Hackaday Podcast Episode 305: Caustic Clocks, Practice Bones, And Brick Layers

January 24, 2025 by Kristina Panos 2 Comments

This week, Hackaday’s Elliot Williams and Kristina Panos joined forces and Wonder-Twin rings to bring you the latest news, mystery sound, and of course, a big bunch of hacks from the previous week.

First up in the news: Big boo to Bambu Labs, who have tried to clarify their new authentication scheme and probably only dug themselves in deeper with their customers.

On What’s That Sound, Kristina didn’t get close at all, but at least had a guess this time. Do know what it is? Let us know, and if you’re right and your number comes up, you can keep warm in a limited edition Hackaday Podcast t-shirt.

Then it’s on to the hacks and such beginning with a rather nice reverse-engineering of the Yamaha PRS-E433 keyboard, which led to a slice of Bad Apple playing on the tiny screen.

After that, we take a look at an NES musical instrument, how to make wires explode with energy, and a really cool space mouse that uses flexures. Finally, we talk about a piece of forgotten Internet history, and a whole bunch of keyboards.

Check out the links below if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3 and savor at your leisure.

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A light-up clock displays the day of the week.

What Day Is It Again? Check The Clock

January 22, 2025 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

If you’re lucky enough to work from home, you’ll soon find that it presents its own set of challenges, mostly related to work/life balance. It can get so bad that you don’t know what day of the week it is. Really. Ask us how we know.

Rather than miss a meeting (or a day off), prolific hacker [Arnov Sharma] created this day of the week clock. It uses a customized LED driver board with seven sets of three LEDs, each driven by a MOSFET. Each MOSFET is controlled by a DFRobot Mini Beetle ESP32-C3. It runs on a 2200 mAh, 3.7 V lithium-ion battery.

While this is mostly PCBs, there are three printed parts that turn it into a displayable object. We really like the look of this clock — it has just the right amount of pizazz to it and reminds us of a and old movie marquee. Be sure to check out the great build instructions.

We love a good clock around here. In case you missed it, here is the latest from [Moritz v. Sivers] that uses a caustic lens to display the time.

Innovative Clock Uses Printed Caustic Lens

January 20, 2025 by Lewin Day 13 Comments

Hackers and makers have built just about every kind of clock under the sun. Digital, analog, seven-segment, mechanical seven-segment, binary, ternary, hexadecimal… you name it. It’s been done. You really have to try to find something that shocks us… something we haven’t seen before. [Moritz v. Sivers] has done just that.

Meet the Caustic Clock. It’s based on the innovative Hollow Clock from [shiura]. It displays time with an hour hand and a minute hand, and that’s all so conventional. But what really caught our eye was the manner in which its dial works. It uses caustics to display the clock dial on a wall as light shines through it.

If you’ve ever seen sunlight reflect through a glass, or the dancing patterns in an outdoor swimming pool, you’ve seen caustics at play. Caustics are the bright patterns we see projected through a transparent object, and if you shape that object properly, you can control them. In this case, [Moritz] used some GitHub code from [Matt Ferraro] to create a caustic projection clockface, and 3D printed it using an SLA printer.

The rest of the clock is straightforward enough—there’s some WS2812 LEDs involved, an Arduino Nano, and even an RP2040. But the real magic is in the light show and how it’s all achieved. We love learning about optics, and this is a beautiful effect well worth studying yourself.

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Hackaday Podcast Episode 304: Glitching The RP2350, Sim Sim Sim, And A Scrunchie Clock

January 17, 2025 by Dan Maloney 1 Comment

It’s podcast time again, and this week Dan sat down with Elliot for a look back at all the cool hacks we’ve written about. We started off talking about Hackaday Europe, which is coming up in March — seems unlikely that it’s just around the corner, but there it is. There’s also good news: the Hack Chat is back, and we started things off with a bang as Eben Upton stopped by to talk all things Pi. Separately, we talked about fault injection attacks, including how to find the hidden cup of 0xC0FFEE in an RP2350.

