Unveiled: The Successful Recipients of the 2025 One-Herz Challenge Revealed
Hackaday Contest Showcases Innovative Time-Keeping Devices
A recent Hackaday contest, themed around time and frequency, saw over a hundred entries showcasing a diverse range of creative and ingenious projects. The contest, announced in June, featured several categories including "Clockwork", "Coulda Used a 555", "Timelords", "Ridiculous", and "One Hurts".
In the "Coulda Used a 555" category, Tom Goff's Bletchley-inspired Logic Bombe and Mark Valentine's mind-bending, capacitor-free timer made notable impressions. Paul Gallagher's "One Hurts" clock, designed to be super annoying, and Mark's restoration of a vintage atomic clock for the "Timelords" category also caught the attention of the judges.
The "Ridiculous" category, which encouraged participants to generate a 1-pps pulse train in the least practical way, saw entries such as alnwlsn's pitchblende-powered "atomic" clock, Sean B's "Nothing but NAND" Nixie clock, and Tim's entry that used candle flames as a time base for the second-place position.
The first-place entry in the "Ridiculous" category was "the electromechanicalanalogdigitalclock", a project by Christian. The project that ranked in the top three of the 2025 One-Hertz Challenge, an earlier contest, was also a part of this category, although the specific names of the creators or their affiliation are not specified in the provided search results.
In the "Clockwork" category, hayday's DCF77 clock from the 2022 Supercon Badge, Andrew Tudoroi's RPi TinynumberHat9 clock, and Lauri Pirttiaho's cheap and simple GPS sync for quartz wall clocks stood out. Simon Newhouse's Nixie-based frequency counter clock also made a notable impression.
Each of the top three entries in the various categories received a $150 gift certificate from DigiKey. Some honorable mentions were also acknowledged in the article.
Will Carver's GPS-disciplined crystal-oven oscillator for the "Timelords" category and Brian Stuparyk's electromechanical function generator, which was a runner-up in the "Ridiculous" category, were among the other notable entries.
The Hackaday contest once again demonstrated the creativity and ingenuity of its participants, with each entry showcasing unique and innovative approaches to time-keeping and frequency generation.
