[Chris Combs] is a full time artist who loves using technology to create unique art projects and has been building blinky artwork since about a decade now. In his 2022 Supercon talk “Art-World Compatibility Layer: How to Hang and Sell Your Blinky Goodness as Art” (Slides, PDF), [Chris] takes us behind the scenes and shows us how to turn our blinky doodads in to coveted art works. There is a big difference between a project that just works, and a work of art, and it’s the attention to small details that differentiates the two.

Just like the field of engineering and technology, the art world has its own jargon and requires knowledge of essential skills that make it intimidating to newcomers. It’s not very easy to define what makes an artwork “art” or even “Art”, and sometimes it’s difficult to distinguish if you are looking at a child’s scrawls or a master’s brushstrokes. But there are a few distinguishing requirements that a piece of artwork, particularly one revolving around the use of technology, must meet.

What People Expect From Artwork

One important feature a technical artwork must have is the ability to turn on as soon as it is plugged in, without requiring any further user intervention. [Chris] recommends that it should be plug and play and this might require “not” using a power button if you can get away with it.

An artwork can be hung on a wall, or placed on a tabletop, pedestal or on the floor. A wall hanging artwork requires special hardware for mounting. One easy method is to use a taut wire to hang it from a wall hook. There are several options available for wired mounting, and [Chris] gives a nice rundown of their pros and cons. Another option for wall mounting is by using keyhole slots. You can use metal screw-on plates or add your own CNC or 3D printed slot plates. Sometimes, art galleries will have an exotic hanging system, but with some hacking, it ought to be possible to adapt either a wired mount or keyhole slots to work with them.

If your artwork runs software, then make sure that it never needs a software upgrade. People don’t expect software bugs in their artwork. This means ensuring your code is robust, and any bugs that surface later can hopefully be attributed as features. Dependence on a network connection is another challenge, so it is best to avoid using it. If a network connection is essential, then ensure that the configuration process is easy and foolproof.

Besides the artwork, accessories such as power supply, connectors, and cables need special attention too. Cables need to be offered in multiple colors and lengths. For power connections, barrel sockets and jacks are a good choice, but it is essential to include reverse polarity protection to avoid losing all the magic smoke if someone connects a power supply with inverted polarity. Using the widely available USB-C connector breakout boards is another great alternative, specially since USB-C cables are available in all kinds of colors and it’s possible to negotiate voltage and current requirements as desired. Finally, be careful with the choice of power supply provided with your artwork. An artwork is expected to last a really long time, and the power supply must be easily replaceable. There are quite a number of additional expectations that an artwork must comply with, and [Chris] covers those in the next part of his talk.

Making It Reliable

Artwork ought to function reliably for a long time. This requires special attention to design, construction and choice of materials and parts. For example, on the electronics hardware, it helps to add all the protection you can think of, such as surge suppression MOV’s, PTC thermal fuses, TVS diodes on signal connections and reverse polarity protection on the power input.

Making the software reliable requires some special effort too. If you are using a single board computer such as the Raspberry Pi, make sure to implement a read only file system, or minimise writes to the file system. Simulate various error conditions such as a file system that bloats due to temp and log files, and confirm that your software is able to recover gracefully. Consider how your system reacts to loss of network or failure of an RTC module or maybe a timer overflow in a microcontroller.

What A Venue Expects From The Artist

A venue or gallery will expect your artwork to have a title, a list of the main visible materials used, date of creation, dimensions and batch size or edition size. When corresponding about the artwork, you will also need to share clear photographs, a short biography and an artist’s statement about the artwork. [Chris] offers useful and relevant tips covering all of these requirements.

During the last part of his talk, [Chris] covers the important aspect of marketing and selling your artwork. Manually scouting for venues and finding upcoming shows can be tedious and time consuming, so he shows us some nifty methods of automating the task. He recommends using a combination of RSS feeds, web scraping, and filtering email newsletters to identify target keywords, and then collating all the data in a task tracker which reminds you when it’s time to apply.