We saw a very cool piece of LED jewelry that does a fluid simulation, a direct conversion radio that’s all laid out in front of you, and the scrunchiest mechanical digital clock you’ll ever see. We saw blinkenlights for blinkenlights’ sake, all the ways to put threads in your prints, and how to ditch to coax and wire up your antennas with Cat 6 cable. Plus, it’s an Al Williams twofer in the Can’t-Miss Articles, with a look back at life before GPS and how you can tune into digital ham radio, no radio required.

Download the zero-calorie MP3.

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Neat Ring Clock Relies On Addressable LEDs

January 16, 2025 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

[WhiskeyTangoHotel] wanted to build an LED clock after seeing some great designs online. They elected to go after a ring clock design, based around the ever-popular WS2812B addressable LEDs.

The core of the build is the HELTEC WiFi 32 development board. It’s not one we’re intimately familiar with, but it’s based around the popular Expressif ESP32. Since it’s got WiFi, it’s able to simply dial up a network time server to always keep accurate time. It then drives a set of WS2812B LEDs set up in six rings. They display the current time with a layout akin to that of a typical analog clock.

What makes this build just a little more fun is the inclusion of Disco Mode. At the press of a button, the full set of LEDs flashes out some fun dancing patterns. The clock is also programmed to trigger the same display for sixty seconds at the top of each hour.

It’s a straightforward build—what might have been highly complicated to build two decades ago has been simplified with the magic of addressable LEDs. What’s also cool is that this clock was apparently inspired by another project shared on these very pages. If you’ve been spurred to build something cool yourself, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Gimbal Clock Relies On Servos For Its Cool Movements

January 16, 2025 by Lewin Day 1 Comment

In the annals of human history, clocks got boring there for a while. Most were just variations on hands spinning in a circle, with the occasional tweeting bird mechanism to liven things up. These days, we’re treated to all kinds of original and oddball designs, like this neat gimbal clock from [Twisted&Tinned].

The concept of the build is straightforward enough. It has four main vertical arms, each with a servo at the base that rotates about a vertical axis. Upon each arm are between one and three servos which rotate 3D printed structures in the shape of numbers. A Wemos D1 Mini microcontroller commands the servos to the correct positions to display the current time. It also uses its WiFi connection to get accurate time updates directly from a network time server.

It’s quite an artistic build—and it’s rather enjoyable to watch this one flex and twist its way into displaying the right time. It’s also easier to read at a glance than some of the more unintelligible designs out there. Indeed, we see all kinds of neat and innovative clocks around these parts.

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Polarizer clock with rainbow glow clockface

Bending Light, Bending Time: A DIY Polarizer Clock

January 7, 2025 by Heidi Ulrich 8 Comments

Imagine a clock where the colors aren’t from LEDs but a physics phenomenon – polarization. That’s just what [Mosivers], a physicist and electronics enthusiast, has done with the Polarizer Clock. It’s not a perfect build, but the concept is intriguing: using polarized light and stress-induced birefringence to generate colors without resorting to RGB LEDs.

The clock uses white LEDs to edge-illuminate a polycarbonate plate. This light passes through two polarizers—one fixed, one rotating—creating constantly shifting colours. Sounds fancy, but the process involves more trial and error than you’d think. [Mosivers] initially wanted to use polarizer-cut numbers but found the contrast was too weak. He experimented with materials like Tesa tape and cellophane, choosing polycarbonate for its stress birefringence.

The final design relies on a mix of materials, including book wrapping foil and 3D printed parts, to make things work. It has its quirks, but it’s certainly clever. For instance, the light dims towards the center, and the second polarizer is delicate and finicky to attach.

This gadget is a splendid blend of art and science, and you can see it in the video below the break. If you’re inspired, you might want to look up polariscope projects, or other birefringence hacks on Hackaday.

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