Hackaday Podcast Episode 273: A Tube Snoot, Dynamic Button Blobs, And Tokamaks Aren’t Whack

This week, it was Kristina’s turn in the hot seat with Editor-in-Chief Elliot Williams. First up in the news: Germany’s solar and wind power generation have resulted in excess energy, which some people think is bad. In Hackaday news, the entries in the 2024 Business Card Challenge are really stacking up.

Then it’s on to What’s That Sound, which Kristina provided this week and managed to stump Elliot. Can you get it? Can you figure it out? Can you guess what’s making that sound? If you can, and your number comes up, you get a special Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Then it’s on to the hacks, beginning with an improved spectrometer that wasn’t easy, and a rotary phone kitchen timer that kind of was. We’ll talk about badges turned invitations, reinventing rotary switches, and dynamic button blobs. Finally, we get the lowdown on the state of nuclear fusion, and posit why chatting online isn’t what it used to be.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download and savor at your leisure.

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A PCB business card with a built-in 4x4 tic-tac-toe game on the back.

2024 Business Card Contest: A Game For Two

If you want to make a good first impression on someone, it seems like the longer you can keep them talking, the better. After all, if they want to keep talking, that’s a pretty good sign that even if you don’t become business partners, you might end up friends. What better way to make an acquaintance than over a friendly game of tic-tac-toe?

This one will probably take them by surprise, being a 4×4 matrix rather than the usual 3×3, but that just makes it more interesting. The front of the card has all the usual details, and the back is a field of LEDs and micro switches. Instead of using X and O, [Edison Science Corner] is using colors — green for player one, and red for player two. Since playing requires the taking of turns, the microcontroller lights up green and red with alternating single-button presses.

Speaking of, the brains of this operation is an ATMega328P-AU programmed with Arduino. If you’d like to make your own tic-tac-toe business card, the schematic, BOM, and code are all available. Be sure to check out the build and demo video after the break.

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Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Auto Harp Typewriter

An extremely large split keyboard with giant knobs, and pedals underneath the desk.
Image by [crazymittens-r] via reddit
Where do I even begin with this one? Let’s start with the reasoning behind this giant beast’s existence, and that is medical necessity. [crazymittens-r] needed something that would let them keep working, and after many hours and many versions, this is the current iteration of their ArcBoard, which looks like it could control a spaceship.

You can read all about this version on GitHub, but here’s the gist — you’re looking at a split keyboard with dual macro pads, rotary encoders, and a built-in trackball. And oh yeah, there are pedals, too. Those are a whole other thing.

In this revision, [crazymittens-4] said no to hand-wiring and instead went with custom flexible PCBs. The encoders now have push-button LED screens, and overall, there are “more LEDs than QMK can handle”. There’s even a secret keyboard within the keyboard! I can’t express how much I want to put my hands on this thing.

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Linear LED clock displaying the time using different-colored triangles.

Linear LED Clock Looks Decidedly Vintage

We just love a good clock around here, and something about those triangles gives this linear LED clock a deliciously mid-century vibe. If you’ve read these pages for any length of time, you know that [andrei.erdei] loves clocks as much as we do, and is always coming up with interesting ways of displaying the passage of time.

Two upward-facing triangles sandwich one downward-facing triangle, and they are lighting up as follows: right, left, middle.This one is a remix of some other linear RGB clocks, but the result is distinctly [andrei.erdei]’s style. There’s nothing crazy going on under the hood here — it’s essentially a Wemos D1 mini running a strip of RGBs, and the microcontroller connects to a Wi-Fi router to get the time from a server. The magic is in the programming and the way the clock is read.

The brief but thorough demo video after the break does a much better job of explaining the display by showing various times of the day, but we’ll give it a shot. For one thing, it uses 24-hour time exclusively. There are four groups of triangles; yellow, red, green, and blue which correspond to tens and units of hours, and tens and units of minutes.

The triangles light up in groups of three in the order depicted in the animation. At midnight, none of the triangles are lit up. Again, it’s best explained in the video, looking at various times of day.  Plus you can see the neat-o startup animation.

