Philadelphia Maker Faire Returns This Weekend

April 1, 2025 by Tom Nardi 1 Comment

While there’s still a vaguely robot-shaped hole in our heart from the loss of the New York World Maker Faire, we do take comfort in the fact that smaller Maker Faire events are still happening all over the world, and some of them have managed to gain quite a bit of momentum over the last few years.

If you’re in the Northeast US, the Philadelphia Maker Faire is your best bet to scratch that peculiar itch that only seems to respond to a healthy blend of art, technology, and the occasional flamethrower. It will be returning to the Cherry Street Pier this Sunday, April 6th, and pay-what-you-can tickets are on sale now. The organizers encourage each attendee to only pay what they are able to afford, with several options ranging from zero to the $25 supporter level.

A look through the exhibits shows the sort of eclectic mix one would expect from a Maker Faire. Where else could you practice picking locks, learn how biodiesel is made, see a display of kinetic sculptures, and stitch together a felt plush monster, all under one roof?

There’s even a few projects on the list that regular Hackaday readers may recognize, such as the ultra-portable Positron 3D printer and the DirectTV dish turned backyard radio telescope built by Professor James Aguirre.

We’ve made the trip to the Philadelphia Maker Faire several times since its inception in 2019, and although it had the misfortune of starting right before COVID-19 came along and screwed up all of our carefully laid plans, the event has managed to find a foothold and continues to grow each year.

Hybrid Mechanical Clock Shows It Both Ways

April 1, 2025 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

After seeing some of the interesting clock builds we’ve featured recently, [shiura] decided to throw their hat in the ring and sent us word about their incredible 3D printed hybrid clock that combines analog and digital styles.

While the multiple rotating rings might look complex from the front, the ingenious design behind the mechanism is powered by a single stepper motor. Its operation is well explained in the video below, but the short version is that each ring has a hook that pushes its neighboring ring over to the next digit once it has completed a full rotation. So the rightmost ring rotates freely through 0 to 9, then flips the 10-minute ring to the next number before starting its journey again. This does mean that the minute hand on the analog display makes a leap forward every 10 minutes rather than move smoothly, but we think its a reasonable compromise.

Beyond the 28BYJ-48 geared stepper motor and its driver board, the only other electronics in the build is a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32C6 microcontroller. The WiFi-enabled MCU is able to pull the current time down from the Internet, but keep it mind it takes quite awhile for the mechanism to move all the wheels; you can see the process happen at 60x speed in the video.

If you’re looking to recreate this beauty, the trickiest part of this whole build might be the 3D print itself, as the design appears to make considerable use of multi-material printing. While it’s not impossible to build the clock with a traditional printer, you’ll have to accept losing some surface detail on the face and performing some well-timed filament swaps.

[shirua] tells us they were inspired to send their timepiece in after seeing the post about the sliding clock that just went out earlier in the week.

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Software Hacks Unlock Cheap Spectrometer

March 31, 2025 by Tom Nardi 24 Comments

A spectrometer is one of those tools that many of us would love to have, but just can’t justify the price of. Sure there are some DIY options out there, but few of them have the convenience or capability of what’s on the commercial market. [Chris] from Zoid Technology recently found a portable spectrometer complete with Android application for just $150 USD on AliExpress which looked very promising…at least at first.

The problem is that the manufacturer, Torch Bearer, offers more expensive models of this spectrometer. In an effort to push users into those higher-priced models, arbitrary features such as data export are blocked in the software. [Chris] first thought he could get around this by reverse engineering the serial data coming from the device (interestingly, the spectrometer ships with a USB-to-serial adapter), but while he got some promising early results, he found that the actual spectrometer data was obfuscated — a graph of the results looked like stacks of LEGOs.

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Can Hackers Bring Jooki Back To Life?

March 30, 2025 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

Another day, another Internet-connected gadget that gets abandoned by its creators. This time it’s Jooki — a screen-free audio player that let kids listen to music and stories by placing specific tokens on top of it. Parents would use a smartphone application to program what each token would do, and that way even very young children could independently select what they wanted to hear.

Well, until the company went bankrupt and shutdown their servers down, anyway. Security researcher [nuit] wrote into share the impressive work they’ve done so far to identify flaws in the Jooki’s firmware, in the hopes that it will inspire others in the community to start poking around inside these devices. While there’s unfortunately not enough here to return these devices to a fully-functional state today, there’s several promising leads.

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Open Source Framework Aims To Keep Tidbyt Afloat

March 29, 2025 by Tom Nardi 10 Comments

We recently got a note in the tips line from [Tavis Gustafson], who is one of the developers of Tronbyt — a replacement firmware and self-hosted backend that breaks the Tidbyt smart display free from its cloud dependency. When they started the project, [Tavis] says the intent was simply to let privacy-minded users keep their data within the local network, which was itself a goal worthy enough to be featured on these pages.

But now that Tidbyt has been acquired by Modal and has announced they’ll no longer be producing new units, things have shifted slightly. While the press release says that the Tidbyt backend is going to stay up and running for existing customers, the writing is clearly on the wall. It’s now possible that the Tronbyt project will be able to keep these devices from ending up in landfills when the cloud service is inevitably switched off, especially if they can get the word out to existing users before then.

What’s that? You say you haven’t heard of Tidbyt? Well, truth be told, neither had we. So we did some digging, and this is where things get really interesting.

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Keep Tabs On Your Vehicle’s Needs With LubeLogger

March 28, 2025 by Tom Nardi 21 Comments

It doesn’t matter if its a Vespa or a Peterbilt truck — if you ignore the maintenance needs of your vehicle, you do so at your own peril. But it can be difficult enough to keep track of basic oil changes, to say nothing of keeping records on what parts were changed when. Instead of cramming more receipts into your glove box, maybe give LubeLogger a try.

This free and open source software tool is designed to make it easy for individuals to keep track of both the routine maintenance needs of their vehicles, as well as keep track of any previous or upcoming repairs and upgrades. Released under the MIT license, LubeLogger is primarily distributed as a Docker image that makes it easy to self-host the tool should you wish to keep your data safe at home rather than on somebody’s server out in the Wild West of the modern Internet.

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AqMood Is An Air Quality Monitor With An Attitude

March 27, 2025 by Tom Nardi No comments

You take your air quality seriously, so shouldn’t your monitoring hardware? If you’re breathing in nasty VOCs or dust, surely a little blinking LED isn’t enough to express your displeasure with the current situation. Luckily, [Tobias Stanzel] has created the AqMood to provide us with some much-needed anthropomorphic environmental data collection.

To be fair, the AqMood still does have its fair share of LEDs. In fact, one might even say it has several device’s worth of them — the thirteen addressable LEDs that are run along the inside of the 3D printed diffuser will definitely get your attention. They’re sectioned off in such a way that each segment of the diffuser can indicate a different condition for detected levels of particulates, VOCs, and CO2.

But what really makes this project stand out is the 1.8 inch LCD mounted under the LEDs. This display is used to show various emojis that correspond with the current conditions. Hopefully you’ll see a trio of smiley faces, but if you notice a bit of side-eye, it might be time to crack a window. If you’d like a bit more granular data its possible to switch this display over to a slightly more scientific mode of operation with bar graphs and exact figures…but where’s the fun in that?

[Tobias] has not only shared all the files that are necessary to build your own AqMood, he’s done a fantastic job of documenting each step of the build process. There’s even screenshots to help guide you along when it’s time to flash the firmware to the XIAO Seeed ESP32-S3 at the heart of the AqMood.

If you prefer your air quality monitoring devices be a little less ostentatious, IKEA offers up a few hackable models that might be more your speed.