Despite using all of these methods, [Chris] has had an acceptance rate of just 15%. So if you plan to walk down this path to artistic glory, be prepared to face lots of rejection letters. [Chris]’s tips and techniques ought to be useful to the growing number of hacker-artists we have seen in recent years who create stunning pieces of technical artwork but find it difficult to make a mark in the art circuit.

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.

Lesson 1 : ALWAYS verify circuit functionality and check Schematic / PCB layout before fabrication

The Christmas ornament is not truly a “binary” clock, but rather a binary-coded-decimal clock using six bits instead of the more usual four or eight bits for BCD encoding. [Aaron] would need four banks of six LEDs each to display number of days, hours, minutes and seconds. Adding a pair of buttons for control brought his GPIO count to 26. To make things simpler, he decided to use just two banks of six LEDs each, with an additional pair of LEDs to indicate if the display was showing days and hours or minutes and seconds. This brought down his GPIO count to a more reasonable number. With this feature list, [Aaron] laid out the first version of his PCB, consisting of an ATmega328, the LEDs, a coin battery for backup power, and a pair of capacitive touch buttons. And this is where his problems started. The connections between microcontroller and programming header were wrong. And the capacitive buttons never worked because capacitive pickup signals were never consistent. Beyond this, his memory is a bit fuzzy to tell us if the rest of the circuit actually worked or not.

Lesson 2 : ALWAYS check manufacturer’s data sheets and verify schematic symbols and footprints

For version 2, he ditched capacitive buttons for physical ones, used an I2C based LED driver to reduce GPIO count, and added a RTC chip with battery backup. This version would’ve worked if he hadn’t messed up the connections to the four pin crystal connected to the microcontroller.

Frustrated with his previous attempts, [Aaron] decided to design a proof-of-concept prototype board based on version 2, just to test all of the functionality. But in this attempt too, he failed miserably with several new issues cropping up. He managed to fix a minor track routing issue for the ATmega328 with a bodge wire.

Since the LED driver and the RTC chip both used the I2C bus, the number of GPIO pins required was reduced to a large extent. To test if he could use a smaller controller instead of the ATmega328, he added an option for mounting an ATtiny45 microcontroller. But all of this effort was pretty much laid to waste due to the wrong footprint used for the LED driver which prevented him from getting any useful test results. On hindsight, he might have had a greater chance of success if he had only fixed the incorrect crystal footprint from the previous version.

Lesson 3 : ALWAYS keep notes of your progress

An upgraded version 3 was supposed to have fixed the previous mistakes, but unfortunately, added some new ones during the process of modification. [Aaron] didn’t maintain any notes or records, and in the few years since then, he has forgotten what worked and what didn’t.

Lesson 4 : See Lesson 2

Version 4 was a big upgrade. The discrete LEDs and I2C LED driver were replaced with WS2812 RGB LEDs, and the ATmega was replaced with an ESP8266 module. Also, the RTC section was removed, in anticipation that the ESP8266 could get time over NTP. A buzzer was thrown in to play tinny christmas tunes. But [Aaron] failed once more when he used WS2812 footprints in the design, but soldered SK6812 LEDs which he had lying around. While the two devices are similar, the mapping between their pin numbers and pin functions is rotated by 180 degrees, which essentially resulted in a power supply short and a super hot PCB. An intermediate version 4.5 was attempted, but like version 3, he does not have any written notes or recollection of what went wrong.

 Lesson 5 : See all of the above

For the next iteration, [Aaron] replaced the ESP8266 with an ESP32 module but missed adding the auto-reset circuit making it difficult to program the device. Programming was further hampered due to two of the programming pins being shorted during assembly. He also added the RTC section once again, just in case it was not not possible for the ESP32 to obtain time over NTP. Due to the global pandemic and the resultant chip shortage, he had trouble sourcing a voltage regulator in the same footprint that was on the PCB. And in version 5, he once again made the rookie mistake of using the wrong footprint for the RTC chip. To add to his woes, he used some ‘cool’ tiny push buttons, but they turned out to be so tiny as to be practically impossible to use.

