If you’re a regular GitHub user you’ll be familiar with the website’s graphical calendar display of activity as a grid. For some of you it will show a hive of activity, while for others it will be a bit spotty. If you’re proud of your graph though, you’ll want to show it off to the world, and that’s where [HarryHighPants]’ Git Contributions E-Ink Display comes in. It’s a small desktop appliance with a persistent display, that shows the current version of your GitHub graph.
At its heart is an all-in-one board with the display and an ESP32 on the back, with a small Li-Po cell. It’s all put in a smart 3D printed case. The software is the real trick, with a handy web interface from which you can configure your GitHub details.
It’s a simple enough project, but it joins a growing collection which use an ESP32 as a static information display. The chip is capable of more though, as shown by this much more configurable device.
It’s always clock time at Hackaday, and this time we have an interesting hack of a clock by [danjovic]– the CIS4, a Cistercian digital clock.
The Cistertians, in case you weren’t paying close attention to European holy orders during the 13th to 15th centuries were the group of monks you’d most likely have found us in. They were the hackers of the middle ages, establishing monestaries across western Europe that were chock full of hacks– including their own numeral system. Cistercian numerals were much more efficient (in spaces and penstrokes) than the Roman numerals they replaced, and even the “Arabic” numerals that replaced them. A single glyph could record anything from 1 to 9,999. (The Europeans hadn’t yet cottoned on to zero.)
The Cistertian glyphs reduced to a 4×4 display.
Depending how you wanted to count time, a single glyph could be used; it looks like [danjovic] is using the thousands and hundreds portions of the glyph for hours and the tens and ones for minutes. This is all accomplished with a 4×4 neopixel matrix, run by an Attiny85 Digispark with a DS3231 RTC module keeping time. A slight simplification is required to reduce the glyphs to 4×4, but we don’t think the monks would mind. For those of us who don’t wear tonsures, an easy read mode scrolls the time in Arabic numerals. (Which still aren’t super easy,with only 4×4 LEDs to display them. See the demo video embedded below and try and guess the time.)
One nice quality of life feature is an LDR for ambient light detection, to automatically adjust the neopixels’ brightness. The hackiest part, which we thought was really clever, is the enclosure: it’s a cheap LED ceiling light. This provides a diffuser, housing and mounting hardware with decent design for no effort. A 3D-printed mask sits between the diffuser and the LEDs and doubles as a PCB holder. All very elegant.
[danjovic] did include a buzzer in the design, but does say if its been programed to sound off for matins, nones and vespers. In any case, at least it’s easier to read than his binary-coded-octal clock that we featured a few years back. This isn’t our first look at this number system,so evidently people can read them with practice.
Gaming on a Nintendo DS can bring back great memories of long car trips from the past. But looking back, we remember wishing to play more than the DS could ever hope to handle. [fami] looks into the SuperCard DSTWO in her recent video, a solution to our past sorrows.
Able to play anything from the very games designed for the DS to emulated PS1 games, the DSTWO is more than capable of surpassing the abilities of the DS itself. More impressively, all games are run directly from the cartridge itself rather than on the DS’s hardware. While this emulated console within a handheld is impressive, it is far from simple to get running.
The DSTWO runs with an Ingenic JZ4732 as the CPU, completely different from any native architecture of the DS. Pair this with the unhelpful SDK made for the cartridge, and the aging hardware is held together by the community development behind any improvements. This is aided by the CPU similarities of another widely modded game console, the Dingoo A320.
When not having a fit, and after going through hours of troubleshooting, you might find the DSTWO running a game of SimCity 2000 or even Spyro the Dragon inside a DS. Even with the difficulties of use, the fact that these games run at all is impressive. If you want to try the DSTWO emulation yourself, check out the forums.
This is far from the only example of extreme care going into emulation. Here at Hackaday, we have covered similarly impressive projects such as this completely DIY handheld made for any retro game emulation you throw at it.
EFI from cables is something every ham loves to hate. What if you modulated, that, though, using an ordinary cable as an antenna? If you used something ubiquitous like a video cable, you might have a very interesting exploit– which is exactly what [Xieyang Sun] and their colleagues have done withTEMPEST-LoRa, a technique to encode LoRa packets into video files.
