Cute Brass Lunar Lander Is A Neat Little Environment Monitor

January 19, 2024 by Lewin Day 8 Comments

Sometimes form can make a project more attractive than its simple function. [Mohit Bhoite]’s free-form builds are great examples of this. His latest effort is a gorgeous little device that displays environmental readings, and it’s shaped like a lunar lander. (Nitter) Just exquisite!

The device is based around a Seeedstudio XIAO nRF52840 dev board. It’s hooked up to a BME280 sensor which delivers temperature, humidity and air pressure readings from the immediate environment. These readings are displayed on a tiny 128×32 OLED display, along with the current time. Power is via a compact 14250 lithium cell.

So far, so simple, but the real magic is in the housing. It’s a wireframe lunar lander lookalike which [Mohit] put together using brass wire and some careful soldering. It adds so much to the build, which wouldn’t be nearly as attractive if just assembled on a PCB. It’s not his first rodeo, either. He previously built a cute device (Nitter) with an animated face in 2019 using similar techniques; it used a CCS811 gas sensor to detect air quality.

Often, we find ourselves falling most in love with devices that please the eye. [Mohit] certainly demonstrates a great skill in building things that fit this brief. Sometimes, it only takes a bit of thought and careful application of the mind to bring a beautiful aesthetic to your projects, and the results can be most rewarding. Try his Hackaday Supercon talk if you want to learn more. Continue reading “Cute Brass Lunar Lander Is A Neat Little Environment Monitor” →

Detail of a circuit sculpture in the shape of a lighthouse

Op Amp Contest: This Lighthouse Sculpture Flickers In The Rhythm Of Chaos

June 6, 2023 by Robin Kearey 7 Comments

Op amps are typically used to build signal processing circuits like amplifiers, integrators and oscillators. Their functionality can be described by mathematical formulas that have a single, well-defined solution. However, not every circuit is so well-behaved, as Leon Chua famously showed in the early 1980s: if you make a circuit with three reactive elements and a non-linear component, the resulting oscillation will be chaotic. Every cycle of the output will be slightly different from its predecessors, and the circuit might flip back and forth between different frequencies.

A light modulated with a chaotic signal will appear to flicker like a candleflame, which is the effect [MaBe42] was looking for when he built a lighthouse-shaped circuit sculpture. Its five differently-colored LEDs are driven by a circuit known as Sprott’s chaotic jerk circuit. A “jerk”, in this context, is the third-order derivative of a variable with respect to time – accordingly, the circuit uses three RC integrators to implement its differential equation, along with a diode to provide nonlinearity.

The lighthouse has three chaotic oscillators, one in each of its legs. Their outputs are used to drive simple pulse-width modulators that power the LEDs in the top of the tower. [MaBe42] used the classic LM358 op amp for most of the circuits, along with 1N4148 diodes where possible and 1N4004s where needed – not for their higher power rating, but for their stronger leads. As is common in circuit sculptures, the electronic components are also part of the tower’s structure, and it needs to be quite sturdy to support its 46 cm height.

[MaBe42] used 3D printed jigs to help in assembling the various segments, testing each circuit before integrating it into the overall structure. The end result is a beautiful ornament for any electronics lab: a wireframe structure with free-hanging electronic components and randomly flickering lights on top. Want to learn more about circuit sculpture? Check out this great talk from Remoticon 2020.

Continue reading “Op Amp Contest: This Lighthouse Sculpture Flickers In The Rhythm Of Chaos” →

Test Your Capacity For Circuit Sculpture With Flashing Lights

December 30, 2022 by Kristina Panos 15 Comments

Have you tried your hand at circuit sculpture yet? Well, if you were waiting for the ideal first project with a great build video to go along with it, keep reading. [4dcircuitry]’s 555-based flashing circuit sculpture ticks all the go-for-it boxen for us — the component list is short, the final circuit looks cool, and well, there are blinkenlights.

Of course, it’s not quite a zero-entry project. Although [4dcircuitry] makes it look oh-so easy build it in the video below, they are using 1206 components and an SOIC-packaged 555 timer here. On the other hand, they start by smartly laying everything out on double-stick tape before applying flux and soldering. Then when it’s time to run the wires that no one wants to see, [4dcircuitry] carefully tweezers it from the tape and flips it over, re-using the tape do solder up the back side.

