Touch Lamp Tracks ISS With Style

July 8, 2025 by 8 Comments

In the comments of a recent article, the question came up as to where to find projects from the really smart kids the greybeards remember being in the 70s. In the case of [Will Dana] the answer is YouTube, where he’s done an excellent job of producing an ISS-tracking lamp, especially considering he’s younger than almost all of the station’s major components.*

There’s nothing ground-breaking here, and [Will] is honest enough to call out his inspiration in the video. Choosing to make a ground-track display with an off-the-shelf globe is a nice change from the pointing devices we’ve featured most recently. Inside the globe is a pair of stepper motors configured for alt/az control– which means the device must reset every orbit, since [Willis] didn’t have slip rings or a 360 degree stepper on hand.  A pair of magnets couples the motion system inside the globe to the the 3D printed ISS model (with a lovely paintjob thanks to [Willis’s girlfriend]– who may or may be from Canada, but did show up in the video to banish your doubts as to her existence), letting it slide magically across the surface. (Skip to the end of the embedded video for a timelapse of the globe in action.) The lamp portion is provided by some LEDs in the base, which are touch-activated thanks to some conductive tape inside the 3D printed base.

It’s all controlled by an ESP32, which fetches the ISS position with a NASA API. Hopefully it doesn’t go the way of the sighting website, but if it does there’s more than enough horsepower to calculate the position from orbital parameters, and we are confident [Will] can figure out the code for that. That should be pretty easy compared to the homebrew relay computer or the animatronic sorting hat we featured from him last year.

Our thanks to [Will] for the tip. The tip line is for hackers of all ages,  but we admit that it’s great to see what the new generation is up to.

*Only the Roll Out Solar Array, unless you only count on-orbit age, in which case the Nakua module would qualify as well.

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CIS-4 Is A Monkish Clock Inside A Ceiling Lamp

July 4, 2025 by 3 Comments

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.

Have you made or seen a cool clock? Send us a tip. We always have time for clocks. Continue reading “CIS-4 Is A Monkish Clock Inside A Ceiling Lamp” →

DIY Book Lamp Is A Different Take On The Illuminated Manuscript

July 1, 2025 by No comments

People have been coming up with clever ways to bring light to the darkness since we lived in caves, so it’s no surprise we still love finding interesting ways to illuminate our world. [Michael] designed a simple, but beautiful, book lamp that’s easy to assemble yourself.

This build really outshines its origins as an assembly of conductive tape, paper, resistors, LEDs, button cells, and a binder clip. With a printable template for the circuit, this project seems perfect for a makerspace workshop or school science project kids could take home with them. [Michael] walks us through assembling the project in a quick video and even has additional information available for working with conductive tape which makes it super approachable for the beginner.

The slider switch is particularly interesting as it allows you to only turn on the light when the book is open using just conductive tape and paper. We can think of a few other ways you could control this, but they quickly start increasing the part count which makes this particularly elegant. By changing the paper used for the shade or the cover material for the book, you can put a fun spin on the project to match any aesthetic.

If you want to build something a little more complex to light your world, how about a 3D printed Shoji lamp, a color-accurate therapy lamp, or a lamp that can tell you to get back to work.

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Smart Lamp Keeps Students On Track With Image Recognition

June 15, 2025 by 5 Comments

It’s a common enough problem: you’re hitting the books, your phone dings with a notification, and suddenly it’s three hours later. While you’ve done lots of scrolling, you didn’t do any studying. If only there were a quick, easy project that would keep an eye on you and provide a subtle nudge to get you off the phone. [Makestreme] has that project, an AI study lamp that shifts from warm white to an angry red to remind students to get back to work. See it in action in the demo video below.

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A Brain Transplant For A Philips Smart Lamp

May 14, 2025 by 25 Comments

As the saying goes, modern problems require modern solutions. When the modern problem is that your smart light is being hijacked by the neighbors, [Wejn]’s modern solution is to reverse engineer and replace the mainboard.

The light in question is a Phillips Hue Ambiance, and [Wejn]’s excellently-documented six part series takes us through the process of creating a replacement light driver. It’s a good read, including reverse-engineering the PWM functions to get the lights to dim exactly like stock, and a dive into the Zigbee protocol so his rebuild light could still talk to the Philips Hue hub. The firmware [Wejn] wrote for the ESP32C6 he chose to use for this project is on GitHub, with the PCB in a second repo.

