Maker Hacks
Ideas, news & tutorials for makers and hackers – Arduino/Raspberry Pi, 3D printing, robotics, laser cutting, and more
Marketing Director by day, maker, retro gaming, tabletop war/roleplaying nerd by night. Co-author of the Problogger Book with Darren Rowse. Husband, Dad, ?? Canadian.
Check out Retro Game Coders for retro gaming/computing.
☕️ Support Maker Hacks on Ko-Fi and get exclusive content and rewards!
Seeed sent me a Wio Terminal to play with, and I have to say I am impressed. Rather than do a straight review, I thought I would show how easy it is to make a quick project with it.
Full Spectrum Muse review? Isn’t the Glowforge your favourite laser cutter, Chris? Yes, yes it is! But there are reasons we have a Full Spectrum Muse, and I will get into those in the following …
In my Glowforge Review I have been keeping some information up to date but it is time to give our long-term thoughts. Our first Glowforge laser engraver arrived October 2018. A few months later we …
Prusa SL1 & Prusa CW1 Review / First Impressions. The Prusa SL1 is a masked SLA resin printer, the first from Prusa
Flux Beamo is a small, enclosed 30w CO2 laser engraver, that launched on Kickstarter.
3D Printing in Resin or FDM/Filament - Which is better for D&D/TTRPG/Miniature Wargaming?
Prusa Mk3s 3D Printer review - the original i3 3D printer kit from Prusa Labs. Does it live up to the hype?
Review of Elegoo Mars, a $250 resin 3D printer - check out this review to see how well it works in practice
Monoprice Ultimate 2 is a fully-enclosed 3D printer, with auto-level compensation, and filament runout sensor. It has a removable, glass, heated bed, and easily switchable nozzles. Let’s see how …
I don’t usually post negative reviews. My approach is to first let the company know of any issues I find, and if they can not be resolved, I move on, unless something is particularly dangerous …
Glowforge Review - Independent review of the Glowforge laser engraver covering the Glowforge Basic and comparing against competing laser cutters
Glowforge air filter allows you to not worry about annoying neighbours, or when you live in a climate where venting outside is not possible
Soldering. Love it, hate it, tolerate it, but if you are into electronics, learn to do it. Are you making it more difficult for yourself than it needs to be?
Update, 2026. I no longer recommend Glowforge. The company looks shaky, and the xTool machines do more for less money. This review stays up because the technique and the workflow notes still hold, and …
What were the best tools you bought or used in 2018? I review a lot of stuff (to the point where I stopped listing everything), but a few things stood out above the rest. Let’s see how many …
For my 3D printed turntable I obviously need some way to turn the turntable, and preferably for video and scanning, some method to control speed. Fortunately, I have a whole box full of those cheap …
Have you been wanting a wifi camera? Maybe for some added security, or perhaps to monitor the kids/pets/roommate?
Turn your Raspberry Pi into an internet camera!
The Glowforge Basic does not have the pass-through feature of the Glowforge Pro but with this magnet hack, you can trick the front flap to think the lid is shut fully, allowing you to "pass-in" larger …
Update, 2026. This printer is no longer on sale, and the shop links below died along with Gearbest. I have left the review up because the build notes and the general lessons still apply, but do not go …
The “Massive Adafruit Arcade Button” is one of my favorites, I just find it comically large. Therefore whenever I get a chance to specify this particular button, I jump at it. As luck …
Can you build a DIY version of the Elgato Stream Deck? Many people could tell this is what I was building up to. I think we are getting a lot closer. This, of course, continues my previous …
I am in the fun position of having a Raspberry Pi project to build for my day job. It brought to light a familiar challenge of how to trouble-shoot and connect to headless Raspberry Pi boards when you …
One of the many productivity-boosters my nerd friends look to is text expanders and keyboard shortcuts. You know, enter a combination of keypresses, and out pops a signature, particular animated gif, …
Did the K40 Laser Upgrades add up to a worthwile exercise or was it a waste of time and money? Find out in the final part of this series
We are pretty familiar at this point with the 3D design creation workflow. Drawing, dragging and dropping CAD files using a mouse and a package such as Fusion 360, or a browser-based application, such …
In this K40 laser upgrades post we install Smoothie board, Activated Carbon filter and Lightburn software
Upgrading my K40 laser cutter to have better quality and abilities
Did you ever want to have your return to your office or home announced with a fanfare? Probably not, but let’s do this anyway ;) This script will use Bluetooth (built into the Raspberry Pi 3) to …
Slack is a hugely popular live group chat system. While a lot of my notifications now go to Discord, as I wrote about here, Slack is still more popular with development teams, and it is what we use in …
While Arduino and Raspberry Pi dominate, there are other boards out there for robot builders. One of the best for rapid robot development is IoTiny from EZ-Robot.
DJI/Ryze Tello Mini-Drone is, as the name suggests, a new and tiny drone from the people who created my lovely DJI Mavic Pro. The important differences are, however, compelling:
I have been writing a lot more about Raspberry Pi than Arduino lately, but don’t get the impression I am leaving the Arduino world behind. Both devices have their benefits, and in fact, I …
You may have seen in the Maker Hacks Facebook Group the latest iteration of my Raspberry Pi based entertainment center. It’s now got to the point where I need a boot menu, so I thought I would …
Grove sensors are a plug and play way to add sensors, buttons, displays, and actuators to your electronics projects, without soldering. Let's take a look how well they work when paired with a …
Running commands from the shell is all well and good, but what if you don’t want to always be logging into your terminal? What if the script, or even server, crashes or needs to reboot? In this …
If you are logging in and out of a Linux machine, especially a Raspberry Pi on your local network, it can be a pain to keep entering a password. The longer and more secure your password, the more of a …
The Prusa Mk2/Mk3 3d printers are renowned as top quality, but buying parts is a painfully expensive deal due to the long journey and single supplier. That just changed!
Here is a shell script that will allow you to kill a script if it is already running #!/usr/bin/env bash ps -ef | grep $1 | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9 Supply the name of the script as the first …
Update, 2026. This kit is no longer on sale, and the shop links below died along with Gearbest. I have left the review up because the build notes and the general lessons still apply, but do not go …
Update, 2026. This printer is no longer on sale, and the shop links below died along with Gearbest. I have left the review up because the build notes and the general lessons still apply, but do not go …
