Art

450 Articles

Design Scanimations In A Snap With The Right Math

September 13, 2025 by 10 Comments

Barrier-grid animations (also called scanimations) are a thing most people would recognize on sight, even if they didn’t know what they were called. Move a set of opaque strips over a pattern, and watch as different slices of that image are alternately hidden and revealed, resulting in a simple animation. The tricky part is designing the whole thing — but researchers at MIT designed FabObscura as a design tool capable not only of creating the patterned sheets, but doing so in a way that allows for complex designs.

The barrier grid need not consist of simple straight lines, and movement of the grid can just as easily be a rotation instead of a slide. The system simply takes in the desired frames, a mathematical function describing how the display should behave, and creates the necessary design automatically.

The paper (PDF) has more details, and while it is possible to make highly complex animations with this system, the more frames and the more complex the design, the more prominent the barrier grid and therefore the harder it is to see what’s going on. Still, there are some very nice results, such as the example in the image up top, which shows a coaster that can represent three different drink orders.

We recommend checking out the video (embedded below) which shows off other possibilities like a clock that looks like a hamster wheel, complete with running rodent. It’s reminiscent of this incredibly clever clock that uses a Moiré pattern (a kind of interference pattern between two elements) to reveal numerals as time passes.

We couldn’t find any online demo or repository for FabObscura, but if you know of one, please share it in the comments.

Continue reading “Design Scanimations In A Snap With The Right Math” →

The weaving is on the left, a microphoto of the chip die is on the right.

The 555 As You’ve Never Seen It: In Textile!

September 10, 2025 by 12 Comments

The Diné (aka Navajo) people have been using their weaving as trade goods at least since European contact, and probably long before. They’ve never shied from adopting innovation: churro sheep from the Spanish in the 17th century, aniline dies in the 19th, and in the 20th and 21st… integrated circuits? At least one Navajo Weaver, [Marilou Schultz] thinks they’re a good match for the traditional geometric forms. Her latest creation is a woven depiction of the venerable 555 timer.

“Popular Chip” by Marilou Schultz. Photo courtesy of First American Art Magazine, via righto.com

This isn’t the first time [Marilou] has turned an IC into a Navajo rug; she’s been weaving chip rugs since 1994– including a Pentium rug commissioned by Intel that hangs in USA’s National Gallery of Art–but it’s somehow flown below the Hackaday radar until now. The closest thing we’ve seen on these pages was a beaded bracelet embedding a QR code, inspired by traditional Native American forms.

That’s why we’re so thankful to [VivCocoa] for the tip. It’s a wild and wonderful world out there, and we can’t cover all of it without you. Are there any other fusions of tradition and high-tech we’ve been missing out on? Send us a tip.

Old Projects? Memorialize Them Into Functional Art

September 1, 2025 by 3 Comments

What does one do with old circuit boards and projects? Throwing them out doesn’t feel right, but storage space is at a premium for most of us. [Gregory Charvat] suggests doing what he did: combining them all into a wall-mountable panel in order to memorialize them, creating a functional digital clock in the process. As a side benefit, it frees up storage space!

Everything contributes. If it had lights, they light up. If it had a motor, it moves.

Memorializing and honoring his old hardware is a journey that involved more than just gluing components to a panel and hanging it on the wall. [Gregory] went through his old projects one by one, doing repairs where necessary and modifying as required to ensure that each unit could power up, and did something once it did. Composition-wise, earlier projects (some from childhood) are mounted near the bottom. The higher up on the panel, the more recent the project.

As mentioned, the whole panel is more than just a collage of vintage hardware — it functions as a digital clock, complete with seven-segment LED displays and a sheet metal panel festooned with salvaged controls. Behind it all, an Arduino MEGA takes care of running the show.

Creating it was clearly a nostalgic journey for [Gregory], resulting in a piece that celebrates and showcases his hardware work into something functional that seems to have a life of its own. You can get a closer look in the video embedded below the page break.

This really seems like a rewarding way to memorialize one’s old projects, and maybe even help let go of unfinished ones.

And of course, we’re also a fan of the way it frees up space. After all, many of us do not thrive in clutter and our own [Gerrit Coetzee] has some guidance and advice on controlling it.

Continue reading “Old Projects? Memorialize Them Into Functional Art” →

Octos background with hackaday website pulled up

Open Source Interactive Wallpapers For Windows

August 30, 2025 by 19 Comments

It’s late at night, and you’re avoiding work that was supposed to be done yesterday. You could open an application on your desktop to keep your attention, or what about the desktop itself? [Underpig1] has you covered with Octos. Octos is an open-source application created to allow interactive wallpapers based on HTML, CSS, or JS for Windows 10 and 11.