Lesson 6 : Persevere, and you will succeed

Having repeated all of his mistakes at least twice over his five previous attempts, [Aaron] finally wizened up enough to take care while designing and assembling his last version. And was rewarded with a fully functioning Christmas Countdown Binary Clock.

Binary clocks seem to be a favourite amongst hackers, maybe because muggles cannot read them, and we regularly end up featuring some amazing projects here on Hackaday. But it would be interesting to know if any of our readers had a project that went through more iterations or took longer than [Aaron]’s monumental project. Let us know in the comments.

Online weather services are great for providing generic area forecasts, but they don’t provide hyperlocal data specific to your location. [Harald Kreuzer] needed both and built a Raspberry Pi Weather Station that provides weather forecasts for the next 7 days as well as readings from local sensors. The project is completely open source and based on a Raspberry Pi base station which connects to ESP32 based sensor nodes and online services to nicely present the data on a 7″ touch screen display.

The architecture is quite straightforward. The ESP32 based sensor nodes publish their readings to an MQTT broker running on the Raspberry Pi. The Pi subscribes to these sensor node topics to pick up the relevant sensor data. This makes it easy to add additional sensor nodes in future. Weather forecast data is collected by connecting to the OpenWeatherMap API. All of the collected information is then displayed through an app built using the Kivy: open source Python app development framework.

The base station hardware is simple and housed in an elegant 3D printed enclosure supported on a 3D printed base support. The remote sensor node electronics are a little bit more involved. [Harald]’s design uses a simple custom PCB which is basically a carrier board for mounting the ESP32, a two way DIP switch for sensor node address setting, a voltage divider to measure battery voltage, a BME280 sensor that provides temperature, humidity and atmospheric pressure readings, and a TP4056 based battery charger for the 18650 lithium ion battery. The battery is charged via a solar cell that forms the top cover of the sensor node enclosure.

Remote sensor applications such as these work well when the battery life can be extended as long as possible, and this requires lowering power consumption to the bare minimum. [Harald] selects an ESP32 board with a low quiescent current voltage regulator. This results in about 20uA current drawn during deep sleep periods of 10 minutes, and 200mA over a 10s period for connecting to WiFi and transmitting the data. He reckons this will give him about a 25 day window before the battery loses charge. Hopefully, he will get enough hours of sunshine during the winter months to keep the battery topped up.

There are several bits of software that need to work in unison to make the weather station tick, and [Harald] walks us through the installation and configuration of each part in detail. From setting up the OS on the Raspberry Pi and the Kivy: framework in which the weather station app is coded, to setting up the OpenWeather API, the Mosquitto MQTT broker, and flashing the code on the ESP32 sensor nodes. [Harald] has shared all the details for the hardware and software components of the weather station on Github repositories, making it easy to replicate his efforts.

The weather station works as expected, but [Harald] already has a “feature creep” list of enhancements that he would like to implement in the next version, which shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. Weather Station projects are staple favourites of hackers, and there are many different approaches to choose from, such as this Weather Station For Whether It Rains Or Shines or this Hackaday Prize 2022 submission for a Solar Powered LoRa Weather Station For The Masses.

[Jacek Fedorynski] had an old Magellan/SpaceMouse 3D mouse with a serial interface which made it impossible for him to use with modern hardware and software. The problem he faced was two pronged – the absence of serial interfaces in the hardware and the lack of appropriate drivers for the operating system. So he built a low cost, simple adapter to use his RS-232 Magellan/SpaceMouse with modern software.

The hardware required to build the adapter was minimal. A Raspberry Pi Pico, a MAX3238 based RS-232 adapter, a null modem adapter and a DB9 gender changer. Of course, a combination null modem – gender changer would have made things even simpler. Four of the GPIO pins from the Pico are mapped to the serial RX, TX, RTS and CTS pins.

