Mechanical Seven-Segment Display, Smaller and Better Than the Original

One thing we love here at Hackaday is when we get to track the evolution of a project over time. Seeing a project grow over time is pretty typical — scope creep is real, after all. But watching a project …read more

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DIY 8-Bit Computer Knows All the Tricks

Some projects are a rite of passage within their respected fields. For computer science, building one’s own computer from scratch is certainly among those projects. Of course, we’re not talking about buying components online and snapping together a modern x86 machine. We mean building something closer to a fully-programmable 8-bit …read more

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A Unique Display Makes An Unusual Clock

Do you know the clock speed of the computer you’re reading this article on? Maybe Hackaday readers are more likely to reply “Yes!” to that question than the general public, but if there’s a takeaway it’s that for most computer users their clock speed is now an irrelevance. It’s quick …read more

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Building This Mechanical Digital Clock Took Balls

In the neverending quest for unique ways to display the time, hackers will try just about anything. We’ve seen it all, or at least we thought we had, and then up popped this purely mechanical digital clock that uses nothing but steel balls to display the time. And we absolutely …read more

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Displaying Incoming Server Attacks by Giving Server Logs a Scoreboard

In the server world, it’s a foregone conclusion that ports shouldn’t be exposed to the greater Internet if they don’t need to be. There are malicious bots everywhere that will try and randomly access anything connected to a network, and it’s best just to shut them off completely. If you …read more

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Mechanical Seven-Segment Display Really Sticks Out from the Pack

We’ve been displaying numbers using segmented displays for almost 120 years now, an invention that predates the LEDs that usually power the ubiquitous devices by a half-dozen decades or so. But LEDs are far from the only way to run a seven-segment display — check out this mechanical seven-segment display …read more

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Mechanical Seven-Segment Display Mixes Art with Hacking

We’re not sure what to call this one. Is it a circuit sculpture? Sort of, but it moves, so perhaps it’s a kinetic circuit sculpture. Creator [Tomohiro Tsuchita] calls it “something beautiful but totally useless,” which we find a tad harsh. But whatever you call it, we think this mechanical …read more

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Daisy Chained Seven Segment Art Display

This seven segment art display makes use of a 81 seven segment red common cathode LED displays. The LEDs are arranged onto 100x100mm boards that each contain an Arduino Nano and 9 seven segment displays, daisy chained through three-pin headers located on the sides of the boards. The pins (power, …read more

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Making A Digital Clock A Little More Intuitive

Digital clocks are extremely useful and generally considered pretty easy to read. However, they can sometimes have rather arcane interfaces for setting the time and alarms. For [Michael Wessel], he noted that in the 1980s he had to routinely help his grandparents set their clocks for this very reason. That …read more

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Tiny Two-Digit Thermometer Has Long Battery Life

Like most of his work, this tiny two-digit thermometer shows that [David Johnson-Davies] has a knack for projects that make efficient use of hardware. No pin is left unused between the DS18B20 temperature sensor, the surface mount seven-segment LED displays, and the ATtiny84 driving it all. With the temperature flashing …read more

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