Mysterious Files PH

We’ve all done it before: a simple project that escalated to the point of extreme overengineering.
But what’s less common is [Lee Hutchinson]’s digital clock, whose case is (somewhat-successfully) designed by LLMs!

A clock needs time synchronization, and a digital one needs some code to drive the display. An avid systemd user, [Lee] had no trouble at all setting up all the users and services needed to keep the time synchronized. Some rusty Python skills with some aid of the dreaded Claude Code later, [Lee] had a script to actually show the time too.

But now comes the interesting part: the case. Now, [Lee] isn’t really a mechanical engineer, and he doesn’t really like Autodesk Fusion’s UX. Most projects would see their creators just grit their teeth and get on with it. But here, in an experiment we haven’t often seen before, [Lee] connects LLMs to Fusion’s new MCP server feature! Did it work? Surprisingly enough, yes. Kind of. The local Qwen model got most of the way there on one request, but still made mistakes for the other. However, another pass with the more powerful Claude models got the job done.

But there’s much more to the story; [Lee] goes into more detail, and talks about the assembly process, over at Ars Technica.

The sport of fencing requires keeping score, just like so many other similar pastimes. When their club’s existing scoring rig broke, [jc0025] stepped up to build a scoring box of their own, using the typical tools of the maker trade.

The brains of the operation is an Arduino Nano, running the venerable ATmega328P. It’s set up to drive a pair of 8×8 WS2812B addressable LED panels. It’s also hooked up to a pair of fencing socket blocks, which hook up to the lamé (jacket), weapon, and guard of each player for electronically scoring hits. The Arduino is thus programmed to respond to various conditions, lighting the LEDs in turn. For example, the tip of one player’s weapon hitting the other player’s lamé will fire a colored light, allowing the hit to be scored. Meanwhile, a tip hitting the floor will fire a white light, indicating off-target. There’s also a buzzer for sonic indication, as well. Everything is wrapped up in a tidy 3D-printed housing, while power is courtesy of a USB-C charger hooked up to the unit.

If you’re looking to replace some old broken fencing scoring gear on the cheap, this project is probably a good place to start. We’ve featured some other great scoreboard projects over the years, too. Meanwhile, if you’re whipping up your custom own gear for your local sporting club, we might like to hear about it on the tipsline.

Silicon-based CMOS camera sensors are cheap and plentiful, but they’re rarely used to their full potential: they can detect a greater range of wavelengths in the infrared spectrum than they can in the visible spectrum, but in most cameras this is blocked by an IR-cut filter. [Project 326]’s infrared camera system reverses this: it records infrared images in color while blocking out visible light.

The system uses three USB webcams, each with its IR cut filter removed and replaced with a different dichroic IR band-pass filter. One filter is centered at 750 nm, one at 850 nm, and one at 940 nm. There is no band overlap; in testing, each camera only detected an infrared flashlight tuned to its own filter wavelength. The original cameras didn’t hold the sensors in a consistent position, so [Project 326] designed new housings. Using three lenses, each with distinct aberrations, introduced some difficulties in alignment. [Project 326] originally intended to use a pair of beam-splitting prisms with only one lens, but this proved too difficult to align using 3D-printed frames.

A Raspberry Pi records a separate monochromatic stream from each camera, which can then be processed into a composite color video. The first frames need to be manually aligned, but afterwards a script can apply the alignment to the rest of the video. Finally, the channels are mapped to colors, with the precise mapping being freely changeable. There were some few unexpected issues: each camera has its own, not terribly precise, local oscillator, and they drifted apart by about one or two frames per minute. Parallax error, on the other hand, was less severe than might be expected: at close range it’s noticeable, but by a distance of 35 meters, it represents less than one pixel of distortion.

The resulting images look great, and it’s easy to forget that they’re being captured without the use of any visible light. We’ve seen a similar technique (though extending into the visible range) used to recreate the surreal effect of Aerochrome film.

Would you buy a broken device, fix it, then return the repaired item? [Team Repair] hopes you will.

Many people would rather repair what they have than have to get a new device and deal with all the annoyances of shopping and getting used to a new item. The problem is, most people don’t have any experience fixing their broken electronics and are intimidated by the process. [Team Repair] has found that helping people through the process the first time is a big confidence boost, especially when they have a test piece to work with.

[Team Repair] started with workshops and now has a “Fixers Club” subscription box for 8-14 year olds where they will send a broken device every three months to fix. After the device is repaired, it gets sent back into Team Repair, or iFixit in the US, to be broken again and sent to the next fixer. For grownups, there is a similar smartphone repair kit, but it’s currently waitlisted. If you’re in the UK, they even have a classroom program if you want to recruit larger groups into your fixer corps.

Curious about other ways to get into repairing your own things? We don’t recommend starting with smart rings, but learning analog repairs like zippers or turning a laptop into a desktop could be good places to start?

The Playdate is a small handheld console with a dedicated fanbase. Among them is [Cristina Ramos], who recently decided to try and push the limits of the hardware by implementing a 3D renderer for the platform.

[Cristina] began by implementing a raycaster. This is a very simple way to do 3D on limited hardware, and this technique was used by some early games like Wolfenstein 3D. However, for [Cristina], it was more a test to get an idea of the performance limitations of the Playdate. After getting her feet wet with that, she stepped up to implementing a renderer that relied on binary space partitioning, which could load map files in the same format used by the classic Quake engine. There was naturally plenty of work to do to handle things like texture mapping and lighting, too, particularly given the vagaries of working with the Playdate’s 1-bit monochrome screen. Using a simplistic, cel-shaded like approach for textures gave things a good look while preserving visual readability on the low-resolution screen.

The 3D engine and associated game remain a work in progress for [Cristina] — we look forward to seeing where the project goes next. We’ve seen similar projects on resource-limited platforms before, too.

I was told you couldn't do 3D on the Playdate, so I did it.Then I was told there was no way I could create exterior levels like those in Mirror's Edge, so I proved them wrong again.

— Cristina Ramos (@saffroncr.bsky.social) 2026-07-22T08:57:09.594Z

Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other ‘AI’ tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects.

The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.

In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only ‘license whitewashing’, but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding ‘AI’ datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized.

Also covered is also the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies. Even if we ignore that such LLM-tools are destroying the cognitive abilities of its users, there’s an argument to be made that if LLM-scraping is disallowed, then it’s consistent to also not allow LLM-generated code.

In the Terms of Use you can see these changes, both for LLMs and for cryptocurrency projects.

Thanks to [mk-fg] for the tip.

[Myth Made] has a goal to get into writing. However, she likes to do things the aesthetic way, rather than the easy way. Thus, she has eschewed simple word processing on a conventional computer, instead choosing to build a remarkably attractive writing deck styled after a classic typewriter.

The build began with a mechanical keyboard with a compact layout. The square keycaps were swapped out for custom 3D printed versions that were rounded to suit the desired look. [Myth Made] used a neat technique where the caps were colored in with a paint marker and then ran through a laser engraver to bond the paint to the surface to make all the key markings.

With the input side sorted, the rest of the build could progress. The typewriter shell was printed in multiple parts, and then welded together with acetone. This was then covered with an ABS-acetone solution that helped remove some of the surface artifacts, before priming and paint. As for the electronics side, a Raspberry Pi Zero runs the show, hooked up to a Waveshare e-ink display which can be cranked up and down like a piece of paper coming out of a typewriter. There’s also a lovely 7-segment display which displays the current word count.

It’s a fun build that looks utterly joyous to use. Sometimes leaning into the aesthetic side of a project is what makes it so magical.