Some people want to watch the world burn. Others, however, will take the simplest of instructions and deliberately subvert them in the most creative manner possible in order to cause maximum irritation—and I love those people.
Case in point, IT manager Mike Coats, who has submitted his entry for Hackaday's One Hertz Challenge, the Metronalmost. The competition requires creators to design devices that beat at a rate of exactly once per second. The Metronalmost doesn't (via Hackaday). In fact, a huge amount of effort has gone into making this particular time-keeper do anything but.
Unlike a regular metronome, the Metronalmost drives its beater with a hobby servo that never, ever takes exactly one second to sweep from one side to the other. That's because it's been programmed with a notch function in the middle of a traditional Gaussian distribution, which is in turn used on a lookup table to map values from a random number generator. I think. I'll allow Coats to explain the rest of this, as maths was never my strong point:
"This new number mapping function maps 0.0 to 0.0 and 1.0 to 1.0 as normal, but maps 0.49 to 0.45 and 0.50 to 0.54. The discontinuity means a value of 0.5 can never be generated. Applying this mapping over a period of between 0.5 and 1.5 seconds will give us our almost, but never quite, 1 Hz metronome."
Devilish. All that's left is to contain this hellish device within a deliberately awful faux-woodgrain cardboard chassis, and to list some tempos on the outside. As Coats points out, real metronomes often have a list of tempos like largo, adagio, or allegro. The Metronalmost's list of tempos, however, includes "encumbered", "dial-up", "impulse", "sub-light", and "warp."
Of course. Coats says that, unsurprisingly, standing in the presence of the Metronalmost is a frustrating experience:
"Leaving the Metronalmost running for any length of time really seems to put your nerves on edge. You can't quite get a handle on when the next tick will occur, and that seems to make you feel especially uneasy. It feels like my heart actually starts to race when I'm in the room with it for more than a few minutes."
Well, you only have yourself to blame, Mike. Hackaday appears to have taken the entry in good humour at least, joking that it's currently gunning for last place in their standings.
I can only presume that now it's been considered for entry, Coats will place the Metronalmost in a lead-lined box and bury it in his back garden. Some things are not meant for this world, after all, so if you ask me, this machine is best kept away from the general public. Excellent work.
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