We’ve all felt the frustration of cheap consumer electronics — especially when they aren’t actually cheap. How many of us have said “Who designed this crap? I could do better with an Arduino!” while resisting the urge to drop that new smart doorbell in the garbage disposal? It’s an all-too familiar thought, and when it […]
[Robert Morrison] had an ancient HP 545A logic probe, which was great for debugging SMT projects. The only problem was that being 45 years old, it wasn’t quite up to scratch when it came to debugging today’s faster circuitry. Thus, he hacked it to do better, and entered it in our 2025 One Hertz Challenge […]
We’ve just begun to receive entries to the One Hertz Challenge, but we already have an entry by [Mike Coats] that explicitly demands to be awarded last place: the Metronalmost, a metronome that will never, ever, tick at One Hertz. Unlike a real metronome that has to rely on worldly imperfections to potentially vary the […]
A man named [Jim Valvano] once said “There are 86,400 seconds in a day. It’s up to you to decide what to do with them.” — while we couldn’t tell you who [Jim Valvano] was without a google search*, his math checks out. The quote was sufficiently inspirational to inspire [danjovic] to create a clock […]
[Jim Matthews] submitted their Ham Radio foxhunt transmitter project for the 2025 One Hertz Challenge. This is a clever Spartan build. In order to create a radio beacon for use in a “fox hunt” [Jim] combined a SR-T300 walkie talkie module with a phototransistor and oscillating LED circuit. The phototransistor and oscillating LED are secured […]
If you’ve worked with germanium transistors, you’ll know that many of them have a disappointingly low maximum frequency of operation. This has more to do with some of the popular ones dating from the earliest years of the transistor age than it does to germanium being inherently a low frequency semiconductor, but it’s fair to […]
It’s about time! Or maybe it’s about time’s reciprocal: frequency. Whichever way you see it, Hackaday is pleased to announce, just this very second, the 2025 One Hertz Challenge over on Hackaday.io. If you’ve got a device that does something once per second, we’ve got the contest for you. And don’t delay, because the top […]
When you really love your pawed, feathered, or scaled friends, you build projects for them. (Well, anyway, that’s what’s happened to us.) For the 2025 Pet Hacks Challenge, we asked you to share your favorite pet-related hacks, and you all delivered. So without further ado, here are our favorites, as well as the picks-of-the-litter that […]
This Pet Hacks Contest entry from [Andrea] opens the door to a great collaboration of sensors to solve a problem. The Cat At The Door project’s name is a bit of a giveaway to its purpose, but this project has something for everyone, from radar to e-ink, LoRa to 3D printing. He wanted a sensor […]