A clock with an e-paper display in a 3D-printed case

Low Power Challenge: E-Paper Shelf Label Becomes Ultra-Frugal Clock

February 24, 2023 by Robin Kearey 12 Comments

Over the past two decades, e-paper has evolved from an exotic and expensive display technology to something cheap enough to be used for supermarket price tags. While such electronic shelf labels are now easy to find, actually re-using them is often tricky due to a lack of documentation. Luckily, [Aaron Christophel] has managed to reverse engineer many types of shelf labels, and he’s demonstrated the results by turning one into an ultra-low-power clock called Triink. It’s based on a 128×296 pixel e-ink display paired with an nRF52832 BlueTooth Low-Energy SoC and uses just 65 micro-amperes on average: low enough to keep it running for more than a year on a single battery charge.

A PCB for an e-ink clock — Power on the left, e-ink on the right: the custom PCB is clever and compact, too

The clock is housed in an enclosure that’s simple but effective: a 3D-printed triangular prism with a slot for the screen and space for the 18650 lithium battery. One side can be opened to access the internal components, although that’s really only needed to charge the battery. You can see how cleverly everything snaps together in the video embedded below. Continue reading “Low Power Challenge: E-Paper Shelf Label Becomes Ultra-Frugal Clock” →

A round clock with a color-coded face, with its name "Pingo" across it, together with a 3D animated mouse

Pingo Is An Analog Clock That Uses Colors Instead Of Hands

February 20, 2023 by Robin Kearey 8 Comments

The purpose of a clock is to show the time, obviously. But if you’ve followed Hackaday for some time, you’ll know there are about a million different ways of achieving this. [illusionmanager] added yet another method in his Pingo Color Clock, which, as the name suggests, uses color as the main indicator.

The clock’s face is divided into three concentric circular zones. The zone at the center shows the hours, while the outer ring indicates the minutes. Both change their color such that they match the zone in between, which always shows a complete rainbow, at the desired location. In the picture above for example, the magenta inner circle matches the rainbow at the 10 o’clock position, while the yellow outer circle matches it at 10 minutes past the hour, meaning it’s currently 10:10.

The rainbow ring is also moving however, and by adjusting its rotation through time you can get some interesting effects. [illusionmanager] programmed it in such a way that the outer ring is always yellow during the day, purple at night, and red at sunrise and sunset. The overall brightness is also adjusted to a day/night schedule.

As complex as the clock’s appearance may be, inside it’s quite a simple design. Nine concentric circular LED strips are driven by an ESP8266, which retrieves the time and sunrise information through its WiFi connection. A piece of translucent white acrylic acts as a diffuser, while a 3D-printed enclosure holds everything together.

Encoding the time using different colors of light has been done before in various different ways, and while we haven’t seen Pingo in real life, we believe it should be somewhat easier to read than most of those examples. It might actually form a nice complement to a recent analog LED ring clock.

Continue reading “Pingo Is An Analog Clock That Uses Colors Instead Of Hands” →

Generating PAL Video With A Heavily Overclocked Pi Pico

January 24, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 19 Comments

Barely a week goes by without another hack blessing the RP2040 with a further interfacing superpower. This time it’s the turn of the humble PAL standard composite video interface. As many of us of at least a certain vintage will be familiar with, the Phase Alternate Line (PAL to friends) standard was used mainly in Europe (not France, they used SECAM like Russia, China, and co) and Australasia, and is a little different from the much earlier NTSC standard those in the US may fondly recollect. Anyway, [Fred] stresses that this hack isn’t for the faint-hearted, as the RP2040 needs one heck of an overclock (up to 312 MHz, some 241% over stock) to be able to pull off the needed amount of processing grunt. This is much more than yet another PIO hack.

The dual cores of the RP2040 are really being pushed here. The software is split into high and low-level functions, with the first core running rendering the various still images and video demos into a framebuffer. The second core runs in parallel and deals with all the nitty-gritty of formatting the frame buffer into a PAL-encoded signal, which is then sucked out by the DMA and pushed to the outside world via the PIO. There may be a few opportunities for speeding the code up even more, but [Fred] has clearly already done a huge amount of work there, just to get it working at all. The PIO code itself is very simple but is instructive as a good example of how to use multiple chained DMA channels to push data through the PIO at the fastest possible rate.

