Rudolph’s Sleigh On A North Pole PCB

December 20, 2024 by Heidi Ulrich 18 Comments

Each Christmas, [Adam Anderson], [Daniel Quach], [Johan Wheeler], and [Gustav Abrahamsson] (going by ‘the Janky Jingle Crew’)—set themselves the challenge of outdoing their previous creations. Last year’s CH32 Fireplace brought an animated LED fire to life with CH32V003 microcontrollers.

This year, they’ve gone a step further with the North Pole Circuit, a holiday project that combines magnetic propulsion, festive decorations, and a bit of engineering flair. Inspired by a miniature speedway based on Friedrich Gauss’ findings, the North Pole Circuit includes sleighs and reindeer that glide along a custom PCB track, a glowing village with flickering lights, and a buzzer to play Christmas tunes.

The propulsion system works using the Lorentz force, where vertical magnets interact with PCB traces to produce motion. A two-phase design, similar to a stepper motor, ensures smooth operation, while guard rails maintain stability on curves. A separate CH32V003 handles lighting and synchronized jingles, creating a cohesive festive display. As we mentioned in the article on their last year’s creation, going from a one-off to a full batch will make one rethink the joy of repetitive production. Consider the recipients of these tiny Christmas cards quite the lucky ones. We deem this little gift a keeper to put on display when Christmas rolls around again.

This annual tradition highlights the Crew’s knack for combining fun and engineering. Curious about the details or feeling inspired to create your own? Explore the full details and files on their GitHub.

British Spooks Issue Yearly Teaser

December 12, 2024 by Jenny List 17 Comments

As a British taxpayer it’s reassuring to know that over in Cheltenham there’s a big round building full of people dedicated to keeping us safe. GCHQ is the nation’s electronic spying centre, and just to show what a bunch of good eggs they are they release a puzzler every year to titillate the nation’s geeks. 2024’s edition is out if you fancy trying it, so break out your proverbial thinking caps.

The puzzle comes in several stages each of which reveals a British landmark, and we’re told there’s a further set of puzzles hidden in the design of the card itself. We know that Hackaday readers possess fine minds, so you’ll all be raring to have a go.

Sadly GCHQ would for perfectly understandable reasons never let Hackaday in for a tour, but we’ve encountered some of their past work. First the Colossus replica codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park was the progenitor of the organisation, and then a few years ago when they had an exhibition from their archive in the London Science Museum.

Intentional Filament Stringing Helps Santa Soar

December 7, 2023 by Donald Papp 3 Comments

Stringing is when a 3D printer’s hot end moves through open air and drags a wisp of melted plastic along with it. This is normally undesirable, but has in the past been done intentionally to create some unconventional prints. Moonlight Santa from [3dprintbunny] shows considerable refinement in the technique, complete with color changes that really make the result pop.

Using a 3D printer’s stringing in a constructive way is something that has been leveraged really well. We remember seeing a lion with a fantastic mane by combining this method with a little post-processing and a blast from a heat gun. The technique has also been applied to make brush bristles (the printer strings filament across two handles, and after printing it is cut in half to make two brushes.)

This isn’t [3dprintbunny]’s first rodeo, either. We loved seeing her show what kind of objects were possible by using clever design, with no reliance on custom G-code or weird slicer tricks. The color changes by filament swaps really make this new one stand out.

Antenna Hidden In Holiday Lights Skirts HOA Rules

February 27, 2023 by Bryan Cockfield 87 Comments

For all their supposed benefits, homeowner’s associations (HOAs) have a reputation of quickly turning otherwise quaint neighborhoods into a sort of Stanford prison experiment, as those who get even the slightest amount of power often abuse it. Arbitrary rules and enforcement abound about house color, landscaping, parking, and if you’ve ever operated a radio, antennas. While the FCC (at least as far as the US is concerned) does say that HOAs aren’t permitted to restrict the use of antennas, if you don’t want to get on anyone’s bad side you’ll want to put up an antenna like this one which is disguised as a set of HOA-friendly holiday lights.

For this build, a long wire is hidden along with a strand of otherwise plain-looking lights. While this might seem straightforward at first, there are a few things that need to be changed on the lighting string in order to make both the antenna and the disguise work. First, the leads on each bulb were removed to to prevent any coupling from the antenna into the lighting string. Clipping the leads turns what is essentially a long wire that might resonate with the antenna’s frequency into many short sections of wire which won’t have this problem. This also solves the problem of accidentally illuminating any bulbs when transmitting, as the RF energy from the antenna could otherwise transfer into the lighting string and draw attention from the aforementioned HOA.