On the software side, the code emulates a 3DConnexion SpaceMouse Compact, so it can be used with software like Fusion 360, 3ds Max, SolidWorks, Inventor, Maya and many others. On the host computer, only the standard 3DxWare driver package is needed. On the host computer, the old Magellan/SpaceMouse 3D will appear like a modern SpaceMouse Compact connected over USB. The only downside to this is that the SpaceMouse Compact has just two programmable buttons, so only two of the many buttons on the old Magellan mouse can be mapped.

Flashing the code to the Pico is also straightforward using the BOOTSEL mode. Hold down the BOOTSEL button when plugging in the Pico and it appears as a drive onto which you can drag a new UF2 file. Just drag-n-drop [Jacek]’s magellan.uf2 firmware and you’re done.

If you’d rather build your own, modern 3D mouse, check out the DIY Cad Mouse You Can Actually Build.

We gotta love hacker Dads and Moms for being so awesome. Sooner or later, their kids get to play with some amazing toy that every other kid on the block is jealous of. [Meanwhile in the Garage aka MWiG] is one of those super hacker Dads who built a frickin’ Tank for his son (video, embedded below.). But it’s so much fun driving that beast around that we suspect Dad is going to be piloting it a lot more than the kid. The tank features metal tracks, differential steering, a rotating turret, periscopes and a functional paintball gun with camera targeting.

Building a tank, even if it’s a mini replica, needs an engine with a decent amount of torque. [MWiG] first tried reviving an old ATV engine, but it did nothing more than sputter and die. It went to the scrap heap after donating its rear transmission and axle. [MWiG] managed to get an old Piaggio scooter with a 250cc / 22 hp engine. The scooter gave up its engine, electricals and the instrument cluster before being scrapped. Looking at the final build, and the amount of metal used, we are left wondering how the puny 22 hp engine manages to drive the tank. We guess it’s the right amount of gearing for the win.

[MWiG] has a lot of experience, and a well equipped workshop with all the right kind of tools to pull off this project. Even so, the build is not without a few hiccups along the way, such as broken drills and bent axle shafts that required  rework. The tank chassis is progressively built up by welding a series of square section steel pipe frames. The scooter engine connects to the rear differential via a chain drive. He added a pair of clutches on each wheel to allow differential steering, as well as a pair of disk brakes. The two clutches are actuated using left and right foot pedals and an elaborate system of rigid levers and flexible rod ends. Each of the twelve non-drive wheels, six on each side, have independent spring suspension. The track drive wheel assembly and tensioning system is nothing short of artwork. He fabricated the drive wheel sprockets from bar stock.

Next part of his build focuses on the rotating turret, mounting and articulation of the paintball gun and attaching the camera and LCD screen for targeting. We have to envy a hacker who has a battle tank scrapyard in his neighborhood. Unfortunately, a visit there does not yield any periscopes as he anticipated, so [MWiG] custom fabricates six periscopes using polycarbonate sheets and glass mirror pieces. The tracks are painstakingly fabricated using steel C-channel pieces, lengths of bar stock, and steel cable rubber conveyor belting pieces, all bolted together. It’s amazing to see the amount of hard work he puts in to fabricate the tracks.

He had to replace a misplaced immobilizer and a faulty injector before the tank could be rolled out for its first test drive. He also swapped the soft, short suspension springs with stiffer, longer ones to prevent the tank from bottoming out due to its weight. Finally, he added a couple of idler support wheels to prevent the tank tracks from sagging. He then disassembled the whole vehicle for cleaning, degreasing, painting and pop riveted the aluminum chequer plate paneling. His idea of using a projector to trace out the logo on the side of the tank turret is pretty brilliant. Finally, it was time to tweak the camera for precise targeting of the paintball gun and the tank was ready to roll.

As a bonus side project, he modified a flatbed trailer to transport the mini tank, building some ramps and a nice manual winch to load and unload the tank. After some target practise in the backyard, father and son set off to put the tank through its paces in an isolated field. We have to admit – this is one seriously epic project and it would be fun to be in the drivers seat.

[Meanwhile in the Garage] is a pretty prolific hacker churning out some great projects over the years. Check out this Rotary Valve Engine That Smokes the Competition and this DIY Enclosed Motorcycle To Keep You Dry In The Rain.

