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Put the Classic PDP-8 Minicomputer on Your Shelf
Between our modern era of ubiquitous interactive computers and the early days of scarce giants fed in batches lies the minicomputing age. Minicomputers were cheap enough that you could risk letting...
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This Huge DIY Workbench Gives You a Hand
As an avid experimenter and builder of random contraptions—and who isn't the best at putting his tools away and normally has multiple projects in various stages of completion—I often run out of work...
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Download Spectrum Collections Vol. 1: Hands On
For many of us, the joy of making things is why we got into fields like engineering in the first place. You take inert bits and pieces, combine them in the right way, and voilà! Something new comes to...
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Hacking Ham Radio for Texting
My first exposure to radio communication happened when I was around 5 or 6 years old. My dad was working as an airport electrician. He would bring walkie-talkies home, and my brothers and I would play...
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BattleBots: Behind the Scenes With Ghost Raptor
As a fashiontech designer, I spend a lot of time making sure my designs are safe, whether it's a robotic spider dress or a prosthetic leg with a built-in Tesla coil and spark gaps. So when I got...
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From HomeBrew to Hasbro
Twenty years ago, just after the dot-com meltdown, I was working as a consultant and had lots of free time on my hands. I started indulging in my hobby of building robots, and subsequently met up with...
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A Web-Enabled, High Quality, DIY Audio Amp
For a long time I owned a beloved Sansui Electric integrated amplifier. These audio amplifiers combine a preamplifier for boosting the sound signal and a power amplifier for driving the loudspeakers....
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Jolly Good: Arduino Cofounder’s Uno Upgrade
First released in 2005, the Arduino microcontroller turbocharged the maker movement. While more advanced boards have joined the Arduino line since, the basic Uno microcontroller remains popular....
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How the Wayback Machine Is Saving Digital Ukraine
When the Ukrainian invasion began, the Internet Archive launched several efforts to capture the Ukrainian Internet. Its archivists launched a high-volume crawl through hundreds of thousands of...
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Print an Arduino-Powered Color Mechanical Television
Before flat screens, before even cathode-ray tubes, people watched television programs at home thanks to the Nipkow disk. Ninety years ago in places like England and Germany, broadcasters transmitted...
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Ukrainian Volunteers Use 3D Printers to Save Lives
One month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine, a group of more than 100 makers from all over Ukraine manufactured and supplied a number of 3D-printed products to the Armed Forces of Ukraine, the...
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Weave Your Own Apollo-Era Memory
The spacecraft that took men to the surface of the moon and back relied on computers that pushed the state of the art when they were built. Designed by MIT, the Apollo Guidance Computers came with 72...
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Chasing Weather Balloons With Software-Defined Radio
I’ve never had an interest in pursuing game such as deer or grouse. Hunting was never my thing. But I do enjoy a good technical challenge. And I recently found a challenge that involves hunting—with...
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Upcyling a 40-year-old Tandy Model 100 Portable Computer
Last year I picked up a Tandy Model 100 at the Vintage Computer Festival East for about US $90. Originally released in 1983, it was the forerunner of today’s notebook computers, featuring a...
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Build a Passive Radar With Software-Defined Radio
Normally, when it comes to radio-related projects, my home of New York City is a terrible place to be. If we could see and hear radio waves, it would make an EDM rave feel like a sensory deprivation...
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Hi-fi, Radio, and Retro: The DIY Projects Spectrum Readers Love
This month we’re celebrating the launch of our second PDF collection of Hands On articles, which IEEE members can download from IEEE Spectrum’s website and share with friends. So we thought we’d take...
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Two C64s Plus a Pile of Floppy Disks Equals One Accordion
Accordions come in many shapes. Some have a little piano keyboard while others have a grid of black and white buttons set roughly in the shape of a parallelogram. I’ve been fascinated by this...
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Play Infinite Versions of AI-Generated Pong on the Go
There is currently a lot of interest in AI tools designed to help programmers write software. GitHub’s Copilot and Amazon’s CodeWhisperer apply deep-learning techniques originally developed for...
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An MPGuino Fuel-Economy Computer with a Retro Look
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the skyrocketing fuel prices that ensued last year got me thinking about how to cut down on my consumption of gasoline. I thought briefly about purchasing a car that...
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Upcycling a Tandy Model 100, Part II: I2C Strikes Back
Last year for Hands On, I gutted a defunct TRS-80 Model 100. The goal was to upgrade its 24 kilobytes of RAM and 2.4-megahertz, 8-bit CPU but keep the notebook computer’s lovely keyboard and LCD...
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