A glowing pocket watch with Roman numerals.

What Is The Hour? It’s XVII O’ Clock

February 4, 2025 by Kristina Panos 6 Comments

When live-action role playing, or LARPing, one must keep fully in tune with the intended era. That means no digital watches, and certainly no pulling out your fantastic rectangle from the future to find out if you’re late picking up the kid.

So what do you do when you’re LARPing at 2 PM, but you gotta be back at the soccer practice field by 5 PM? Well, you fashion a period-appropriate timepiece like [mclien]’s 17 o’ Clock. Visually, it’s about as close to a pocket sundial as you can get. It’s deliberately non-connected, and its only function is to tell the time.

But how? If you visually divide the watch across the top and bottom, you get two sets of Roman numerals. The top half handles the hour, and the bottom half the minute. [mclien] started designing this in 2018 and picked it back up in the second half of 2024.

Back to the non-connected part. The only permanently-powered part of the project is a high-precision real-time clock (RTC). The rest uses a power latching circuit, which turns on the Adafruit Trinket M0 to show the time using a NeoPixel ring. Be sure to check out the awesome project logs with fantastic pictures throughout.

Looking for a smarter pocket watch? It’s time you built one yourself. And speaking of pocket sundials…

Illustrated Kristina with an IBM Model M keyboard floating between her hands.

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator

February 3, 2025 by Kristina Panos 8 Comments

Have you ever wished you could experiment with different layouts super easily, just by adding or removing a few switches here and there and printing a new case? Well, [heyisjambo] says that it’s more than possible with menura, the modular keyboard system.

A collage of menura keyboards, which are modular via the VIK standard. — So many lovely options! Image by [heyisjambo] via GitHub

[heyisjambo] is happy with 36 keys, but is reduced-count-curious and wanted a way to explore without a lot of wasted time and PCBs.

At the same time, [heyisjambo] wanted to experiment with split vs. uni-body construction, and especially the different shapes that are possible when tweaking the angle and distance between them.

And as if that weren’t enough, there’s support for [Sadek Baroudi]’s VIK standard for interfacing data between PCBs, which calls for an FPC 12-pin, 0.5 mm pitch connector and allows for ultra-cool magnetic connectors. This way, you can easily add things like displays, trackpads, and trackballs in the between the halves.

Thanks for the tip, [calculus]!

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The Keyboard Configurator” →

Wearables queen [Becky Stern] with a microcontroller and a speaker. And a skull!

Wearable Tech Tips Directly From The Queen

February 2, 2025 by Kristina Panos 7 Comments

What’s the only thing cooler than building something electronic? That’s right — wearing it proudly for all to see.

But maybe you’re not into wearables. Maybe it’s because you’re afraid of sewing, or simply scared that you won’t be able to launder that blinkenshirt you’ve always wanted to make. Well, the undisputed queen of wearables — [Becky Stern] — has a bunch of beginner tips for making DIY wearables. She’s created dozens and dozens of wearable projects and matching tutorials over the years and has graced these pages many times.

As [Becky] points out, once you have your idea sorted, the next thing you need is the tools to get the skills to do the parts you don’t know how to do yet. Even if that’s almost all of it, then this is the guide for you. Importantly, [Becky] reminds us that we should only bite off what we can chew, and that ready-made modules and such are perfectly fine.

There are some tips here that may surprise you. For instance, [Becky] recommends against conductive thread for beginners who already know how to sew by hand, largely because of power delivery and other issues. She also is somewhat anti-lithium battery pouch, preferring instead to use a couple of AAs or a USB battery bank for the renewability aspect.

Be sure to check out the video after the break, which has these tips and more.
Continue reading “Wearable Tech Tips Directly From The Queen” →

Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The DIY Homing Keys

January 28, 2025 by Kristina Panos 42 Comments

r/keebgirlies Is Totally a Thing Now

When [coral-bells] posted her first build to r/mechanicalkeyboards, she likely felt some trepidation. After all this is reddit we’re talking about, so right away you’ve got two layers of male-domination hobby.

Most of a lovely plant-themed keyboard. — Image by [coral-bells] via reddit

What she likely didn’t expect was to be upvoted into the tens of thousands, or to receive such a response from other girlies who came out of the woodwork to share their builds.

And so r/keebgirlies was born, and already has a few thousand members. This is a brand-new subreddit for women and non-binary folks who are into mechanical keyboards. As it says in the sidebar, men are welcome but limited to the comments for now, so don’t go trying to post your builds. The girlies are currently seeking moderators, so give that some thought.

As for [coral-bells]’ lovely build, this is an Epomaker MS68 with MMD Vivian V2 switches, and those flowery keycaps are from Etsy. She is currently waiting for supplies to mod a Yunzii AL66, but wants to build a kit at some point.

Continue reading “Keebin’ With Kristina: The One With The DIY Homing Keys” →

A gif of a BlueSky feed, visualized as Matrix-style digital rain.

It’s Raining From The BlueSky

January 28, 2025 by Kristina Panos 14 Comments

Which would you rather feel? The blast of a fire hose, or a cool, digital rain? That’s what we thought. Introducing Blue Rain — the fire hose that is the BlueSky feed, falling semi-cryptically down your screen in Matrix-style letter droplets. Ahh, isn’t that nice?

Now, the rain doesn’t have to be blue. You can change the color, the speed at which it falls, the font, the font size, and other stuff like toggling NSFW, uh, tweets. (Wait, what are we calling BlueSky messages, anyway? Skeets? Really?)

You can even choose between a few fonts for the rain. And if you want to like, actually read one of the skeets, just shoot one carefully with your mouse while it’s still falling.

[Simone] has the project files on GitHub, but you should really read the blog post. Inspired by the lovely firehose3d, [Simone] thought instead of displaying the BlueSky fire hose as digital rain.

First, she collects as many skeets as there are empty columns on a screen from a Jetstream sever. This is calculated based on font style and size. She wrote an algorithm loosely inspired by CodePen, which does digital rain. If the skeet doesn’t fully render by the time it reaches the bottom of the screen, the rest appears at the top of the same column and falls until it’s done displaying. Then the column clears out and waits for a new skeet.

Want to take Matrix-style digital rain on the go? You can cram it onto a Pico, you know.

Thanks for the tip, [FrancisF]!

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.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 305: Caustic Clocks, Practice Bones, And Brick Layers” →

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.