Building your own network attached storage (NAS) for personal use isn’t all that difficult. A single board computer, a hard disk and a power supply in an enclosure is all the hardware you need. Then, choose from one of several open source NAS software solutions and you’re up and running. [tobychui] decided to notch things up by designing a NAS that really looks like a NAS. It’s tailored to his specific requirements and looks like a professional product to boot. The design features dual 3.5 inch HDD bays, a small footprint, is low cost, compatible with a variety of single board computers, and can handle high data transfer speeds by using RAM and SD card for buffering.

Not only has he done a great job with the hardware design, but he’s also developed a companion software for the NAS. “ArozOS” is a web desktop operating system that provides full-fledged desktop experience within a browser. ArozOS has a great user interface and features a lot of networking, file, disk management and security functions. He has also developed a launcher application to enable over-the-air (OTA) software updates.

Assembling the device will need some planning and preparation, even though most of the hardware is off the shelf. You will need a SATA to USB 2.0 adapter, a SBC (Orange Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi 4, Orange Pi Zero 2, etc) , three buck converters — one each to provide 12 V to the two hard disks and a third to provide 5 V to the SBC. You’ll also need a 12 V / 6 A or 24 V / 3 A external power brick, or a USB-C 65 W GaN charger with a triggering module to set the desired voltage and current.

There is also one custom power distribution board which is essentially a carrier board to mount the buck converters and connectors for power and USB data. For the 3D prints, [tobychui] recommends printing at the highest resolution for a nice finish.

The off the shelf SATA to USB adapter will need to be taken apart before it can be fixed to the 3D printed SATA adapter plate and might pose the most challenge during construction, but the rest of the assembly is fairly straightforward. Once assembly is complete, [tobychui] walks you through installation of the ArozOZ software, mounting the drives and making them accessible over the network.

Have you got your data backup act in order ? If not, it’s still not too late to make it a new Year’s resolution. And if you need help figuring things out, check out New Year Habits – What Do You Do For Data Storage?

When [Hand Tool Rescue] came across a 1919 patent for a one size fits all wrench, he couldn’t help but recreate it. Described in the patent as “a new, original, ornamental design for a wrench”, the wrench had a slot for possibly every fastener that the inventor could think of. Not only did it have slots for several hexagonal fasteners, but many others for octagonal, square and even a pentagonal fastener.

[Hand Tool Rescue] reckons there are 47 slots for various sizes and types of fasteners, not counting the ones whose purpose he could not fathom. Just in case he missed any fastener sizes, the original designer decided to add an alligator wrench at the other end of the handle, potentially negating the need for any of the other slots. The tool even features a sharp edge along one of the sides, possibly for use as a scraper of some kind.

Why such a crazy design was patented, or what were the functions of some of its slots are questions that will likely remain unanswered. At best, we can all take guesses at solving the mystery of this tool. [Hand Tool Rescue] scales the original drawing such that one of the slots has a width of 1 inch, and then uses that as a template to recreate the wrench. He starts with a slab of 3/8th inch thick, grade 4140 steel, which has a high strength to weight ratio and can be case hardened after machining, making it suitable for this ornamental project.

He then embarks on his journey of excessive milling, drilling, filing, band sawing and shaping (using a slotting attachment), totaling about 11 hours worth of drudgery. Of course, one could argue that it would have been much easier, and accurate, to have used modern machining methods. And we are spoilt for choices here among laser cutting, water jet cutting or even EDM machining, any of which would have done the job faster, cleaner and more precisely. But we guess [Hand Tool Rescue] wanted to stick to traditional methods as would have been available in 1919 to an inventor who wanted to make a prototype of his awesome, all in one wrench.

If you can help explain the overall function of this wrench, or identify some of the more vague slots in it, then [Hand Tool Rescue] would be happy to get the feedback. And talking about less desirable wrenches, check out how this Sliding Wrench Leaves a Little to be Desired.

Thanks, [Carson] for going down a wrenches rabbit hole and coming up with this tip.