Continue reading “Generating PAL Video With A Heavily Overclocked Pi Pico” →

The Tale Of The Final EVGA GPU Overclocking Record

January 23, 2023 by Dave Rowntree 12 Comments

It’s not news that EVGA is getting out of the GPU card game, after a ‘little falling out’ with Nvidia. It’s sad news nonetheless, as this enthusiastic band of hardware hackers has a solid following in certain overclocking and custom PC circles. The Games Nexus gang decided to fly over to meet up with the EVGA team in Zhonghe, Taiwan, and follow them around a bit as they tried for one last overclocking record on the latest (unreleased, GTX4090-based) GPU card. As you will note early on in the video, things didn’t go smoothly, with their hand-lapped GPU burning out the PCB after a small setup error. Continue reading “The Tale Of The Final EVGA GPU Overclocking Record” →

Organic Fibonacci Clock Is All About The Spiral

January 12, 2023 by Lewin Day 5 Comments

Whether you’re a fan of compelling Tool songs, or merely appreciate mathematical beauty, you might be into the spirals defined by the Fibonacci sequence. [RuddK5] used the Fibonacci curve as the inspiration for this fun clock build.

The intention of the clock is not to display the exact time, but to give a more organic feel of time, via a rough representation of minutes and hours. A strip of addressable LEDs is charged with display duty. The description is vague, but it appears that the 24 LEDs light up over time to show the amount of the day that has already passed by. The LEDs are wound up in the shape of a Fibonacci spiral with the help of a 3D printed case, and is run via a Wemos D1 microcontroller board.

It’s a fun build, and one that we can imagine would scale beautifully into a larger wall-hanging clock design if so desired. It at once could display the time, without making it immediately obvious, gradually shifting the lighting display as the day goes on.

We’ve seen other clocks rely on the mathematics of Fibonacci before, too. If you’ve cooked up your own fun clock build, don’t hesitate to let us know!

Two hands holding a 3d printed alarm clock with an LCD display, snooze button and knob on top

IO Connected Radio Alarm Clock

December 19, 2022 by Abe Connelly 3 Comments

[CoreWeaver] creates an alarm clock that includes features one might expect in such a project, including an FM radio, snooze button inputs and a display, but goes beyond the basic functionality to include temperature sensing and a PC connection, opening the way for customizable functionality.

An Atmega328 is used for the main microcontroller which communicates via I2C both to a DS1307 real time clock (RTC) and a TEA5767 FM module. The main power comes from a 9V power source with an LM317 and LM7805 linear regulators providing a 3.3V and 5V power rail, respectively. Most of the electronics are powered using 5V except for the TEA5767, which is powered from the 3.3V rail and has its I2C communication levels shifted from 5V to 3.3V. The audio output of the TEA5767 feeds directly into the TDA7052 audio amplifier to drive the speakers. Since the RTC has an auxiliary coin cell battery for power, the alarm clock can keep accurate time even when not plugged in. Continue reading “IO Connected Radio Alarm Clock” →

An alarm clock with a Nixie tube display

Retro Alarm Clock With Nixies Is Thoroughly Modern Inside

December 10, 2022 by Robin Kearey 12 Comments

We feature a lot of clocks here at Hackaday, but alarm clocks seem to be less popular for some reason. Maybe that’s because no-one enjoys being woken up in the morning, or simply because everyone uses their smartphone for that purpose already. In any case, we’re delighted to bring you [Manuel Tosone]’s beautiful Nixie tube alarm clock that cleverly combines modern and classic technologies in a single package.

The clock and alarm functionalities are implemented by a PIC24 microcontroller on a custom mainboard. It keeps track of time through its real-time clock with battery backup, and plays a song from an SD card when it’s time to wake up. A 2 x 3 W class D audio amplifier plus a pair of stereo speakers should be able to wake even the heaviest sleepers.

Of course, the real party piece is the clock’s display: four IN-4 Nixie tubes show the time, with neon tubes indicating the day of the week. The 180 V needed for the Nixies is generated by an MC34063A-based boost converter, which also powers the neon tubes.

Instead of using the standard current-limiting resistor for each Nixie tube, [Manuel] designed an array of transistor-based current sources: this enables linear control of the tubes’ brightness, and should keep the amount of light constant even as the tubes age. The individual segments are switched by SN75468 Darlington arrays, with no need for those hard-to-find SN74141 drivers.

The mainboard and the display are housed inside a 3D-printed case that mimics the style of 1980s digital alarm clocks, but with a nice 1970s twist courtesy of those Nixie tubes. [Manuel]’s GitHub page has all the schematics as well as extensive documentation describing the circuit’s operation — an excellent resource if you’re planning to build a Nixie project yourself. If Nixies aren’t your thing, you can also make an alarm clock with a VFD tube, or even roll your own luminous analog dial.

Continue reading “Retro Alarm Clock With Nixies Is Thoroughly Modern Inside” →