Don’t have the patience to solder 1206? All component sizes are beautiful, as evidenced by this amazing circuit sculpture clock.

Continue reading “Test Your Capacity For Circuit Sculpture With Flashing Lights” →

A wall clock made from wires and electronic components

Form Follows Function In This Circuit Sculpture Clock

December 29, 2022 by Robin Kearey 5 Comments

Electronic components are strictly functional objects: their appearance is determined by the function they’re meant to fulfil. But that doesn’t mean there’s no beauty in them. In fact, a whole discipline called circuit sculpture exists that aims to make beautiful shapes out of nothing more than electronic components and wires. Today we can show you [Maarten Tromp]’s latest work in this field: a wall-mounted clock that he’s christened the Clock Sculpture.

The clock’s main structure consists of two concentric rings made from galvanized steel wire, held together by twelve spokes. All components are soldered directly onto those two rings, with no additional mechanical support. Steel isn’t the greatest material for soldering to, but [Maarten] managed to make it work with a high-wattage soldering iron and a bit of plumbers’ flux.

The overall design is simple but clever: the outer ring holds 60 LEDs to indicate the minutes, with every fifth LED always illuminated dimly in order to provide a background reference in dark conditions. There are 24 LEDs on the inner ring to indicate the twelve hours as well as the “half-hours” in between. Without these, the dial would look a bit odd at 30 minutes past the hour.

A mains transformer, plus a single diode, a buffer capacitor and a 7805 regulator form a simple DC power supply, with its negative terminal connected to the steel frame. Time is kept by an ATtiny13A that counts mains frequency pulses. There’s no way to adjust the time: you’ll have to plug in the clock exactly at noon or midnight in order to synchronize it with the outside world. A crude method perhaps, but one that fits well with the clock’s bare-bones aesthetic.

The individual LEDs are driven by a set of twelve 74HC595 shift registers, all mounted dead-bug style between the two rings. Signals and power are carried between the chips by inconspicuous grey wires taken from old IDE cables; this gives the clock a clean, uncluttered appearance. [Maarten] has had the sculpture clock in his office for several months and while it apparently took some time to get used to, he claims it’s easy to read in bright and dark conditions.

Circuit sculpture has formed the basis for several stunning clock projects: this Tie Fighter-shaped clock for instance, or this insanely complex LED clock. Our 2020 Circuit Sculpture contest yielded many breathtaking designs, too.

Sight And Sound Combine In This Engaging Synthesizer Sculpture

October 23, 2022 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

We’ll always have a soft spot for circuit sculpture projects; anything with components supported on nice tidy rows of brass wires always captures our imagination. But add to that a little bit of light and a lot of sound, and you get something like this hybrid synthesizer sculpture that really commands attention.

[Eirik Brandal] calls his creation “corwin point,” and describes it as “a generative dual voice analog synthesizer.” It’s built with a wide-open architecture that invites exploration and serves to pull the eyes — and ears — into the piece. The lowest level of the sculpture has all the “boring” digital stuff — an ESP32, the LED drivers, and the digital-to-analog converters. The next level up has the more visually interesting analog circuits, built mainly “dead-bug” style on a framework of brass wires. The user interface, mainly a series of pots and switches, lives on this level, as does a SeeedStudio WIO terminal, which is used to display a spectrum analyzer of the sounds generated.

Moving up a bit, there’s a seemingly incongruous vacuum tube overdrive along with a power amp and speaker in an acrylic enclosure. A vertical element of thick acrylic towers over all and houses the synth’s delay line, and the light pipes that snake through the sculpture pulse in time with sequencer events. The video below shows the synth in action — the music that it generates never really sounds the same twice, and sounds like nothing we’ve heard before, except perhaps briefly when we heard something like the background music from Logan’s Run.

Hats off to [Eirik] for another great-looking and great-sounding build; you may remember that his “cwymriad” caught our attention earlier this year.