There are many wallpaper applications made to spruce up your desktop, but Octos stands out to us here at Hackaday from the nature of being open source. What comes along with the project is a detailed API to reference when creating your own wallpaper. Additionally, this allows for detailed and efficient visualization techniques that would otherwise be difficult to display, perfect for procrastination.

Included demos range from an interactive solar system to Conway’s Game of Life. Customization options allow for basic manipulation of the backdrops in the application itself, but we’re sure you could allow for some fun options with enough tinkering.

If you want to try Octos out for yourself, it’s incredibly easy. Octos can be found on the Microsoft Store, and additional backdrops can be added within the application. Open-source applications allow for incredibly easy additions to your personal device, but it’s not always that way. Kindle has been a prime example of a fairly locked down system; however, that never stops a clever hacker!

Thanks to [Joshua Throm] for the tip!

Raspberry Pi Pico LED display sitting in window sill

An Ode To The Aesthetic Of Light In 1024 Pixels

August 2, 2025 by 3 Comments

Sometimes, brilliant perspectives need a bit of an introduction first, and this is clearly one. This video essay by [Cleggy] delivers what it promises: an ode to the aesthetic of light. But he goes further, materializing his way of viewing things into a beautiful physical build — and the full explanation of how to do it at home.

What’s outstanding here is not just the visual result, but the path to it. We’ve covered tons of different LED matrices, and while they’re all functional, their eventual purpose is left up to the builder, like coasters or earknobs. [Cleggy] provides both. He captured a vision in the streets and then built an LED matrix from scratch.

The matrix consists of 1024 hand-soldered diodes. They’re driven by a Raspberry Pi Pico and a symphony of square waves. It’s not exactly a WS2812 plug-and-play job. It’s engineered from the silicon up, with D-latches and demultiplexers orchestrating a mesmerizing grayscale visual.

Pulse-width modulation (PWM) is the secret ingredient of this hack. [Cleggy] dims each white pixel separately, by varying the duty cycle of its light signal. The grayscale video data, compressed into CSV files, is parsed line-by-line by the Pico, translating intensity values into shimmering time slices.

It transforms the way you see and perceive things. All that, with a 1000 LED monochrome display. Light shows are all highly personal, and each one is a little different. Some of them are really kid stuff.

Continue reading “An Ode To The Aesthetic Of Light In 1024 Pixels” →

Numbers Station Simulator, Right In Your Browser

July 29, 2025 by 6 Comments

Do you find an odd comfort in the uncanny, regular intonations of a Numbers Station? Then check out [edent]’s numbers station project, which leverages the browser’s speech synthesis engine to deliver a ceaseless flow of (mostly) numbers, calmly-intoned in various languages.

The project is an entry for the annual JavaScript Golfing Competition, in which participants aim to create a cool program in 1024 bytes or less. It cleverly relies on the Web Speech API to deliver the speaking parts, which helps keep the code size tiny. The only thing it’s missing is an occasional shadow of static drifting across the audio.

If you’re new to numbers stations, our own [Al Williams] is here to tell you all about them. But there’s no need to tune into an actual mysterious radio signal just to experience weird numbers; just fire up [edent]’s project, put on some headphones, and relax if you can.

A black and white illustration of people with headphones or microphones and floating empty speech bubbles. They appear happy and engaged with each other in a pleasant, park-like environment. In the foreground, on top of a wall, various anthropomorphized big tech logos like Apple, Amazon, and Google spy down on the people with binoculars like hunters assessing their prey. The text reads, "But like any good thing on the internet, there's a big tech monopoly trying to ruin it."

Long Live RSS!

July 10, 2025 by 34 Comments

While we know that many of you are reading Hackaday via our Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed, we suspect that most people on the street wouldn’t know that it underlies a lot of the modern internet. [A. McNamee] and [A. Service] have created an illustrated history of RSS that proudly proclaims RSS is (not) dead (yet)!

While tens of millions of users used Google Reader before it was shut down, social media and search companies have tried to squeeze independent blogs and websites for an increasingly large part of their revenue, making it more and more difficult to exist outside the walled gardens of Facebook, Apple, Google, etc. Despite those of you that remember, RSS has been mostly forgotten.

RSS has been the backbone of the podcast industry, however, quietly serving feeds to millions of users everywhere with few of them aware that an open protocol from the 90s was serving up their content. As with every other corner of the internet where money could be made, corporate raiders have come to scoop up creators and skim the profits for themselves. Spotify has been the most egregious actor here, but the usual suspects of Apple, Google, and Amazon are also making plays to enclose the podcast commons.

If you’d like to learn more about how big tech is sucking the life out of the internet (and possibly how to reverse the enshittification) check out Cory Doctorow’s keynote from our very own Supercon.