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 count those seconds precisely.

It’s a simple project, both conceptually and electrically. All it does is keep time and count the seconds in the day– a button press switches between counting down, counting up, and HH:MM:SS. In every mode, though, the number displayed will change at one Hertz, which we appreciate as being in the spirit of the challenge. There are only four components: an Arduino Nano, a DS3231 RTC module, a SSD1306 128×64 OLED module, and a momentary pushbutton. At the moment it appears this project is only on breadboard, which is a shame– we think it deserves to have a fancy enclosure and pride of place on the wall. Wouldn’t you be more productive if you could watch those 86,400 seconds ticking away in real time? We think it would be motivating.

Perhaps it will motivate you to create something for our One Hertz Challenge. Plenty of seconds to go until the deadline on August 19th, after all. If you’d rather while away the time reading, you can check out some of [danjovic]’s other projects, like this Cistertian-inspired clock, or this equally-inscruitable timekeeper that uses binary-coded octal.

*Following a google search, he was an American college basketball coach in the mid-20th century.

hackaday.com/2025/07/14/2025-o…

There’s something ominous about robots taking over jobs that humans are suited to do. Maybe you don’t want a job turning a wrench or pushing a broom, but someone does. But then there are the jobs no one wants to do or physically can’t do. Robots fighting fires, disarming bombs, or cleaning up nuclear reactors is something most people will support. But can you climb through a water pipe from the inside? No? There are robots that are available from several commercial companies and others from university researchers from multiple continents.

If you think about it, it makes sense. For years, companies that deal with pipes would shoot large slugs, or “pigs”, through the pipeline to scrape them clean. Eventually, they festooned some pigs with sensors, and thus was born the smart pig. But now that it is possible to make tiny robots, why not send them inside the pipe to inspect and repair?

Why?

It makes sense that anything you can do from inside the pipe is probably going to be cheaper than digging up buried pipe and either repairing or replacing it. For example, 4 cm robots from the University of Sheffield can inspect pipes from inside, cooperate in swarms, and locate leaks that would be nearly impossible to find conventionally.

In fact, robots inside pipes aren’t a totally new idea. But in the past, the pipes had to be very large to fit the robot. This newer class of pipe inspecting and repairing robots can fit inside smaller pipes like you might find in a city’s water supply. For example, the Easy-Sight X5 (see the video below) fits in a 100 mm pipe, and it is big when compared to some of the newer competitors.

youtube.com/embed/2-V6veJiqdI?…

Not Just Inspection

The Carnegie Mellon robot is modular, so it can handle different kinds of jobs. A mobility module has two-inch wheels and can haul up to sixty pounds of payload. One of those payloads is an applicator for a special resin that can repair leaks.

The resin starts out with the consistency of soft-serve ice cream but quickly hardens as it shoots out of a spinning nozzle that creates a spring-like inner coating spiraling around the inside of the pipe.

The robot’s no speed demon. It can inspect about nine miles of pipe in eight hours. However, when repairing, the same time period is sufficient to fix 1.8 miles of pipe. Even big names like GE are working on similar technology that will spray epoxy to form a new pipe inside an old pipe.

youtube.com/embed/_Um9bD3VLLM?…

DIY

Could you do this yourself? There’s no reason you couldn’t make an inspection robot. [Stargate Systems] did using a Raspberry Pi Zero, and you can check it out in the video below. Repair might be a bit more complex, but might be workable with a little ingenuity.

youtube.com/embed/adGp3PADKsk?…

Dirty Jobs

Even if you and your submarine were shrunk down, you probably don’t want this job. There are probably dozens of jobs you can’t or don’t want to do. Will you build a robot to do it? Let us know in the comments or — better — built it and leave us a tip.

We wonder why these robots don’t look more like snakes.

hackaday.com/2025/07/14/robots…

It is virtually a rite of passage for C programmers to realize that they can write their own cooperative multitasking system. C is low-level enough, and there are several ways to approach the problem, so, like Jedi light sabers, each one is a little bit different. [Christoph Wolcher] took his turn, and not only is his system an elegant hack, if that’s not an oxymoron, it is also extremely well documented.

Before you dig in, be warned. [Christoph] fully admits that you should use an RTOS. Or Rust. Besides, after he finished, he discovered the protothreads library, which does a similar task in a different way that is both more cool and more terrible all at the same time.

Once you dig in, though, you’ll see the system relies on state machines. Just to prove the point, he writes a basic implementation, which is fine, but hard to parse and modify. Then he shows a simple implementation using FreeRTOS, which is fine except for, you know, needing FreeRTOS.

Using a simple set of macros, it is possible to get something very similar to the RTOS version that runs independently, like the original version. Most of the long code snippets show you what code the macros generate. The real code is short and to the point.

Multiprocessing is a big topic. You can have processes, threads, fibers, and coroutines. Each has its pros and cons, and each has its place in your toolbox.

hackaday.com/2025/07/14/corout…

Il Fairphone 6.

Nella sua confezione minimalista in cartoncino FSC, decorato con inchiostro di soya.

Prenderò un giorno di ferie per prepararmelo come si deve.

😁😁😁

#Fairphone #fairphone6

Negli ultimi mesi la procura ha messo all’amministrazione giudiziaria per motivi simili anche la Manufactures Dior, società italiana controllata dal gruppo francese Dior, la Giorgio Armani Operations, che si occupa dell’ideazione e della produzione di capi di abbigliamento e accessori per il gruppo Armani, la Alviero Martini Spa, l’azienda di moda i cui prodotti sono famosi soprattutto per le mappe disegnate sui tessuti, e la Valentino Bags Lab srl, un’azienda controllata dalla società di moda Valentino che produce borse a suo marchio.

ilpost.it/2025/07/14/loro-pian…

Anche l’azienda di abbigliamento Loro Piana sarà messa in amministrazione giudiziaria per un’indagine sullo sfruttamento dei lavoratori

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