Simple NTP Clock Uses Custom RGB 7-Segment Displays

March 17, 2024 by Lewin Day 14 Comments

A great majority of hackers build a clock at some point. It’s a great way to get familiar with electronics and (often) microcontrollers, and you get to express some creativity along the way. Plus, you get something useful when you’re done! [Tadas Ustinavičius] recently trod this well-worn path and built a neat little NTP clock of their own.

The build uses an ESP 12F as the core of the operation. It’s charged with querying an NTP time server via its WiFi connection in order to maintain accurate timekeeping around the clock. For display, it drives a series of custom 7-segment displays that [Tadas] built using 3D-printed housings. They use WS2812B addressable LEDs and thus can display a rainbow of colors.

For initial configuration, the phone creates its own WiFi hotspot with a web interface for changing settings. Once configured, it connects to the Internet over WiFi to query an NTP server at regular intervals.

It’s a simple build that does a simple job well. Projects like these can be very valuable, as they teach you all kinds of useful skills. If you’ve been working on your own clock design, don’t hesitate to let us know. You can use a microcontroller, relays, or even a ball.

A Fully Automatic British Breakfast: Ready While You Sleep

March 17, 2024 by Maya Posch 35 Comments

What do you mean, the temporary breadboard setup went into production? (Credit: Gregulations, YouTube) — What do you mean, the temporary breadboard setup went into production? (Credit: [Gregulations], YouTube)

Among all the amazing technologies that were promised to us, there is one that is much more egregious than the lack of flying cars and real hovering hoverboards: the lack of fully automated breakfast-maker machines. Instead we find ourselves handling the same dumb appliances each morning as we make a healthy breakfast that we then have time to wolf down before rushing out of the door to still be a few minutes late for work. When [Greg] researched machines that could automatically prepare breakfast, he came up empty, which led him down the rabbit hole of the Autochef-9000.

Although often featured in movies – ranging from Back to the Future to Wallace and Gromit – the contraptions in those are rarely practical, and real-life attempts often suffer the problem of feature creep as they have to handle too many ingredients and operations. This is where [Greg] found redemption in the simplicity of a proper British breakfast: beans, toast, sausages (sossys), and eggs. Months of CAD, welding, breadboarding, and writing Arduino code later, he made a machine that can open a can of beans, toast bread, boil eggs, fry up sausages, and deposit it all on a plate, all ready for that morning breakfast first thing when you stroll into the kitchen.

Thanks to [htky] for the tip.

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Creating A Numbers Station Of Your Very Own

March 17, 2024 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Numbers stations are a weird phenomenon where odd voices read out long strings of numbers or random codewords to the confusion of the vast majority of the listening audience. If you’ve ever wanted to build one of your own, you could follow the example of [AudioWanderer].

NumberMumble, as it’s called, is a numbers station emulator. It doesn’t signal spy networks or reveal national secrets. Instead, it randomly plays audio samples using an Arduino, including characteristic bursts of white noise that make it sound more authentic. It relies on the Mozzi library to help with audio tasks, including generating white noise and playing back samples. It’s also kitted out with a filter knob for varying the tone. Audio output is via PWM.

If you want to confuse your neighbours with oddball audio, put this thing on a radio transmitter and get broadcasting. But don’t, because that’s illegal without the proper licenses or — you know — if you happen to be a real spy. Video after the break.

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The Most Famous Room In Rock-n-Roll You’ve Never Seen

March 17, 2024 by Jenny List 6 Comments

The study of audio technology has a lot of fascinating branches, and one or two of them even take the curious engineer not into electronics but into architecture. There’s the anechoic chamber with its complete lack of echo, but at the other end of the scale, there’s the echo chamber.

It’s normal in 2024 when searching for reverb to reach for a software plugin, but following the effect back through silicon, spring lines, and metal plates to the 1950s, we find an echo chamber as a real room with a speaker and a microphone placed in it. [Rick Beato] takes us into the echo chamber, starting with one of the few remaining originals and probably the one whose effect has been heard on the most highly-charting music, at the famous Abbey Road studio in London.

The video below the break is broadly in two parts, with the first concentrating on the Abbey Road chamber and the second showing how an empty room in a house can be used to make your own. It’s aimed at musicians rather than hardware hackers but we think it’s one of those moments of crossover that readers might find interesting. We were particularly curious about the tall ceramic tubes in the Abbey Road chamber, designed to further break up the sound waves for a greater depth of reverb.

The video shows how reverb can be achieved with just a room, but don’t worry if you’re space limited. A plate reverb needn’t break the bank. Or, grab a spring.

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diagram of the radicle node-to-node connectivity

Radicle: An Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative

March 16, 2024 by Dave Rowntree 26 Comments

The actions of certain large social networks have recently highlighted how a small number of people possess significant power over the masses and how this power is sometimes misused. Consequently, there has been a surge in the development of federated (or decentralized) services, such as Mastodon and Matrix. But what about development? While GitHub and similar services are less likely to be used for political manipulation, they are still centralized services with a common failure point. Radicle is an open-source, peer-to-peer collaboration stack built on top of Git but backed with public key cryptography as a standard and a gossip protocol to ensure widespread data sharing across the network and, thus, some fault tolerance.

Essentially, code and associated documentation are secured cryptographically with an identity. The Git protocol is used for actual data transfer from peer-to-peer, which means that updates are only sent as deltas, not complete copies, maximizing channel bandwidth efficiency. A custom gossip protocol is used for metadata transfer around the network of peers. The projects had a local-first ideology, with users running a full-stack node on their hardware and all features available, even offline, which is great for laptop users who move around locations with sporadic access to the internet.

Judging from their Zulipchat instance, this is a highly active space, so perhaps it is worth diving in and seeing if it floats your boat. Fancy getting onto the Fediverse, but only have a spare MS-DOS machine to try it on? We’ve got it covered. Want to use Git but not online? You need a private Git server. Finally, too much Git? How about Gitless?

Thanks [Anonymous] for the tip! No, that wasn’t lost on us :D

NASA Engineers Poke Voyager 1 And Receive Memory Dump

March 16, 2024 by Maya Posch 59 Comments

For months, there has been a rising fear that we may have to say farewell to the Voyager 1 spacecraft after it began to send back garbled data. Now, in a sudden twist, Voyager 1 sent back a read-out of the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) memory after a “poke” command, which both gives some hope that the spacecraft is in a better condition than feared while also allows engineers to dig through the returned memory read-out for clues. Although this data was not sent in the format that the FDS is supposed to use when it’s working correctly, it’s nevertheless readable.

It was previously suspected that the issue lay with the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), but has since been nailed down to the FDS itself. This comes after NASA engineers have been updating the firmware on both spacecraft to extend their lifespan, but it’s too early to consider this as a possible reason. Now, as a result of the “poke” instruction – which commands the computer to try different sequences in its firmware in case part of it has been corrupted – engineers can compare it to previous downloads to hopefully figure out the cause behind the FDS problems and a possible solution.

Inspired by this news of the decoded memory download, Nadia Drake – daughter of Frank Drake – wrote about how it affects not only the engineers who have worked on the Voyager mission for the past decades but also her own thoughts about the two Voyager spacecraft. Not only do they form a lasting reminder of her father and so many of his colleagues, but the silence that would follow if we can no longer communicate with these spacecraft would be profound. Still, this new hope is better than the earlier news about this plucky little spaceship.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.