasn’t interested in paying for an off the shelf kit. Since he had this old smartphone kicking around, he thought that it would [...]

There’s a million and one ways to play around with MIDI and an Arduino. It’s trivial to have a ‘duino spit out a scale to a MIDI keyboard, or even respond to SysEx messages to change a lighting or effects rig. There’s one thing that has eluded MIDI-duino builders, though: implementing a MIDI synthesizer with [...]

You may have seen an air powered engine at some point, but most are made out of some sort of metal. This engine, however, is made entirely out of wood (and fasteners). One might wonder how a design like this was conceived, but this may be explained by [Woodgears.ca's] tagline: “An engineer’s approach to woodworking.”  [...]

[Brad Graham] wrote in to let us know about his electric bike data dump over at atomiczombie.com, written just for us! Last we heard from [Brad] he was building some serious robots and freakishly tall tallbikes but since the weather has turned for the chilly its time to focus on indoor projects. Using a combination [...]

They say that the holidays are a time to gather with others, which usually translates into spending time with friends and family. The folks at ioBridge Labs thought that while friends and family certainly are a big part of the holidays, it would be pretty cool to gather together flocks of strangers by using the [...]

[Michael] is a huge fan of old media formats. There’s something special about quarter-inch thick 78s, fragile blue cylinders holding music, and thin strips of mylar that preserve the human voice. He’s had an idea for a tape-based instrument for a while, and now that the Magnetotron is complete, we’re in awe of this glass harmonica and [...]

[Minisystem] has a thing for dynamo powered bike lights. He wanted to measure how well his latest is working, but just logging the current flow through the LEDs wasn’t enough for him. He picked up a cheap Lux meter and hacked into the circuit to log measurements while he rides. He started by cracking open [...]

Free-form Christmas ornament Here’s [Rob]‘s free form circuit that’s a Christmas ornament for geeks. It looks great, but sadly isn’t powered through a Christmas light strand. It’s just as cool as the skeletal Arduino we saw. Prototyping with flowers Well this is interesting: protoboard that’s specifically made to make SMD soldering easier. The guys at elecfreaks [...]

We missed 60% of it already, but luckily you can easily watch the back catalog of [Alan Yates'] 2011 Advent Calendar of Circuits. As with traditional Advent Calendars he’s got a treat for every day in December leading up to Christmas. Instead of chocolate, the treat is a video about a different electronic circuit. We [...]

[Victor] likes to watch movies on his laptop, but the tiny speakers in his machine don’t do [John Williams] and other perfectly fine soundtracks justice. To pump up the jams a little bit, [Victor] got a pair of Trust Mila 2.0 speakers for Sinterklaas. Unfortunately, these speakers were terrible – noise everywhere, tinny output and [...]

[Milton] sent in a build that censors every ‘F’ word on TV, and not just the one that rhymes with ‘duck,’ either. His setup sounds the alarm every time someone inside the moving picture box says a word that contains the letter F. The build is based around Nootropic Design’s Video Experimenter Shield. This neat little shield [...]

These images may look the same, but if you peer closely at the one on the left you’ll notice the eyes staring back at you. It seems animatronic decor is in this year, and we think [Fjord Carver's] talking Christmas tree is one of the better offerings. He picked up the diminutive tree at the [...]

This LED lamp, which uses a soda cup as a lampshade, is Internet enabled thanks to a Linux board (translated). To say the system is overpowered would be a gross understatement. But at least there’s plenty of room for growth. The lamp is really just a hardware extension for the Linux board. A half-dozen colored LEDs [...]

[Andrew] is trying to buckle down and hammer out his PhD project but was surprised by the sorry state of the configuration options for his FPGA/ARM dev board. Using JTAG was painfully slow, so he studied the datasheet to see if there was another way. It turns out the Xilinx FPGA he’s using does have [...]

Apparently there was a Nuclear Taco eating contest at the 2010 Codebits Conference. The team from altLab, a Hackerspace in Lisbon, didn’t partake but the discomfort of those that did was burned into their memory. This year, the altLab members decided to build a spciy taco monitoring helmet as part of the conference’s 48 hour [...]

[Aaron] was looking for a cheap RFID reader that had some easy to follow documentation and a standardized interface. Most everything he saw was pretty expensive, so he decided to buy a cheap $10 reader from eBay to see how easy it would be to work with. The reader came with very little documentation, but [...]

This man is strapped onto the business end of a huge robotic arm. If you’ve seen videos of industrial robots on automobile assembly lines and the like, you know how fast and strong these machines are. But this isn’t headed for the factory floor, it’s a new flight simulator built do train Australian fighter pilots. Researchers at Deakin University [...]

If you want people to really be impressed by your projects it’s often better not to have a fully finished look. In this case, we think hooking the stripboard version of FIGnition up to your TV will raise a lot more eyebrows than the PCB version will. [Julian] put together a guide to building the computer on [...]

[Entropia] is just putting the final touches on his bar-top MAME cabinet (translated). The project started out as a 3D model to get the case dimensions just right. An old laptop is being, so the enclosure was designed to fit the bare LCD assembly and hide the rest of the computer. [Entropia] had access to [...]

3D printers are awesome, but boy are they frustrating. If you’ve built a RepRap Mendel, Prusa or Huxely, you know there’s nothing quite like trying to get a washer off of a threaded rod without disassembling the entire machine. This frustration in part sourcing, assembling and correctly aligning a printer is where printers like the [...]

[Fabien] wrote in to share a link to this RGB video display which he made. He’s got some pretty cool routines that make it more functional than you would think, but first we want to comment on the construction. He used an RGB strip, which makes this look like an incredibly simple build. The strip [...]

[BadWolf] managed to make some free time to get back to his own electronic projects. This time around he’s created a security system for his car. It’s patched into the ignition, preventing the engine from starting when the key is turned. A driver must first insert the key, then type the combination on a keypad [...]

[Photonicinduction] has an impressive battery backup installation that powers his whole house. Unlike a standalone emergency generator which would require you to hook up all of the device you want to run, this setup sits in between the power meter and the breaker box, ready to step in when needed. But get this, he’s not [...]

[Euphy] just posted and Instructable of his Polargraph drawing machine that’s able to draw huge images slower than molasses in November. The plotter only uses two stepper motors to control the position of the pen and can be made nearly entirely from salvaged parts – [Euphy] built his for just about £150. The Polargraph uses [...]

[Raphaël Assénat] needed anti-static bags for some boards he is selling. He had a lot of leftovers on hand (presumably from the components he ordered to assemble these boards) and wanted to reuse them. Instead of buying a heat sealer he built his own to cut them down to size. His build starts with a [...]