Small, cheap electric pickups barely exist yet, so Michael Pick made one. He bought a 2017 BMW i3 REx with more than 100,000 miles on it from an online auction, sight unseen, cut away the back half of its cabin and turned it into a two-seat electric pickup with a real load bed. His target was a usable electric truck for under $10,000 in total, with more than 300 miles of combined range from…
Most humanoid robots you see walking on stage are closed products with closed software. Asimov 1 is the opposite. Menlo Research, a team in Singapore, has published the full mechanical CAD, electrical schematics and PCBs, simulation models, firmware and walking policy for its 1.2 m, 35 kg humanoid, and on day 366 of the project the robot was out in public at the SWITCH event in Singapore,…
Talking robots usually have a lag problem: by the time a large language model has decided what "stop" means, the robot has already hit the wall. Maker Asten (beasaltfish) ran into exactly this while turning a $4 toy robot into a voice-controlled AI companion for their kid, and fixed it with a second, much smaller model. A fine-tuned 0.8-billion-parameter "reflex" model hears every command…
Speech recognition on a microcontroller usually means a short list of fixed commands. Boumedine Billal has gone much further: his open-source project runs a full speech-to-text model live on an ESP32-P4, a chip that costs about $5. You talk into the board's microphone and any English sentence appears on its screen as you speak, with no Wi-Fi, no cloud and no neural accelerator. On the standard…
Most 3D-printed RC planes are slow foam-and-PLA cruisers. King Chaser is not. The Mach Initiative, a small team presented on camera by Josh Martin and Dan Sykes, has flown its 1-metre, 3D-printed jet for the first time, and it reached 273 mph (about 440 km/h) on a short private airfield. The team's goal is the Guinness World Record for the fastest jet-powered model aircraft, which currently…
Daniel Zellhuber's father lives in the Bavarian mountains, loves watching planes cross the sky, and does not use the internet. So instead of showing him a flight-tracking app, Daniel built him a small flight tracker in a picture frame. Whenever an airliner passes overhead, the colour e-paper screen shows the airline with its logo, flight number, route, aircraft type, speed and altitude. There…
An Arduino Uno has 2 KB of RAM, 32 KB of flash and a 16 MHz 8-bit ATmega328P. That is less memory than the 1982 ZX Spectrum had, and nowhere near enough to hold a frame of video. Even so, Smashcat has built a game engine that runs full arcade-style games on it at a locked 50 frames per second, straight to a TV over composite video made with just two resistors. It now runs four games: Manic…
Touchscreens are on phones, watches, fridges and car dashboards, but never on clothes, because a display has to bend, breathe and survive a washing machine. Researchers at the National University of Singapore say they have now cracked it. A team led by Assistant Professor Tural Khudiyev at the NUS College of Design and Engineering has built a fibre that is both a line of pixels and a touch…
The analog TV signals that old tube sets need stopped being broadcast almost 20 years ago, so when BorisDigital bought a 1995 Sony Watchman pocket CRT TV for 15 dollars at a thrift store, it had nothing to watch. A cheap analog TV transmitter board fixed that. Then he kept going. The result is a full 1990s-style TV station in a 10-inch home lab rack, built from six Raspberry Pis, two Raspberry…
The Nintendo Entertainment System was never meant to be a computer. It has a 6502-based CPU, 2 KB of RAM and two controller ports. Yet Throaty Mumbo has turned his NES into something that looks and behaves a lot like a 1990s desktop PC: a Windows-style desktop with a start menu, files and a trash bin, a USB keyboard and mouse, a MIDI keyboard, CD and DVD playback, and a web browser that can…
Large language models with hundreds of billions of parameters normally live in data centres, on servers with far more memory than any single-board computer. So it is a surprise to see one answer a question on an Arduino. In a project published on Arduino Project Hub, Jim Bruges ran GLM-5.3, a 744-billion-parameter model whose files take up about 419 GB, on an Arduino VENTUNO Q with just 16 GB…
Hioki is one of those Japanese test-equipment names that engineers associate with quality and with a high price, so a Hioki multimeter for 95 US dollars sounds like a fake. It isn't. The DT4215 is a genuine, Hioki-approved meter made in China and sold only for the Chinese market, and Dave Jones of EEVblog just bought one from AliExpress to tear it down. Inside he found input protection that is…
