All Things Enigma Hack Chat

February 25, 2019 by Dan Maloney 2 Comments

Join us Wednesday at noon Pacific time for the All Things Enigma Hack Chat!

This week’s Hack Chat is a bit of a departure for us because our host, Simon Jansen, has tackled so many interesting projects that it’s hard to settle on one topic. Simon is a multidisciplinary hacker whose interests run the gamut from building an ammo-can Apple ][ to a literal steampunk Rickroller. How about a Bender Brewer? Or a MAME in a TARDIS? Or perhaps making an old phone play music to restore a car by? Oh, and remember that awesome ASCII animation of Star Wars: Episode IV? That was Simon.

So, a little hard to choose a topic, but we asked Simon to talk a bit about his recent Enigma watches. He has managed to put an electronic emulation of the Enigma cypher machine from World War II into both a wristwatch and, more recently, a pocket watch. They’re both gorgeous builds that required a raft of skills to complete. We’ll start there and see where the conversation takes us!

Please join us for this Hack Chat, where we’ll discuss:

Where the fascination with Enigma came from;
Tools, techniques, and shop setup;
Melding multiple, disparate skill sets; and
What sorts of new projects might we see soon?

You are, of course, encouraged to add your own questions to the discussion. You can do that by leaving a comment on the All Things Enigma Hack Chat and we’ll put that in the queue for the Hack Chat discussion.

Our Hack Chats are live community events on the Hackaday.io Hack Chat group messaging. This week we’ll be sitting down on Wednesday, February 27, at noon, Pacific time. If time zones have got you down, we have a handy time zone converter.

Click that speech bubble to the right, and you’ll be taken directly to the Hack Chat group on Hackaday.io. You don’t have to wait until Wednesday; join whenever you want and you can see what the community is talking about.

3D-Printed Tourbillon Demo Keeps The Time With Style

February 4, 2019 by Dan Maloney 9 Comments

It may only run for a brief time, and it’s too big for use in an actual wristwatch, but this 3D-printed tourbillon is a great demonstration of the lengths watchmakers will go to to keep mechanical timepieces accurate.

For those not familiar with tourbillons, [Kristina Panos] did a great overview of these mechanical marvels. Briefly, a tourbillon is a movement for a timepiece that aims to eliminate inaccuracy caused by gravity pulling on the mechanism unevenly. By spinning the entire escapement, the tourbillon averages out the effect of gravity and increases the movement’s accuracy. For [EB], the point of a 3D-printed tourbillon is mainly to demonstrate how they work, and to show off some pretty decent mechanical chops. Almost the entire mechanism is printed, with just a bearing being necessary to keep things moving; a pair of shafts can either be metal or fragments of filament. Even the mainspring is printed, which we always find to be a neat trick. And the video below shows it to be satisfyingly clicky.

[EB] has entered this tourbillon in the 3D Printed Gears, Pulleys, and Cams Contest that’s running now through February 19th. You’ve still got plenty of time to get your entries in. We can’t wait to see what everyone comes up with!

Continue reading “3D-Printed Tourbillon Demo Keeps The Time With Style” →

Silent Stepper Drive Makes A Nicer Watch Winder

January 24, 2019 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

Mechanical watches are great in that they never need batteries, but they are simultaneously less than great in that they will lose time if not worn or otherwise regularly agitated. The ridiculous solution to this is the watch winder, which automatically rotates your mechanical watches for you, while you’re not wearing them. This is probably the item you’ll miss the least once the apocalypse hits. [Kristopher] wanted a nice quiet watch winder for his bedside table, but existing solutions were either too loud or too expensive. As is often the case, hacking ensued.

[Kristopher] had decided that starting from scratch was too much hassle. The cheaper watch winders on the market had acceptable quality enclosures, but were simply too loud. [Kristopher] sourced a $40 unit from Amazon, and proceeded to gut the drivetrain. This was replaced with a Sparkfun stepper motor and a Trinamic SilentStepStick – an advanced stepper motor driver that uses several techniques to reduce noise during operation.

An Arduino Nano was substituted as the brains of the operation, communicating with the stepper driver and allowing the winder to be configured for different wind rates. [Kristopher] reports that the device operates near-silently, and the total cost came in well below that of a high-end luxury winder.

Mechanical watches don’t always get a lot of attention these days, but we’ve seen one built from the ground up before. As always, with tips – send ’em if you got ’em.

Fallout Watch Build Triumphs In Adverse Conditions

September 27, 2018 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

Is it a badge? Is it a watch? Well, it’s [Sarif’s] take on a wrist-mounted computer from the Fallout series, so you’re free to choose your own designation! We think the Brotherhood of Steel would be proud to have this piece of kit.

[Sarif] commenced the build after first getting their feet wet with the pipman, a watch inspired by Metro 2033 and Steins;;gate as much as Bethesda’s popular post-apocalyptic RPG. It features all the fruit – GPS, compass, a TV-B-Gone – and perhaps the coolest feature, long-since-deprecated bubble LED displays and flippy switches for that Altair-esque charm.