Continue reading “Sight And Sound Combine In This Engaging Synthesizer Sculpture” →

The Wonderfully Weird Wireframe Game Boy That Actually Works

June 7, 2022 by Robin Kearey 10 Comments

We see lots of great hardware projects here at Hackaday: some are extremely clever, some are beautifully made, and some show off their maker’s extraordinary skills. Others are just plain weird, but still manage to include some or even all of the above categories. Case in point: [kgsws]’s Wireframe Game Boy project. It’s probably the weirdest Game Boy mod we’ve seen so far, but also extremely impressive from a technical point of view.

The basic idea was to take a Game Boy Pocket and remove its outer shell, replacing it with a cage-like structure made from thick copper wire. That sounds kind of reasonable; think of those transparent Game Boys, only without the transparent plastic. [kgsws]’s video (embedded below) shows him bending a few pieces of copper wire to match the Game Boy’s overall shape, then adding mounts for the cartridge socket, the display, the D-pad and the four buttons. After that you’d simply slide in the PCB, insert some batteries and off you go, right?

Well, this wouldn’t do for [kgsws]. What he did instead, was use a hot air desoldering station to remove all chips from the motherboard and proceed to mount them directly inside the wireframe without a PCB. He then used dozens of thin copper wires to hook up the cartridge slot, the CPU, RAM, buttons, and everything else to reconstruct the motherboard’s functionality. We cringed a bit when we saw him brutally cut the display’s flat cable with scissors, and that too was connected to the rest of the system through flying wires, soldered directly onto the screen’s contacts.

Amazingly, the system managed to boot up and run its software after it got a pair of fresh batteries. Despite a slightly dodgy D-pad, the naked Game Boy actually turned out to be fully usable, although it probably requires somewhat more delicate handling than Nintendo’s famously bullet-proof hardware. We’ve seen Game Boys modded into all kinds of different shapes and sizes, but none quite as unusual as today’s. If it’s wireframe construction you like, check out this eerie sound generator or this beautiful circuit sculpture clock. Continue reading “The Wonderfully Weird Wireframe Game Boy That Actually Works” →

The LED tree itself , filmed in the dark - a myriad of small orbs glowing mictures of green, blue and warm white

Kaleidoscope – Feelings Turned Into LED Tree

May 3, 2022 by Arya Voronova 4 Comments

In 2020, [Eddie] found himself with a few hundred RGB LEDs left after a pandemic-interrupted project, and a slew of emotions he wanted to express – so he turned to the language of hardware, and started sculpting his feelings into an art project. He set out to build an LED tree around a piece of wood he picked for its cool shape, and trying out a long-shelved idea of his, while at it – using different resistors to mix colors of the RGB LEDs. The end result, pictured above, has earned “The Most Important Device” spot in our recent Sci-Fi contest, fair and square.

Initially, he wanted to use ATTiny microcontrollers and PWM all the lights in parallel. Having built an intermediate prototype, a small LED flower, he scrapped the idea due to technical problems, and then simplified it by hard-wiring RGB LEDs with randomly selected colors instead. As for the glowing orbs themselves, he made these just by pouring hot glue into silicon orb molds, a simple technique any of us could repeat. After 90 hours of work between him and an assistant he hired, the LEDs were wired up, each with random resistors connected to green and blue LED colors, and some warm white LEDs added into the mix.

He wanted to mostly use blue and green colors, as symbols of a world revived and revitalized – something we can’t help but keep our fingers crossed for. Before putting it all together, they wouldn’t know which colors each of the LEDs would power up in – part of the charm for this art piece, and no doubt a pleasant surprise. In the end, it turned out to be a futuristic decoration that we’re glad a camera could capture properly! If you like what you see, the build logs linked above have a bit more insights into how it all came together.

LED-adorned plants are fun projects that bring joy for a long time after you’ve finished them. You can easily make a LED tree out of what you have on hand, and if you get real fancy, you can create an intricate bonsai, too. And, if you’re ever interested to experiment with castellations, you can design yourself some PCB cube flowers!

This project was an entry into the 2022 Sci-Fi Contest. Check out all of the winning entries here.