It’s about time! Or maybe it’s about time’s reciprocal: frequency. Whichever way you see it, Hackaday is pleased to announce, just this very second, the 2025 One Hertz Challenge over on Hackaday.io. If you’ve got a device that does something once per second, we’ve got the contest for you. And don’t delay, because the top three winners will each receive a $150 gift certificate from this contest’s sponsor: DigiKey.
What will you do once per second? And how will you do it? Therein lies the contest! We brainstormed up a few honorable mention categories to get your creative juices flowing.
- Timelords: How precisely can you get that heartbeat? This category is for those who prefer to see a lot of zeroes after the decimal point.
- Ridiculous: This category is for the least likely thing to do once per second. Accuracy is great, but absurdity is king here. Have Rube Goldberg dreams? Now you get to live them out.
- Clockwork: It’s hard to mention time without thinking of timepieces. This category is for the clockmakers among you. If your clock ticks at a rate of one hertz, and you’re willing to show us the mechanism, you’re in.
- Could Have Used a 555: We knew you were going to say it anyway, so we made it an honorable mention category. If your One Hertz project gets its timing from the venerable triple-five, it belongs here.
We love contests with silly constraints, because you all tend to rise to the challenge. At the same time, the door is wide open to your creativity. To enter, all you have to do is document your project over on Hackaday.io and pull down the “Contests” tab to One Hertz to enter. New projects are awesome, but if you’ve got an oldie-but-goodie, you can enter it as well. (Heck, maybe use this contest as your inspiration to spruce it up a bit?)
Time waits for no one, and you have until August 19th at 9:00 AM Pacific time to get your entry in. We can’t wait to see what you come up with.
I’m going to guess my Cesium atomic clock with its PPS output flashing a LED would be cheating?
I would say that’s a perfect entry! (And we’d love to see what’s up with your Cesium clock.)
Or my GPS module with 1 PPS output.
Write a bot to spam hackaday once/sec
Damn their post rate limit!
You can always write a bot to report random comment every second. It once gave us such a wonderful sithshow of people complaining about HaD going full-reddit with censorship.
https://hackaday.com/2024/10/12/if-you-cant-say-anything-nice/
Yes. That was “great”.
Thank the mystery bot writer.
This is how systems get debugged.
Want to know who did it?
The person who complained that automatically taking down posts based on randos clicking links was a bad idea.
The one that was likely ignored.
Wasn’t me.
I don’t complain, I snark.
Complainers have expectations.
I understand bandwidth ain’t free and fully endorse any links to advertisers content HackaDay chooses to post on their site.
Gives me something to snark about.
BTW about 1% of letters typed into this box appear after the cursor. Weird. Chrome.
Not complaining, snarking.
It’s JS, the root of all evil.
But why 1 second? It’s stupid that we’re still using time system based on 24 hours. It was originally developed in ancient Egypt for the sole purpose of making sure slaves work equally long no matter if it’s winter or summer. It has no meaning today, none, zip, zero, nada.
Nowdays it would be more reasonable to use base 10 timing system and to adjust “second” accordingly.
But why you are using some words which were developed ten thousands years ago? Btw the second was not invented in ancient Egypt. Take it easy.
Thanks for the heads up, we at hackaday will be updating this challenge to require participants to use your base 10 time system shortly. Sorry for not consulting you beforehand!
Please provide a 5000 word essay outlining everything which would have to be changed to accommodate this new unit of measure when we deprecate the second.
Please note, all units of measure related to time will need to be adjusted accordingly.
Write using the Decabet.
10 letters is enough, figure it out.
Lots of old time systems split the day into day/night.
Each of which would be divided into 12 hours.
Mechanical watches with CVTs!
Fun.
It mostly depends on how your language is constructed to accomodate real-life concepts. For example in most of the world speed is measured as km/h which is dependent on definition of seconds, but here in Russia we use км/ч (километр / час; kilometre / time) so over here it would not matter if time is measured in old egyptian units (second) or in decimal. 50 км/ч would still be 50 км/ч. It’s problem of european languages that they cannot deal with change in efficient manner.
🤣
talk to the French, they tried this
Tried.
It’s like they have a different word for everything!
No matter how slow and fake accented my English, they just looked at me.
Damn treacherous French, can’t trust ’em.
They didn’t just try, they used it for 12 years! They had a whole system of alternate months and leap days. The dish Lobster Thermidor is named after a play which is named after one of the French months. The English added the “and Spam” later.
12 Years? They should have tried it for 10
What? You’re still using cyclic time like a loser!? We have artificial lights, 24/7 stores, and corporations spread out over the entire earth. Cycles have no meaning today, none, zip, zero, nada.