The build log is full of details, from the components used and the debugging battles involved in the journey. [Sarif] learned about using transistors, burning up a few along the way – some say setting the lab on fire is the quickest way to learn important lessons, anyway. On top of that, there were some software niggles but in the end, the watchputer made it to DEFCON 26 anyway!

Builds like this that start from limited experience and go deep into the trials and tribulations involved are an excellent way to learn about what goes into the average DIY electronics project, particularly when talking about embedded systems. And if you’re keen to check out the work of [Sarif’s] contemporaries, we’ve got a collection of all the awesome badges from DEFCON 26. Enjoy!

No Signal For Your Radio-Controlled Watch? Just Make Your Own Transmitter

September 10, 2018 by Ben James 36 Comments

You can win any argument about the time when you have a radio controlled watch. Or, at least, you can if there’s any signal. [Henner Zeller] lives in a place where there is no reception of the DCF77 signal that his European wristwatch expects to receive. Consequently, he decided to make his own tiny transmitter, which emulates the DCF77 signal and allows the watch to synchronise.

A Raspberry Pi Zero W is the heart of the transmitter, and [Henner] manages to coax it into generating 77500.003Hz on a GPIO pin – close enough to the 77.5kHz carrier that DCF77 uses. The signal is AM, and transmits one bit/s, repeating every minute. A second GPIO performs the required attenuation, and a few loops of wire are sufficient for an antenna which only needs to work over a few inches. The Raspberry Pi syncs with NTP Stratum 1 servers, which gives the system time an accuracy of about ±50ms. The whole thing sits in a slick 3D printed case, which provides a stand for the watch to rest on at night; this means that every morning it’s synchronised and ready to go.

[Henner] also kindly took the time to implement the protocols for WWVB (US), MSF (UK) and JJY (Japan). This might be just as well, given that we recently wrote about the possibility of WWVB being switched off. Be sure to check the rules in your area before giving this a try.

We’ve seen WWVB emulators before, like this ATtiny45 build, but we love that this solution is an easy command line tool which supports many geographical locations.

An Arduino Watch Without A Clock

August 24, 2018 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

When you show up at a party wearing this bare PCB watch, there are effectively two possible reactions you might receive from the other people there. Either they are going to snicker at the nerd who’s wearing a blinking circuit board on their wrist in public, or they are going to marvel at the ridiculously low part count. We’ll give you one guess as to which reaction you’d likely get at any event Hackaday is involved in.

Designed and built by [Electronoobs], this extremely simple watch consists of a ATmega328P microcontroller, a dozen LEDs with their associated 200 Ω resistors, and a battery. There’s also a single push button on the front which is used to not only set the watch, but turn the LEDs on when you want to check the time. Short of dropping down to one LED and blinking out the time, it’s hard to imagine a timepiece with fewer components than this.

You’re probably wondering how [Electronoobs] pulled this off without an external clock source for the ATmega328P chip. The chip actually has an internal 8 MHz oscillator that can be used, but you need to flash the appropriate bootloader to it first. Accordingly, the backside of the PCB has both SPI and a UART solder pads for external bootloader and firmware programming.

As you might expect, there’s a downside to using the internal oscillator: it’s not very good. The ATmega328P spec sheet claims a factory calibrated accuracy of ±10%, and [Electronoobs] has found that equates to a clock drift of around 15 seconds per day. Not exactly great, but considering the battery only lasts for two days anyway, it doesn’t have much of an impact in this case.

Compared to other “analog” LED watches we’ve seen, the simplicity of this build is really quite remarkable. The closest competitor we’ve seen so far is this slick binary watch.

Continue reading “An Arduino Watch Without A Clock” →

A Surprisingly Practical Numitron Watch

August 16, 2018 by Tom Nardi 6 Comments

Regular Hackaday readers are surely familiar with Nixie tubes: the fantastically retro cold cathode display devices that hackers have worked into all manner of devices (especially timepieces) to give them an infusion of glowing faux nostalgia. But unfortunately, Nixie displays are fairly fragile and can be tricky to drive due to their high voltage requirements. For those who might want to work with something more forgiving, a possible alternative is the Numitron that uses incandescent filaments for each segment.

There hasn’t been a lot of prior-art that utilizes Numitrons, but that might be changing, given how fantastic this wristwatch created by [Dycus] looks. With a multi-day battery life, daylight readability, and relatively straightforward construction, the Filawatch is likely to end up being something of a reference design for future Numitron watches.

[Dycus] has gone through three revisions of the Filawatch so far, with probably at least one more on the way. The current version is powered by a ATmega328 microcontroller with dual 16-bit LED drivers to control the filaments in the KW-104S Numitron display modules. He’s also included an accelerometer to determine when the wearer is looking at the display, and even a light sensor to control the brightness of the display depending on the ambient light level.

If there’s a downside to Numitron displays, it’s their monstrous energy consumption. Just like in the incandescent light bulbs most of us have been ditching for LED, it takes a lot of juice to get that filament glowing. [Dycus] reports the display draws as much as 350 mA while on, but by lighting it up for only five seconds at a time it can be checked around 150 times before the watch needs to be recharged.

Its been a few years since we’ve seen a Numitron watch, and it’s interesting to see how the state of the art has advanced.

[via /r/electronics]