Sometimes, there are too many choices in this world. My benchtop function generator can output a sine, square, or saw wave anywhere from 0.01 Hz up to 60 MHz? Way too many choices. At least, that’s what we suspect [Phil Weasel] was thinking when he built this Analog 1 Hz Sinewave Generator.

A KiCad rendering of [Phil]’s design[Phil]’s AWG (which in this case stands for Anything as long as it’s a 1 Hz sine Wave Generator) has another unique feature — it’s built (almost) entirely with op-amps. A lot of op-amps (37, by our count of the initial schematic he posted). His design is similar to a Phased Locked Loop (PLL) and boils down to a triangle wave oscillator. While a 1 Hz triangle wave would absolutely satisfy judges of the One Hertz Challenge, [Phil] had set out to make a sine wave. Using a feedback loop and some shaping/smoothing tricks (and more op-amps), he rounded off the sharp peaks into a nice smooth sine wave.

Sometimes we make things much more complicated than we need to, just to see if we can. This is one of those times. Are there much simpler ways to generate a sine wave? Yes — but not exclusively using op-amps! This entry brings stiff competition to the “Ridiculous” category of the 2025 One Hertz Challenge.

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A universal feature of traveling Europe as a Hackaday scribe is that when you sit in a hackerspace in another country and proclaim how nice a place it all is, the denizens will respond pessimistically with how dreadful their country really is. My stock response is to say “Hold my beer” and recount the antics of British politicians, but the truth is, the grass is always greener on the other side.

There’s one thing here in dear old Blighty that has me especially concerned at the moment though, and perhaps it’s time to talk about it here. The Online Safety Act has just come into force and is the UK government’s attempt to deal with what they perceive as the nasties on the Internet, and while some of its aspirations may be honourable, its effects are turning out to be a little chilling.

As might be expected, the Act requires providers to ensure their services are free of illegal material, and it creates some new offences surrounding sharing images without consent, and online stalking. Where the concern lies for me is in the requirement for age verification to ensure kids don’t see anything the government things they shouldn’t, which is being enforced through online ID verification. There are many reasons why this is of concern, but I’ll name the three at the top of my list.

As always, Ali has you covered.
As anyone who has helped their non technical friends secure their networks will tell you, nothing boosts technical expertise more than presenting a 13-year-old with an online restriction. It’s already been shown how a tech-savvy kid can use an AI generated fake ID to watch online smut, and I am thus certain that the Act just won’t work. Kids will trade ways to get round it just like they traded floppies full of dodgy JPGs in the playground back in the ’90s.

The scope of the Act extends way beyond merely the porn sites you might expect, so your average Brit is going to find themselves uploading their drivers’ licence or passport an awful lot. The probability of a data breach involving all that valuable data will approach one, and all those identities will be compromised. Making more laws won’t stop this happening, after all the very definition of a criminal is a person with a disregard for the law.

And finally, that broad scope is catching all manner of inoffensive and blameless online communities who don’t have the resources to put the age verification and other measures in place. Your classic car forum, a support group for people with mental health problems, even possibly Wikipedia. Of course it’s important to protect children from inappropriate content, but killing the British internet for everyone else shouldn’t be a side effect.

This issue is likely to rumble on for a while in the UK, as at the time of writing a petition for its reform stands around 350k signatures. Thus a further parliamentary debate seems very likely, and no doubt we’ll see a few of our overlords wriggling a little to avoid the inevitable repercussions. You can sign it if you’re a Brit, and meanwhile if you’d like to restore access to the internet that the rest of the world sees, you can join the hordes of Brits running to acquire VPN access.

Palace of Westminster header image: Diliff, CC BY-SA 2.5.

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Sometimes, we’re faced with what should be simple household tasks that we choose to make more difficult. Sure, you could buy a clock, hang it on your wall, and move on with your day, or could spend a week or two building the perfect one. [Nejc Koncan] was in one such situation recently when he needed some new overhead lighting. He wanted hexagonal lights — and since none of the off-the-shelf solutions met his exacting requirements, he built his own.

Unlike most of the cycling RGB hexagonal lighting solutions available on the market, [Nejc] wanted elegant white outlines that he could control via HomeAssistant. After some careful design and quite a bit of trial-and-error, he ended up with a highly modular and very professional-looking installation. The hexagons are constructed from LED strips set into aluminum extrusions, with junction PCBs at each intersection. To complete the look, all of the strips and wiring are hidden by diffusers that slot into the extrusions — and of course, the whole thing is open source.

We see lots of lighting projects here at Hackaday, and even other hexagonal lights — but this might just be one of the most refined. Sometimes it’s worth the extra effort to build a totally over-engineered custom solution.

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