"Want to Know? Here Are the Competition Winners for the 2025 One-Hertz High-Frequency Task"

The One-Hertz Challenge, a contest organised by a popular website, has recently announced its winners. The challenge, which required participants to do something once a second, attracted over a hundred entries since it was announced in June.

The Top Contenders

The first-place winner is "the electromechanicalanalogdigitalclock," a project created by Rob Hagedorn. This clock combines physics and electronics to extract order from a seemingly stochastic process. Tim, the winner from January, took a unique approach by using candle flames as a time base for his project. Tim's project uses a wire sticking into the flame to trigger a capacitive sensor input on a CH32xxx microcontroller.

In the second place, we have [Andrew Tudoroi]'s RPi TinyNumberHat9 clock with bubble displays. [Mark Valentine] also impressed the judges with his mind-bending, capacitor-free timer.

Unique Entries in Different Categories

The "Clockwork" category, targeted at horologically inclined participants, invited them to turn their one-per-second timebase into a unique and interesting timepiece. [Sean B] entered a "Nothing but NAND" Nixie clock, while [Paul Gallagher] created a super annoying "One Hurts" clock. [hayday] made a DCF77 clock from the 2022 Supercon Badge.

The "Timelords" category saw [CuriousMarc] restore a vintage atomic clock. [Lauri Pirttiaho] submitted a cheap and simple GPS sync for quartz wall clocks.

The "Ridiculous" category, which encouraged participants to find the least practical way to generate a 1-pps pulse train, saw entries like [Brian Stuparyk]'s electromechanical function generator and [alnwlsn]'s pitchblende-powered "atomic" clock. [Simon Newhouse] submitted a Nixie-based frequency counter clock, and [Tom Goff]'s entry was a Bletchley-inspired Logic Bombe.

Prizes for the Winners

The contest's top three winners each receive a $150 gift certificate from DigiKey. The One-Hertz Challenge, with its unique and challenging format, continues to inspire creators and innovators in the field of electronics and physics.