We love clocks, but we especially love unusual timepieces that aren’t just about showing the hour of the day. [Simone Giertz] built a flip clock moon phase tracker for a friend.

While in Egypt for Cairo Maker Faire, [Giertz] and [dina Amin] found some old flip clocks at a flea market and had to have them. [Amin] mentioned wanting to make a moon phase tracker with one, and [Giertz] decided to try her hand at making her own version. A side quest in more comfortable flying is included with the price of admission, but the real focus is the process of figuring out how to replicate the flip clocks original mechanism in a different size and shape.

[Giertz] cut out 30 semi-circle flaps from polystyrene and then affixed vinyl cut-outs to the flaps. The instructions for the assembly suggest that this might not be the best way to do it, and that printing stickers to affix to the flaps might work better since the cut vinyl turned out pretty fiddly. We really like the part where she built a grid jig to determine the optimal placement of the beams to keep the flaps in the right position after a disheartening amount of difficulties doing it in a more manual way. Her approach of letting it rest for twenty minutes before coming back to it is something you might find helpful in your own projects.

Best of all, if you want to build your own, the files are available for the flip moon station on the Yetch website. You’ll have to come up with your own method to drive it though as that isn’t in the files from what we saw.

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Recently in material science news from China we hear that [Hailin Peng] and his team at Peking University just made the world’s fastest transistor and it’s not made of silicon. Before we tell you about this transistor made from bismuth here’s a whirlwind tour of the history of the transistor.

The Bipolar Junction Transistor (BJT, such as NPN and PNP) was invented by Bell Labs in 1947. Later came Transistor-Transistor Logic (TTL) made with BJTs. The problem with TTL was too much power consumption.

Enter the energy-efficient Field-Effect Transistor (FET). The FET is better suited to processing information as it is voltage-controlled, unlike the BJT which is current-controlled. Advantages of FETs include high input impedance, low power consumption, fast switching speed, being well suited to Very-Large-Scale Integration (VLSI), etc.

The cornerstone of Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) technology which came to replace TTL was a type of FET known as the Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET). The type of MOSFET most commonly used in CMOS integrated circuits is the Enhancement-mode MOSFET which is normally off and needs gate voltage to conduct.

A transistor’s technology generation is given with the “process node”, in nanometers (nm). This used to mean the size of the smallest feature that could be fabricated, but these days it’s just a marketing term (smaller is “better”). Planar CMOS MOSFETs were initially dominant (through ~28nm), then came SOI MOSFETs (28nm to 16nm), then FinFETs (16nm to 5nm), and now finally Gate-All-Around FETs (GAAFETs, 3nm and beyond).

All of that in order to say that this new transistor from [Hailin Peng] and his team is a GAAFET. It’s made from bismuth oxyselenide (Bi₂O₂Se) for the channel, and bismuth selenite oxide (Bi₂SeO₅) as the gate material. See the article for further details.

Keep in mind that at this point in time we only have a prototype from a lab and the gory details about how to mass-produce these things, assuming that’s even possible, haven’t yet been worked out. We have previously discussed the difficulty of manufacturing state-of-the-art transistors. If you’re interested in bismuth be sure to check out how to use bismuth for desoldering.

hackaday.com/2025/05/16/new-bi…

Da qualche settimana nella redazione di Ristretti Orizzonti, storica rivista del carcere di Padova scritta da persone detenute, lavorano otto detenuti in meno, su una quarantina in totale. Sono quelli provenienti dall’Alta Sicurezza, la sezione del carcere riservata a persone condannate per alcuni tipi di reati associativi in cui si è normalmente sottoposti a una sorveglianza più stretta: non lavorano più in redazione per via di una recente circolare sulla gestione di questa categoria di detenuti diffusa dal Dipartimento dell’amministrazione penitenziaria (DAP), l’ufficio del ministero della Giustizia che si occupa di carceri

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The Mac mini is the closest to an Apple-based SBC you can get, so it lends itself to unusual portable computers. [Scott Yu-Jan] is back to tackle a portable build using the latest and greatest M4 mini.

[Yu-Jan] walks us through his thought process of how to maximize the portability of the system without all that tedious mucking about with setting up a separate keyboard, monitor, and the mini while on the go. With the more complicated electronics, the monitor risked tipping the keyboard over when attached, particularly since [Yu-Jan] isn’t a fan of batteries for his portables.

By affixing the Mac mini to the side of the keyboard, it makes the whole thing easier to slip into a bag without being overly thick. We get a peek into his iterative process as well when he evaluates the build and decides that the closing of the lid wasn’t what he was hoping for. By adding some TPU rests for the monitor to rest on in the closed position, he says it’s really brought the whole project up a notch. We certainly have had our own projects where one little detail really moves it from sketchy to polished, and we appreciate when makers clue us in on where that happened for them.

You may recognize [Yu-Jan] from our previous coverage of his older portable all-in-one Mac mini and this luggable version where he explains why he doesn’t like laptops. If you like your computers more stationary, how about some G4 iMacs with the newer internals from an M-series mini?

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hackaday.com/2025/05/16/a-port…

Remember The Clapper? It was a home automation tool (of sorts) that let you turn appliances on and off by clapping. [Kevin O’Connor] has built something rather similar, if more terrifying. It’s called The Screamer.

