A stepper motor can reach its target while the robot joint it drives is still in the wrong place. That gap comes from backlash in the gearbox, and it is the reason cheap 3D-printed robot arms feel sloppy. Arctos Robotics, the maker behind the open-source Arctos arm, built CLMD, an open-source ESP32-S3 stepper driver that reads a second encoder right at the gearbox output and corrects the joint…
Thousands of Lenovo ThinkSmart View displays were built for Microsoft Teams calls and are now turning up second-hand for very little money. They have no battery, decent microphones and a speaker, and they are designed to stay switched on. Reddit maker m_s_ik turned one into a dedicated Home Assistant voice assistant and wall panel by replacing Android with a minimal Debian and a single program…
Most people who want a flight tracker on a desk reach for a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI screen. Reddit maker Virtual-Bet-4566 went the other way: a 1986 Apple II monochrome monitor, a classic ESP32-WROOM-32 and exactly two wires. The green phosphor CRT now shows a live radar view of the aircraft overhead, and no video converter sits in between.
Composite video straight from a DAC pinThe…
Earlier this year we covered Sesame, an open-source ESP32 quadruped you can build for about $50 to $60. Its maker, Dorian Todd, has now made it fly. Sesame Drone walks somewhere, folds its legs out flat into propeller arms, takes off, lands and walks away again.
Two brains with no link between them
The robot is really two machines sharing one 2S LiPo.…
A laptop and an SDR dongle is still the default radio lab. Maker SAMS0N1TE is collapsing that stack into a pocket multitool called LakeShark: open-source firmware that turns ESP32-P4 boards into portable scanners for ADS-B, P25, FM, pagers, LoRa and more. Hackster covered the project, and the code lives on GitHub under GPL-3.0.
ESP32-P4 boards, SX1262 or LR2021Supported hardware…
No firmware, no battery, no app. YouTuber ALTco built a palm-sized solar robot pet that wanders toward light using only analog BEAM circuits. Hackster covered the project on 5 Nov. The idea came after looking after frogs: he wanted a companion that mostly looks after itself, so the robot harvests energy from a solar cell and spends it in short motion bursts.
Miller solar engine and…
Most "3D" LED projects are flat panels that only look deep from one angle. Maker AncientJames took the harder path with Vortex: two LED panels mounted back to back, spun at high speed, and driven by a Raspberry Pi 4 so the image hangs in a volume you can walk around. Hackaday covered the build on 5 Nov, and the software, simulator and CAD for the printed parts are on GitHub.
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Phones on this mesh need no cell signal of their own. Reddit maker EaseAlert5864 built a Raspberry Pi 4 cyberdeck that sits as the only uplink for an off-grid Wi-Fi HaLow mesh running OpenMANET. ATAK and iTAK clients join the mesh for chat, video and location, while the deck bridges traffic to a TAK server over Tailscale. If the uplink drops, the mesh keeps working on its own and the deck…
Most ESP32 handhelds pick one job. Reddit maker leetcodedemon built both: a click-wheel music player on one face and a Game Boy Advance emulator on the other, sharing one custom 4-layer PCB and a screen that physically swivels. Hall sensors tell the firmware which side is up. The build is still a prototype, but the demo video and the ~176 upvotes on r/esp32 show how far a careful board layout…
Old aircraft panels still look better than any flat graph on a monitor. Reddit maker Night-Caps put that look on his desk: four aircraft-style gauges driven by an Arduino that reads live PC hardware data from HWiNFO over serial. The needles move with CPU and GPU temperature, load, GPU power and RAM, and the post landed near the top of r/arduino with about 750 upvotes.
Switec steppers…
A leftover LCD does not have to stay in the parts drawer. Reddit maker Engineeroids turned a spare ST7735 and an ESP32 DevKit V1 into a from-scratch Game Boy emulator handheld that runs Pokemon, Zelda, Tetris and Contra. The post drew about 650 upvotes on r/esp32, and Hackster followed with a write-up on 5 Nov. Everything sits on a 7x9 cm perfboard: screen, analog joystick, two buttons and the…
Robots that work both in water and on land usually carry two propulsion systems, such as propellers for swimming and wheels or legs for land, and pay for it in weight, power and complexity. SAWbot, built by researchers at the Bio-Inspired and Medical Robotics Lab (Zarrouk Lab) at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, swims with a continuous travelling wave along a flexible fin, the way an eel…
