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.
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.
Esperanto for time
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
Take one of those cheap recording postcards and a 555 to trigger it (maybe needs at transistor).
Record your kid’s “are we there yet”.
…
Profit
friend one mine build the mechnical 1herz watch years ago (dead second) so there is no news
a diesel car engine looks like a nice challenge (60rpm)
The 1 Hz challenge can have no winners. The best you can do is “Second” place! lmfao
Dad? Is that you?
If I slow down the rotation by 3,808,799, I will be at 1rpm, will that work?
https://hackaday.io/project/180517-38-million-rpm-1338mph-2153kph-243-million-gs
With so many arbitrary suggestions, why not convert the world to Minecraft time? Seems reasonably popular enough in current pop culture to qualify as a candidate. 😀
https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Daylight_cycle#Real_time_to_Minecraft_time
For the decimal fixated, I’m surprised no one has suggested going back to a 10 month year instead, e.g. like the Romans used before January and February were added under the Julian calendar. Just a different form of a lunar based calendar than the Egyptians and the Sumerians though but perhaps a way having one’s decimal time cake and keeping it too?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_calendar
Or perhaps one based on Venus, or a luni-solar calendar, e.g. the Mayans, or the vernal equinox driven Persian calendar? All are arbitrary choices based on astronomical bodies or events important to the cultures that created them; all of which require adjustments over time.
https://www.calendar.com/blog/different-calendars-humans-have-used-throughout-history/
But given the debate about some calendar choices being arbitrary choices…aren’t they all? For example, why Cesium-133 if only concerned with 1 second accuracy? Why not a different element, either now or in the future?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_radioactive_nuclides_by_half-life
Of course measuring any of them accurately will bring the argument full circle, leading to a never ending race to reduce the need for future corrections. Cesium-133 after all was defined in 1960 based upon a rounded value based on what could be accurately measured at the time but perhaps more importantly did not constitute a large enough change to cause errors is other derived or measured values. Given enough time, however, I’m sure some future someone will likely be ridiculing us for having chosen it as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesium_standard
Everything above is meant in good fun. So don’t take anything I’ve written too seriously, especially the Minecraft suggestion.