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Hackaday

Daily coverage of hardware projects that had no commercial reason to exist. Reliably the most inventive corner of the web.

Opens in a new tab. We do not control this site and it may have changed since we catalogued it.

How to get the most from it

Hackaday sits in DIY & Life Hacks under Learn, filed as rabbit hole.

  • Open it when the evening is free. It has no natural stopping point.
  • It works on a phone or a desktop, so open it on whatever is nearest.
  • It works with the sound off, so it is fine on a train or in a quiet office.
  • No account needed — you can start without signing up.
  • Go in expecting something clever and brainy.

About this category: Build guides, repair databases and instruction sites for physical tasks. The internet at its most straightforwardly useful.

Good for

  • A long evening with nothing planned
  • Being impressed by a clever idea
  • Giving your brain a workout
  • A quiet break at your desk
  • Killing time on your phone
  • Trying it with zero commitment

Hackaday: quick answers

Is Hackaday free?

Yes. Hackaday is free to use and needs no account.

Do I need an account to use Hackaday?

No. You can use Hackaday without signing up for anything.

Does Hackaday work on a phone?

Yes. Hackaday works on phones as well as desktop browsers.

Is Hackaday safe for work?

Yes, we file it as safe for work. It also works muted.

How long does Hackaday take?

We file it as "Rabbit hole": Clear your evening. We warned you.

More in DIY & Life Hacks

All 14 in DIY & Life Hacks
  • Free illustrated repair manuals for phones, laptops, cars and appliances, plus teardowns that name and shame every glued-in battery.

  • Step-by-step build guides for anything from a bookshelf to a plasma cutter, written by the people who actually made the thing.

  • Daily tips on doing ordinary things slightly better, running since 2005 and still occasionally genuinely surprising.

  • The maker movement's own magazine: projects, tool reviews and the long-running argument about what counts as making something.

Same mood: clever

All clever sites
  • Mash any keys and perfectly formatted code appears character by character, exactly as in every hacking scene ever filmed.

  • Generates blobs, waves, stacked layers and low-poly grids as SVG, all of them tweakable and all free to export.

  • Vector halftone generator that rebuilds an image out of dots, lines or waves and exports it as clean SVG.

    • 2 min
    • Desktop
  • Mr Doob's sketching toy, where strokes web themselves together with connecting threads and turn scribbles into shading.

    • <1 min
    • Desktop

Keep exploring

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