One thing that annoyed [Jashua] to no end was hearing his automated sprinkler system kick on in the middle of the night, when it had rained earlier in the day. He wished that his sprinklers were a bit smarter, so he decided to give the system an upgrade. Rather than pay hundreds of dollars for [...]

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One thing that annoyed [Jashua] to no end was hearing his automated sprinkler system kick on in the middle of the night, when it had rained earlier in the day. He wished that his sprinklers were a bit smarter, so he decided to give the system an upgrade. Rather than pay hundreds of dollars for [...]

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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 [...]

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[BrianH] decided that he no longer wanted to venture outside on cold or rainy days just to check if the mail had come, so he built himself a notification system that would alert him if the postman had stopped by. Additionally, he admits to being forgetful on occasion and wanted a way to monitor whether [...]

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[Aleksander Zawada] makes vacuum tubes in his home. One of the most challenging builds he has taken on is to produce a working Nixie tube. He describes the process in a PDF, covering his success and failure. It seems the hardest part is to get the tube filled with the proper gas, at the proper [...]

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[Jeri Ellsworth] made this silicon inverter at home, by hand. It took her two years to get the process figured out and achieve something we didn’t think was possible. The complexity of manufacture, and the wide range of tools and materials needed seem insurmountable but she did it anyway. Her home chip fab Flickr set [...]

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Why settle for the standard home icon on your browser? If your home button brings you to hackaday.com, why not make the icon reflect that destination? This hack is quick and simple. We’ll take you through it using Firefox 3 and the default theme with standard sized icons.
We start by using our favorite graphics program [...]

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[Kenneth Maxon] is a wizard who only does things one way, beautifully. While out of the average hacker’s production capabilities, his injection molding machine is amazing to behold. The machine has all features a commercial model would. It heats and cools the mold, produces over a ton of pressure to inject plastic with, and ejects [...]

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