2026-03-21 16:00:20
The famous cuckoo clock, with its moving, chirping mechanical bird indicating various divisions of time, has been around since at least the 1600s. The most famous of them come from the Black Forest area of Germany, and are still being made worldwide even today. Other clocks with different themes take their inspiration from the standard bird-based clocks from history, and thanks to modern 3D printing and other technologies we can make clocks with almost any type of hour indicator we’d like with relative ease like [Jason]’s golf clock.
While the timekeeping mechanism is a fairly standard analog clock, the hour indicator mechanism in this build is a small figure which putts a golf ball into a hole once every hour. It uses an ESP32-C3 at its core, which controls a pair of servos. One controls the miniature golfer, and the other lifts the ball up into position on the green at the appointed time. Once the ball is in place, the figure rotates, striking the ball towards the hole. Although it looks almost like the ball is guided by a magnet of some sort at first glance, the ball naturally finds its way into the hole by the topography of the green alone.
Almost all of the parts in this build are 3D printed, including the green, the golfer, the frame, and a number of the servo components. There’s also a small sensor that detects if the ball has actually made it into the hole and back to the lifting mechanism, and to that end there’s also a number of configurations that can be made in the software to ensure that the servos controlling everything all work together to putt the ball properly.
While not a cuckoo clock in the strict sense, we always appreciate a unique clock around here, but if you demand your clocks have ideological purity we’ll point you to this cuckoo clock built into a wristwatch.
2026-03-21 13:00:40
These days, it’s pretty easy to slap together a single-board computer and a cheap LCD screen to whip up a cool cyberdeck fast. But what if you wanna go more retro? [Manu] found a portable TV straight out of the original Blade Runner film, and decided this would be the perfect base for a cyberdeck rocking a whole-ass CRT screen.
The build started with a Panasonic TR-545 television. Back in the day, it took many large batteries to power this thing up—no surprise given how power hungry CRTs are. This gave [Manu] a neat opportunity to sneak all the new cyberdeck hardware into the original battery tray, including a new lithium-ion battery pack that is much more compact than the original. A Raspberry Pi 5 is running the show, computer-wise, and it’s hooked up to an HDMI RF modulator that allows the video output signal to be hooked up to the TV’s original antenna input. It’s not the cleanest way to go, but it allowed [Manu] to make the mod entirely reversible. All the new hardware slots neatly into the repurposed battery tray, and can be removed quite easily without damage to this vintage specimen. Even the keyboard fits nicely into the setup, as [Manu] was able to find a suitable 60% layout foldable unit right off the shelf.
Check out the slide deck for more details on the build, but be warned—it’s a 241 MB PDF. Bonus points if you calculate what that would cost to store on a hard drive in 1979 when the Panasonic TR-545 was on the market. We’ve seen a similar build before, too, with a classic black & white Magnavox unit. If you like squinting at a tiny blurry screen, a CRT cyberdeck is absolutely the way to go. Just be warned that the other screenwriters at your local coffee shop will be more interested in your hardware than whatever you’re actually working on. Good luck with your next pitch all the same. Video after the break.
2026-03-21 10:00:35
The Slug Algorithm has been around for a decade now, mostly quietly rendering fonts and later entire GUIs using Bézier curves directly on the GPU for games and other types of software, but due to its proprietary nature it didn’t see much adoption outside of commercial settings. This has now changed with its author, [Eric Lengyel], releasing it to the public domain without any limitations.
Originally [Eric] had received a software patent in 2019 for the algorithm that would have prevented anyone else from implementing it until the patent’s expiration in 2038. Since 2016 [Eric] and his business have however had in his eyes sufficient benefit from the patent, making it unnecessary to hold on to it any longer and retain such exclusivity.
To help anyone with implementing their own version of the algorithm, there is a GitHub repository containing reference shader implementations with plenty of inline comments that should help anyone with some shader experience get started.
Although pretty niche in the eyes of the average person, the benefits of using on-GPU rendering of elements like fonts are obvious in terms of rendering optimization. With this change open source rendering engines for games and more can finally also use it as well.
Thanks to [Footleg] for the tip.
2026-03-21 07:00:14
Conway’s Game of Life excels in its simplicity, creating a cellular automaton on a 2D grid where each cell obeys a set of very simple rules that determine whether a cell is ‘alive’ or ‘dead’. After setting an initial condition the ‘game’ then evolves naturally from there, creating an endless series of patterns as a simplified form of bacterial evolution. Of course, setting an initial state and then watching cells light up or fade away seems like a natural fit for light-up buttons. After struggling with intrusive thoughts related to such a project for a while, [Michal Zalewski] finally gave in, creating a pretty amazing looking result.