Tests of this antenna seemed to show surprising promise while it was on the ground, but when the string and antenna was attached to the roof fascia the performance dropped slightly, presumably because of either the metal drip edge or the gutters. Still, the antenna’s creator [Bob] aka [HOA Ham] had excellent success with this, making clear contacts with other ham radio operators hundreds of miles away. We’ve shared another of [Bob]’s HOA-friendly builds below as well which hides the HF antenna in the roof’s ridge vent, and if you’re looking for other interesting antenna builds take a look at this one which uses a unique transformer to get wide-band performance out of an otherwise short HF antenna.

Continue reading “Antenna Hidden In Holiday Lights Skirts HOA Rules” →

Fail Of The Week: Epic 312 Weeks Of Fixing A Broken Project

February 17, 2023 by Anool Mahidharia 7 Comments

If a hacker guardian angel exists, then we’re sure he or she was definitely AWOL for six long years from [Aaron Eiche]’s life as he worked on perfecting and making his Christmas Countdown clock. [Aaron] started this binary clock project in 2016, and only managed to make it work as expected in 2022 after a string of failures.

In case you’d like to check out his completed project first, then cut the chase and head over to his Github repository for his final, working version. The hardware is pretty straightforward, and not different from many similar projects that we’ve seen before. A microcontroller drives a set of LED’s to show the time remaining until Christmas Day in binary format. The LEDs show the number of days, hours, minutes and seconds until Christmas and it uses two buttons for adjustments and modes. An RTC section wasn’t included in the first version, but it appeared and disappeared along the six year journey, before finding a spot in the final version.

The value of this project doesn’t lie in the final version, but rather in the lessons other hackers, specially those still in the shallow end of the pool, can learn from [Aaron]’s mistakes. Thankfully, the clock ornament is not very expensive to build, so [Aaron] could persevere in improving it despite his annual facepalm moments.

Continue reading “Fail Of The Week: Epic 312 Weeks Of Fixing A Broken Project” →

A Hacker’s Christmas Story

December 24, 2022 by Elliot Williams 11 Comments

Twas the night before Christmas, and because I decided to make everyone’s presents myself this year, I’m still working like mad to get everything done before the big deadline. Why do I do this to myself? Well, partly because I enjoy the process.

My wife had this idea that we can make the older folks some fun decorative blinky things, and picked some motives. My son then drew them out on paper, and I scanned those drawings in and traced them over in CAD. We then cut the shapes out of wood on the CNC router, which turned out to be incredibly successful. (Now that I’ve done it, I wouldn’t be surprised if all of those “quirky” decorative objects that the Swedish flat-packers sell aren’t initially sketched out by third graders.)

Then my son painted them, and it’s my job to insert the twinkling. I bought some of those three-wire “fairy lights” for the purpose, and they’re really fun to hack on. They’re like WS2812s, only instead of using four pins and shifting the data downstream, they’re on a bus, each with a hard-coded address – they know where they are in the string and each LED only listens for the Nth set of 24 bits. This means sending 200 color codes just to light up the 4 LEDs in Aunt Micki’s decorative tree, but so be it.

Last stop, and still to do as of the 23rd, route out some kind of wooden battery case, wedge in the LiPo and the charging circuits, and solder on an on/off switch. It’s down to the last minute, but isn’t that always the way?

Definitely would have been easier just to order something online. But is that the spirit of giving? No! The DIY way brings the family together, gets me some quality time with the CNC machine, and tones up my FreeCAD skills. My son even looked over my shoulder as we were coding some of the LED animations. And nothing says Christmas like hand-coded blinkies.

Happy Holidays, y’all!

Hanging Christmas Lights With No Ladder And No Fuss

December 3, 2022 by Lewin Day 25 Comments

Getting up on a ladder to hang Christmas lights is a great way to hurt yourself if you’re not careful, and winter conditions only add to the peril. One enterprising hacker has whipped up a neat way to avoid ladders entirely, by hanging their lights while planted safely on the ground.

The build uses hefty magnets and triangle eye bolts, attached at regular intervals to the string of Christmas lights. The magnets are used to hold the lights to metal roof siding, while the hooks allow the lights to be lifted into place using a hook on a large extendable pole. Washers, spacers, and screws are used to attach the magnets and hooks to the lights.

For a layout that follows the lines of a simple peaked roof, this hack works great. For more complicated installations, you might still have to climb up a ladder. We’ve featured great primers on getting started with advanced Christmas light displays before, if you’re looking to up your game.

Meanwhile, no matter how much you enjoy seasonal decoration brinkmanship, don’t even think about watching Deck the Halls (2006). Danny Devito has saved a lot of films, but he couldn’t save this. Happy holidays!