We all need to change to Unix Time. Just a number counting forever upwards. No confusion between AM and PM, no time zones, just the elapsed time from the zero point of Jan 1st, 1970. Seconds are already standardized and many computer systems already use Unix time, so change-over will be smoother than most other systems.
I’ve not heard it called the zero point. Cool
What time does the show start?
1750996737
Sounds easy enough for a human that struggles to count change
I’m still lobbying to redirect all of humanity’s energy production into slowing down earth’s rotation enough to eliminate leap years. Once we have an integer number of days in a year, we can start worrying about metric time.
Leap seconds are not constant though, so we’d need to keep a steady operation going to speed up / slow down as needed to retain integer days.
Time to dig out the old MIT Lincoln Labs proposal to change the earth’s rotation with rockets installed at the equator.
Just executing screaming Lord Sitches plan to tow the British isles south to improve the weather would make a good start.
I bet once started, there would be a number of islands wanting to move towards the equator.
Perhaps even a continent.
For those of you interested in a more scientifically based measure of time, we could just use this system:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150506055228/http://www.timecube.com/index.html
Wow. Just wow. Thanks for the reminder of the diversity of human minds.
One does wonder what history of drug use is needed to produce something like that.
Lack thereof, most likely.
One time I was wondering what the length of a note is, seeing all music is based on notes and fractions thereof it made me wonder how long a single note is suppose to be historically.
So I looked it up and it turns out it was originally based on the heartbeat, which on average is 60 beats a minute, or in other words.. wait for it… 1 second. Arbitrary if you will, but oh so human.
Now you cats might view a second as odd, but is it?
The current system of 60 seconds/minute, 60 minutes/hour, hours/day is probably for the same reason we have 360 degrees in a circle – all are highly divisible numbers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number A day can then be divided into many equal parts with integer math: 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, etc. Having different ratios of second/hours/days is annoying though. Maybe a more sensible approach would have been 48 seconds/minute, 48 minutes/hour, 48 hours/day.
If you are old school and need help converting to these new “Hertz” units, here is a helpful chart:
https://www.kb6nu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/cps-hertz-chart.png
Equally useful if you’re one of these young’uns who don’t know what a cps is.
(Though the chart might not make sense if you have an insufficiently warped sense of humour.)
That chart made me laugh out loud! Thanks for the handy conversion aid.
Love that!
Beautiful.
On October 23, 1998, The Swatch Group, in collaboration with MIT, attempted to introduce a new form of timekeeping called “Internet Time,” or .beat time. In the spirit of the metric system, Swatch chose to divide the day into 1000 use-absolutely-anywhere units called “beats”. Each beat was equivalent to 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. The goal was to provide a uniform global time without the need for time zones, enabling easier scheduling of online activities. Alas, this idea did not catch on, and was quickly relegated to the dustbin of history.
Surely now is the time (pun intended) to get rid of the second and go for a fully base ten time system with 13 months in the year. None of those awkward 12’s, 24’s and 60’s any more. Not too late for the contest to be adjusted to the new units.
Why the obsession with base 10? Is it because we first learn to count on our hands in unary? What if we had 12 digits? What if we had 3 hands? It’s so arbitrary.
But almost all of us have a base 10 calculator somewhere on our body so no its not arbitrary
You have 10 digits of binary or 2 of base-5 as well.
Its more difficult (physically) but you have 10 digits of trinary and 8 of Base-4 that you could use instead.
So while it’s not entirely arbitrary, it is a little arbitrary.
Using two hands it’s trivial to count in base 60 like the babylonians https://ktwop.com/2017/08/19/counting-on-fingers-leads-naturally-also-to-base-60/
Stopped being arbitrary with the invention of the 0
https://youtu.be/pqGyUvZP0Zg
Mr Nobody, Mr. Christopher, joelagnel1 = one person, spaming the same crap with slight variation. I normally do not feed trolls, but damn, people like you make the internet slightly worse post by post…
Nope … you’re waaaaay off. I’ve no interest in unix time ….. an artificial construct based on an arbitrary date in 1970 and I’ve no idea what the f**k that Russian guy was going on about as it was using weird Russian letters which i dont understand. Check out the 13 month year … it’s a real thing and makes a lot more sense than the 12 month one we currently have.
Me on the other hand I use moments. People intuitively understand this unit – if I say “wait a moment” they know exactly how long should they wait and become impatient only if the moment have passed and they are still waiting. Moment of course is relative unit because time also is relative.
Look below at hypothetical discussion and notice how moment perfectly defines amount of time needed and how imprecise any other time unit would be.
“I’ve no idea what the f**k that Russian guy was going on about as it was using weird Russian letters which i dont understand.”
With all that passion for new time units you didn’t take a moment to “copypasteit” into some translator or AI chatbot?
I bet kids say “are we there yet” on long road trips at 1 hertz.
but the contest would need a nsfw category to enter them