Although there is no set size for the game board, [Michal] was constrained by his budget for the selected NKK JB15LPF-JF tactile buttons, resulting in a 17×17 matrix. That’s 289 buttons, for those keeping score, which comes down to over $1,000 over at e.g. Digikey even with quantity-based pricing. Add to this the custom PCB and a Microchip AVR128DA64 squeezed in a corner of said PCB to run the whole show and it’s quite the investment.
Finishing up the PCB, driving the lights is done with a duty cycle as the matrix is scanned along with detecting inputs in a similar manner. This required the addition of MOSFETs and transistors, the details of which can be found in the downloadable project files, along with the firmware source code. In the article a video of the board in action can be watched, allowing one to admire the very pretty wooden enclosure as well.
2026-03-21 04:00:34
The dream of fully powering everything from aircraft to cars on just the power generated from solar panels attached to the machine remains a tempting one, but always seems to require some serious engineering including putting the machine on a crash diet. The quadcopter that [Luke Maximo Bell] tried to fly off just solar power is a good case in point, as the first attempt crashed after three minutes and wrecked its solar panels. Now he’s back with a second attempt that ought to stay airborne for as long as the sun is shining.
Among the flaws with the first prototype were poor support for the very thin and fragile PV panels, requiring much better support on the carbon fiber frame of the drone. To support the very large solar array, the first drone’s arms were made to be very long, but this interfered with maneuvering, so the second version got trimmed down and the array raised above the frame. This saved 70 grams of weight from the shortened tubs, which could then be added to the new panel supports.
After an initial test flight resulted in a crash when the PV output dropped, the need for a small battery buffer was clear, so this was added, along with a reduction of the array to 4×7 panels to get the same 20V as the battery. The array also had to be reinforced, as the thin array was very wobbly in addition to making it impossible to fly with any significant wind.
During the subsequent five hours long test flight it was clear that the resulting PV-powered drone was at the limits of its performance, with even some mild cloud cover forcing the battery to provide backup power.
For the test location a tree-sheltered site far away from windy Cape Town was also selected to provide the best possible shot, as keeping position with this drone was very hard. With the low weight and the big surface area of the solar panel array catching any little bit of wind, the GPS-based position keeping was essential. Unfortunately a few hours into the test this feature failed.
Manual position keeping is definitely possible, but [Luke] had to constantly counteract the drone wanting to drift off somewhere else. Ultimately the test flight ended when it was still very much a sunny South African summer’s day, due to the current provided by the array no longer keeping up with the power demands of the motors.
What this perhaps demonstrates best is that if you want to use PV solar power for your flying drone – especially with a significant payload – it’s probably best to use it for recharging while idle, or to extend the battery life by an appreciable amount. That said, props to [Luke] for persevering and making it work in the end.
2026-03-21 02:30:08
Power banks come in many sizes, and those that target construction sites are probably among the largest. The massive four ton unit based around lead-acid batteries which the [Buy it Fix it] YouTube channel got handed is a good example. Inside it are Victron CCGX inverters among a lot of other Victron electronics, with the control panel for the system throwing up an error that was deemed to be not user-serviceable. Naturally, this makes for a good challenge.
The exact error as thrown up on the central control panel is error #42, indicating a storage corruption issue on the device. According to the manual this means an issue with the internal flash memory that stores settings, serial numbers and WiFi credentials, requiring it to be shipped back to the manufacturer.
To further diagnose the issue, this Color Control unit was taken out of the power bank and coaxed onto a repair bench. This device has a whole host of Ethernet, CAN and other buses on the back, along with a USB host feature, but using the latter to reflash the firmware made no difference. Fortunately it’s just an embedded Linux system running on the System-on-Module and gaining remote SSH access was a snap due to easy root access.
Interestingly, running a diagnostic on the flash IC showed it to be still in good condition. Instead an ECC issue was logged that caused it to be marked as bad. This seems to have been due to the flash IC requiring 4 bits of ECC per 528 bytes, but the software using only a single bit. After reformatting and clearing the error it seems to have fixed the issue. Apparently it was just a weird configuration error that soft-bricked the device, raising the question of how that happened.