The concept is pretty simple: a specially-constructed video file contains information to be broadcast via LoRa– the graphics card and the video cable serve as the Tx, and the Rx is any LoRa module. Either VGA or HDMI cables can be used, though the images to create the LoRa signal are obviously going to differ in each case. The only restriction is that the display resolution must be 1080×1920@60Hz, and the video has to play fullscreen. Fullscreen video might make this technique easy to spot if used in an exploit, but on the other hand, the display does not have to be turned on at the time of transmission. If employed by blackhats, one imagines syncing this to power management so the video plays whenever the screen blanks.
This image sends LoRa. Credit: TEMPEST-LoRa
According to the pre-print, a maximum transmission distance of 81.7m was achieved, and at 21.6 kbps. That’s not blazing fast, sure, but transmission out of a totally air-gapped machine even at dialup speeds is impressive. Code is on the GitHub under an MIT license, though [Xieyang Sun] and the team are white hats, so they point out that it’s provided for academic use.There is a demo video, but as it is on bilbili we don’t have an easy way to embed it. The work has been accepted to the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (2025), so if you’re at the event in Taiwan be sure to check it out.
Thanks to [Xieyang Sun] for the tip! We’ll be checking the tips line for word from you, just as soon as we finish wrapping ferrites around all our cables.
[Ryan] of [Fat Lip Collective] has been on a streak of using 3D printing for his car mod projects. From spark plug adapters to exhaust pipes to dash panels, his CAD skills and additive manufacturing tech have played a number of roles in his process.
Most recently, [Ryan] has embarked on a mission to equip an ’80s-era Toyota KE70 Corolla with a turbo engine. The main question there being how to fit the engine back into the car once he’s inserted a salvaged turbo into the exhaust line.
There is a non-trivial amount of stuff that needs to be packed in with the rest of the engine and finding a working configuration that doesn’t get in the way of anything else requires some trial and error. Furthermore, the alignment of the many twisting and turning pieces of schedule 40 pipe that will direct gasses where they need to go needs to be pretty precise.
Juggling all of this would be tedious, time consuming, and error prone if it were not for [Ryan’s] mighty 3D printer. He printed a set of the different elbows and reducers modeled on the schedule 40 pipe that he would likely be using. He added degree markers for easy reference later and flat sections at the ends of each piece so they could be bolted to each other. With this kit of parts in hand, he was able to mock up different arrangements, re-configuring them as he considered the position of other nearby components.
Some people can’t be bothered to read the analog face of a traditional clock. Some people cannot stand the low frequency “hum” of mains current. If you are in either of those categories, you probably don’t want to make [Christian]’s handsome and well-documented electromechanical CMOS clock.
As you might guess from the name, the clock uses CMOS logic, based around a 12 bit counter, to provide the divider circuits 24 (daily) and 60 (minutes and seconds). Specifically, the circuits are based around a CD4040 twelve-bit adder. Those signals go through DAC circuits based around DAC0808 chips to drive some very nice coil meters for hours and minutes in lieu of the traditional clock face. Taking the time to make a CMOS clock circuit from adder chips is respectable enough in this era of instant-gratification through micro-controllers, and we dig the blinkenlights built into the circuits, but it’s what is being added that is where things get really interesting.
[Christian] had the bright idea that a stepper motor could be driven via the mains, simply by using a capacitor to offset the waveforms on the coils by 90 degrees. With a 200-step stepper motor, [Christian] gets one revolution per second out of the 50 Hz grid; this generates the seconds signal for his CMOS chips by the simple expedient of a 3D printed arm and a light barrier. Once per second, the light is interrupted by the spinning arm, creating a pulse for the clock circuits to add up. Check it out in action in the demo video below.
This project also seems to have the distinction of being the first project submitted to our One Hertz Challenge. It’s not just for clocks, but keep an eye on your clock because entries are only open until 9:00 AM Pacific time on August 19th.
It’s Independence Day here in the USA, but if you’re not a fan of fireworks and hot dogs, Elliot and Dan’s rundown of the best hacks of the week is certainly something to celebrate. Rest easy, because nothing exploded, not even the pneumatic standing desk that [Matthias] tore into, nor the electroplated 3D prints that [H3NDRIK] took a blowtorch to. We both really loved the Ploopiest knob you’ve ever seen, which would be even Ploopier in anodized aluminum, as well as an automatic book scanner that takes its job very seriously. We looked into the mysteries of the Smith chart, another couple of fantastic student projects out of Cornell, the pros and cons of service loops, and what happened when the lights went out in Spain last Spring. And what does Janet Jackson have against laptops anyway?