The build is based around a Sonoff S31 smart switch. [Kevin] selected an off-the-shelf device because he wanted something that was safe to use with mains power out of the box. But specifically, he selected the S31 because it has an ESP8266 inside that’s easy to reprogram with the aid of ESPHome. He ended up hooking up a whole extra ESP32 with an INMP441 microphone over I2S to do the scream detection. This was achieved with a simple algorithm that looked for high amplitude noises with lots of energy in the 1000 – 4000 Hz frequency range. When a scream is detected, it flips a GPIO pin which is detected by the S31, which then toggles the state of the smart switch in turn. Job done.

It’s a simple project that does exactly what it says on the tin. It’s The Screamer! If you’d like to learn more about the original Clapper that inspired this build, we’ve looked at that before, too. Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own excuses to scream at the lights and walls in your home, please only notify the tipsline if it has something vaguely to do with electronics or hackery.

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For a while now part of my email signature has been a quote from a Hackaday commenter insinuating that an article I wrote was created by a “Dumb AI”. You have my sincerest promise that I am a humble meatbag scribe just like the rest of you, indeed one currently nursing a sore shoulder due to a sporting injury, so I found the comment funny in a way its writer probably didn’t intend. Like many in tech, I maintain a skepticism about the future role of large-language-model generative AI, and have resisted the urge to drink the Kool-Aid you will see liberally flowing at the moment.

Hackaday Is Part Of The Machine

As you’ll no doubt be aware, these large language models work by gathering a vast corpus of text, and doing their computational tricks to generate their output by inferring from that data. They can thus create an artwork in the style of a painter who receives no reward for the image, or a book in the voice of an author who may be struggling to make ends meet. From the viewpoint of content creators and intellectual property owners, it’s theft on a grand scale, and you’ll find plenty of legal battles seeking to establish the boundaries of the field.

Anyway, once an LLM has enough text from a particular source, it can do a pretty good job of writing in that style. ChatGPT for example has doubtless crawled the whole of Hackaday, and since I’ve written thousands of articles in my nearly a decade here, it’s got a significant corpus of my work. Could it write in my style? As it turns out, yes it can, but not exactly. I set out to test its forging skill.

In Which I Meet My Digital Impostor

A couple of weeks ago I covered the news of the impending re-entry of a failed Soviet Venus mission stuck in orbit since 1972. It’s a fascinating story because the craft may survive the experience, and it’s possible that by the time you read this it might have been retrieved. I asked ChatGPT to provide me with a 200 word article on the story “in the voice of the Hackaday writer Jenny List”. Here’s what it came up with:

In the early days of the Space Race, the Soviet Union launched a bold bid to reach Venus: the Venera missions. Among them was Kosmos 482, a 1972 mission that never made it past Earth’s gravity. Now, over five decades later, its descent craft is finally coming home—with a bang.

Kosmos 482 was intended to deliver a lander to Venus, but due to a malfunction in its upper stage, it was stranded in a highly elliptical orbit around Earth. Encased in a semi-spherical titanium shell, the descent craft—designed to survive the brutal atmosphere of Venus—has been orbiting quietly, steadily losing altitude. By early May 2025, that orbit had decayed to a precarious 232 x 136 km, setting the stage for an uncontrolled reentry around May 10th.

Unlike typical space debris, Kosmos 482’s reentry carries a bit more drama. Built to endure Venus’s hellish surface, the lander is expected to survive Earth’s atmospheric plunge mostly intact. Impact predictions estimate it will hit the ground at about 65-70 m/s, roughly the speed of a meteorite, packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering.

With an orbital inclination of 51.95 degrees, it could come down anywhere between 52°N and 52°S, adding an element of unpredictability. One thing is certain: after 53 years in limbo, Kosmos 482 is finally coming back to Earth—whether we’re ready or not.

Reading it is a fascinating experience, because superficially it feels like a Hackaday piece. It has my vague style with some phrases such as “packing the punch of a 500 kg hunk of Soviet engineering“. It’s casual in its language, and it’s captured my wordiness; in contrast to the more terse style it does when for example I ask it to do the same thing in the voice of my colleague Al Williams. It fails though in several senses, I feel it doesn’t capture my sentence style and the very British way I use punctuation, it relies on far more figures than I would put in a piece, and perhaps most importantly it has no inference. It relies only on the facts it can find, indeed those figures are a sign of it overusing them, and it doesn’t go further in commenting on any likely outcomes. In my human-written version of the same piece I finished up by speculating on who would own it if retrieved, and anything of that nature is absent in its output.

Don’t Worry, Humans Still Needed

So it’s clear from the above that while it can write something which is superficially coverage of the same story in my voice when writing a Hackaday piece, it still fails at the task in hand. Where we would try to give a little introduction, background and comment to the story, it instead presents only a summary of facts it has found. The fact that it can’t infer beyond the story is reassuring, because it means we meat-based Hackaday scribes still have the edge. There are many people who will tell you to look for certain words as clues to AI-written text, but the truth is much simpler. Look for the human touch.

hackaday.com/2025/05/16/chatgp…