We want to applaud [Wejn] for his excellent documentation and open-sourcing (the firmware and PCB are under GPL v3). Not only do we get enough information to replicate this project perfectly if we so choose, but by writing out his design process, [Wejn] gives everyone reading a good head start in doing something similar with other hardware. Even if you’re scratching your head wondering why a light switch isn’t good enough anjymore, you have to appreciate what [Wejn] is offering the community.

We’ve covered domestic brain transplants in the past — which is easier in this sort of light than the close confines of a smart bulb. If you’re still wondering why not just use a light switch, perhaps you’d rather hack the light to run doom instead.

Before you go, can we just take a moment to appreciate how bizarre the world has become that we have a DOOM-capable computer to run fancy light fixture? If you’re using what might have been a decent workstation in days of yore to perform a painfully mundane task, let us know on the tips line.

Pried open clamp meter on blue desk

Frnisi DMC-100: A Clamp Meter Worth Cracking Open

May 4, 2025 by 17 Comments

Not all clamp meters are the same, and this video shows just that. In a recent teardown by [Kerry Wong], the new Fnirsi DMC-100 proves that affordable doesn’t mean boring. This 10,000-count clamp meter strays from the classic rotary dial in favour of a fully button-based interface – a choice that’s got sparks flying in the comments. And yes, it even auto-resumes its last function after reboot, like it knows you’re busy frying other fish.

What sets this meter apart isn’t just its snappy interface or surprisingly nice gold-tipped probes. It’s the layered UX – a hackable interface where short- and long-presses unlock hidden menus, memory functions, and even a graphing mode. A proper “hold-my-beer” moment comes when you discover it can split-display voltage and current and calculate real-time power (albeit with a minor asterisk: apparent power only, no power factor). Despite a few quirks, like accidentally triggering the flashlight when squeezing the jaw, it holds up well in accuracy tests. Even at higher currents where budget meters usually wobble.

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Hacking A Cheap Rechargeable Lamp With Non-Standard USB-C Connector

April 12, 2025 by 40 Comments

Recently [Dillan Stock] bought a $17 ‘mushroom’ lamp from his local Kmart that listed ‘USB-C rechargeable’ as one of its features. Unfortunately while this is technically true, there’s a pretty major asterisk. This Inaya-branded lamp comes with a USB-C cable with a rather prominent label attached to it that tells you that this lamp requires that specific cable. After trying with a regular USB-C cable, [Dillan] indeed confirmed that the lamp does not charge from a standard USB-C cable. So he did what any reasonable person would do: he bought a second unit and set about to hacking it.

The "USB C" cable that comes with the Inaya Portable Rechargeable Lamp. (Credit: The Stock Pot, YouTube)
The “USB C” cable that comes with the Inaya Portable Rechargeable Lamp. (Credit: The Stock Pot, YouTube)

[Dillan] also dug more into what’s so unusual about this cable and the connector inside the lamp. As it turns out, while GND & VCC are connected as normal, the two data lines (D+, D-) are also connected to VCC. Presumably on the lamp side this is the expected configuration, while using a regular USB-C cable causes issues. Vice versa, this cable’s configuration may actually be harmful to compliant USB-C devices, though [Dillan] did not try this.

With the second unit in hand, he started hacking in earnest. The changes include a regular USB-C port for charging, an ESP32 board with integrated battery charger for the 18650 Li-ion cell of the lamp, and an N-channel MOSFET to switch the power to the lamp’s LED. He’s made the full plans and schematics available on his website.

With all of the raw power from the ESP32 available, the two lamps got integrated into the Home Assistant network which enables features such as turning the lamps on when the alarm goes off in the morning. All of this took about $7 in parts and a few hours of work.

Although we commend [Dillan] on hacking his device instead of just returning it to the store, it’s worrying that apparently there’s now a flood of ‘USB C-powered’ devices out there that come with non-compliant cables. It brings back fond memories of hunting down proprietary charging cables, which was the issue that USB power was supposed to fix.

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