Are you more into sound than blinkenlights? Then this customizable bird clock may be for you.

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A 3D-printed clock that uses flaps for the digits that get rotated.

Non-Split-Flap Clock Does It With Fewer Flaps

As cool as split-flap clocks and displays are, they do have a few disadvantages. The mechanism sticks out on the side, and the whole thing relies on gravity. Some people don’t care for the visual split in the middle of each digit that comes as a result. And their cousins, the Numechron clocks? Those wheels, especially the hours wheel, are really big compared to the size of what they display, so the clock housings are huge by comparison.

[shiura] decided to re-invent the digital display and came up with this extremely cool spinning flap mechanism that uses a lip to flip each flap after it is shown. Thanks to this design, only half the number of flaps are needed. Not only is the face of the clock able to be much larger compared to the overall size of the thing, the whole unit is quite shallow. Plus, [shiura] tilted the display 15° for better visibility.

If you want to build one of these for yourself, [shiura] has all the STLs available and some pretty great instructions. Besides the printed parts, you don’t need much more than the microcontroller of your choice and a stepper motor. Check out the demo/build video after the break, and stick around for the assembly video.

Don’t mind the visual split in the numbers? Check out this split-flap clock that uses a bunch of magnets.

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A Google Pixel 7 with a detachable Bluetooth keyboard.

BlueBerry Is A Smartphone-Agnostic Keyboard Firmware

If you’re anything like us, you really, really miss having a physical keyboard on your phone. Well, cry no more, because [Joe LiTrenta] has made it possible for any modern smartphone whatsoever to have a detachable, physical keyboard and mouse at the ready. [Joe] calls this creation the BlueBerry.

A couple of metal plates and a mag-safe pop socket connect a Bluetooth keyboard to a Google Pixel 7. The keyboard/mouse combo in question is a little BlackBerry Bluetooth number from ZitaoTech which is available on Tindie, ready to go in a 3D printed case. What [Joe] has done is to create a custom ZMK-based firmware that allows the keyboard be device-agnostic.

In order to easily mount the keyboard to the phone and make it detachable, [Joe] used adhesive-backed metal mounting plates on both the phone and the keyboard, and a mag-safe pop socket to connect the two. The firmware makes use of layers so everything is easily accessible.

Check out the demo video after the break, which shows the board connected to a Google Pixel 7. It makes the phone comically long, but having a physical keyboard again is serious business, so who’s laughing now? We’d love to see a keyboard that attaches to the broad side of the phone, so someone get on that. Please?

Do you have a PinePhone? There’s an extremely cute keyboard for that.

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Kaffa Roastery founder Svante Hampf shows a bag of their AI-conic coffee blend.

AI-Created Coffee Blend Isn’t Terrible

Weren’t we just talking about coffee-based sacrilege the other day? Here’s something to make the single-origin bean snobs chew their espresso cups: an artisan roastery in Helsinki is offering a coffee blend created by artificial intelligence called AI-conic. The idea, of course, is that technology will lighten the workload needed to produce coffee.

This is an interesting development because Finland consumes the most coffee in the world, according to the International Coffee Organization. Coffee roasting is a highly-valued traditional artisan profession there, so it stands to reason that they might turn to technology for help.

Just like with scotch whisky, there’s nothing wrong with coffee blends outright. Bean blends are good for consistency, when you want every cup to taste pretty much exactly the same. Single-origin beans, though, are traceable to one location, and as a result, they usually have a distinct flavor based on the climate they’re grown in.

If you’re new to coffee, blends are a nice, safe way to start out. And, interestingly, the AI chose to make the blend out of four different types of beans instead of the usual two or three, despite being tasked with creating a blend that would suit the palates of coffee enthusiasts. But the coffee experts agreed that the AI blend was “perfect” and needed no human intervention. We probably won’t be getting to Finland anytime soon, so if you try it, let us know how it tastes!

Do you like cold brew? How would you like to be able to brew some in just three minutes?