Find the latest electronics industry news covering new electronics components releases in various electronics domains such as embedded, power electronics, analog, digital, IoT and Automotive industries.
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…
BrainChip has launched the AKD1500 Raspberry Pi 5 Dev Kit, a ready-to-run box for trying its Akida neuromorphic AI accelerator, priced at $1,295. Inside the metal case is a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8 GB of RAM, the official Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ and an AKD1500 M.2 card. Neuromorphic chips process data as sparse events, closer to how neurons fire, instead of crunching every value in every frame,…
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…
Most ESP32 garden projects stop at a soil moisture sensor and a pump. Reddit user Repulsive_Ant_7167 went much further: an indoor aeroponic lettuce grow room where every job, from misting the roots to dosing nutrients, is handled by its own ESP32. There are 12 of them, driving 8 four-channel MOSFET boards, and they all report into one "Garden Manager" spreadsheet. The post became one of the…
Wax motors are the quiet actuators inside washing machine door locks, radiator valves and car thermostats: heat a block of wax, it melts and expands, and that expansion pushes a piston. Nobody thinks of them as precision parts. BubsBuilds built his own "waxtuator" to find out how precise one could be, and with careful temperature control it held a gap of less than 5 microns for twelve hours.…
Smart blood pressure monitors that sync to an app usually cost more than plain ones, and many push your readings into somebody else's cloud account. Tomasz Burzy of Mellow_Labs wanted his readings in his own self-hosted health tracker instead, so he kept a basic A&D UA-611 monitor and taught it Wi-Fi from the outside. An ESP32-CAM on a 3D-printed arm looks at the LCD, reads systolic,…
Wi-Fi is usually the first thing to drain a battery-powered gadget, which is why most low-power sensors use Bluetooth LE or Thread instead. Nordic Semiconductor wants to change that with the nRF71 Series, a single chip that combines Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE and Thread with its own processors and, on one version, an NPU for edge AI. Nordic claims up to 20 times lower standby power than its current…
Most digital cameras are closed boxes: you get the buttons, menus and file formats the maker chose. Reddit user jpotter124 built the opposite. The R1 Mini is a 100 mm cube with a Raspberry Pi 5 inside, an interchangeable-lens HQ camera sensor at the front and real buttons for the settings photographers change most. It shoots RAW DNG stills and CinemaDNG video, runs for five to six hours while…
Most hobby hexapods walk by playing back a fixed sequence of leg moves, which is why switching gaits usually means stopping first. The hexapod built by ForgeVolt does not stop. It blends from a fast tripod walk into a tetrapod or ripple gait while it is still moving, leans into curves, and keeps its body level when the floor tilts under it. All of the leg math runs on one ESP32-S3, and the…
A toothbrush head is a plastic stick with bristles, so why does Philips put a microchip in it? YouTuber Circuit Helper wanted to know, so he built a small NFC reader, read what a Sonicare brush head stores about the person using it, rewrote that data, and finally used an old brush head as a key to unlock his Mac. The chip sits under a small brown dot near the base of the head and needs no…
