Parking Assistant Helps Back Up the Car Without Going Too Far

Sure, [Ty Palowski] could have just hung a tennis ball from the ceiling, but that would mean getting on a ladder, testing the studfinder on himself before locating a ceiling joist, and so on. Bo-ring. Now that he finally has a garage, he’s not going to fill it with junk, …read more

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Plastic Prosthetics for Rubber Duckies

Will someone please think of the rubber duckies?!

For decades they’ve been reduced to a laughing stock: a caricature of waterfowl. Left without a leg to stand on, their only option is to float around in the tub. And they don’t even do that well, lacking the feet that Mother …read more

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Mirror Turns Webcam into Document Camera

This is one of those so-simple-I-wish-I-invented-it hacks. Professor [Michael Peshkin] is teaching his engineering students remotely. While he has a nice second camera that he can use to transmit whatever he doodles on paper, most of his students just have the single webcam built into their laptops.

The solution is …read more

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This LEGO Air Conditioner is Cooler Than Yours

What’s the coolest thing a person can build with LEGO? Well it’s gotta be an air conditioner, right? Technically, [Manoj Nathwani] built a LEGO-fied swamp cooler, but it’s been too hot in London to argue the difference.

This thoroughly modular design uses an Arduino Uno and a relay module to …read more

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Don’t Slack Off On Updating Your Status

Displaying an accurate status in Slack (or whatever other employer-provided collaboration program you may be forced to run) is crucial in 2020. If you need to make a sandwich or take the dog out real quick, but you don’t update your status to show yourself as away, you might come …read more

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Four Years Later, Off-Grid Office Shed Still Rocks

About four years ago, [Russell Graves] created what was, to him, the ultimate work-from-home environment: an off-grid office shed. The shed might look a bit small, but it’s a considerably larger workspace than most people in an office are granted. Four years later, in the middle of a global pandemic, …read more

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Mixing Up Your Own Supersized Sidewalk Chalk

When folks started quarantining, chalk art spilled onto driveways and sidewalks to remind us that there’s still beauty and creative people doing what they always do. Now it’s time to strut your stuff and show your neighbors that things are greener on your slab of concrete. [friedpotatoes] has shared their …read more

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Encouragement Machine Battles Your Inner Bully

We would be preaching to the choir if we told you that fear is the action killer when it comes to the challenge of new projects in uncharted territory. Everyone who reads Hackaday knows that it takes mettle to forge through the self-doubt as we push ourselves to new engineering …read more

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Helmet Decal Charger Keeps Them Ready to Glow

When firefighters are battling a blaze, it’s difficult for them to find each other in the smoky darkness. To help stand out they wear glow-in-the-dark decals on their helmets, but since they spend so much of their down time stowed away in a dark locker, they don’t always have a …read more

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Tired of Regular Keebs? Might Be Time to Split

No matter how much geek cred your old vintage keyboard pulls, it’s not worth suffering through wrist pain or any other discomfort while using it. Especially now, when there are so many points of entry into the rabbit hole world of DIY mechanical keebs.

Once the wrist pain started, [Ben …read more

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