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 hobby robots that "follow a ball" just chase a colour blob. Sector 07 built one that plays a full game of fetch. His 3D-printed robot, called Fetch, uses an Arduino UNO Q and a custom vision model trained in Edge Impulse to find an orange ball, drive to it, grab it with two arms, then look for the owner's hand and bring the ball back, with no remote control. It is his first autonomous…
When his local airport tore down its old control tower, one maker got the chance to salvage two vintage wind meters from the controllers' console: a wind speed dial (0-100 mph) and a wind direction dial (0-360 degrees), both heavy steel cans with glass faces and night lamps. Instead of putting them on a shelf, he made them show live wind again, fed from his own weather station and driven by a…
Every robot leaves the lab with its sensors already bolted on, picked from a best guess about where it will end up. Researchers at the University of Tartu in Estonia and the Italian Institute of Technology have built a moth-shaped robot that can add one later. They pumped an "artificial blood" through veins in its 3D-printed wings, shone UV light on a patch for about a minute, and that patch…
Most DIY AI voice assistants end up as a dev board in a plastic box. Huy Vector of HVT Lab went the other way and built a talking assistant about the size of two fingers, soldered into an open frame of brass wire and tubing. An ESP32-C3, a 0.96-inch OLED face, a microphone, a smartphone speaker and a rechargeable battery are all it takes to hold a spoken conversation.
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In Grade 11, maker Jeneus tried to write an Othello program in C++. It ended up buggy and the computer could only play random moves. Years later, with mechatronics skills, he turned that failure into Othellobot: a gantry robot that watches the board with a camera, picks its move and places clear tokens with a suction cup. The smart part is that it never flips a disc. Every cell has its own LED…
Pollen Robotics, the Hugging Face robotics team behind the open-source Reachy Mini desktop robot, has launched "Level Up", a set of add-ons that let the little robot leave the desk. Announced on 29 October, it adds a two-wheeled Hoverboard base, NFC hats that switch the robot's personality, and iOS and Android apps.
What is new Hoverboard, $149 (pre-order): a two-wheeled base with soft…
Industrial crane remotes are the chunky orange handsets that move tonnes of steel in factories and yards, and you would hope their radio link is hard to fake. IoT security researcher Matt Brown (Brown Fine Security) reverse-engineered a Telecrane-style remote and its receiver, then wrote an open-source Flipper Zero app that listens to a real remote, learns its ID over the air and sends its own…
Most insect-sized flying robots are lab pets: one crash into a wall and a rigid hinge or gearbox snaps. A team led by Yuan Zhu, Hanxiang Wu and Professor Qibing Pei at UCLA, with Wenzhong Yan at UC Davis has built one that shrugs it off. Their 185 mg robot, lighter than a fifth of a gram, took off again after being hit with a flyswatter and after being flattened under aluminium blocks weighing…
Renesas Electronics Corporation (TSE:6723), a premier supplier of advanced semiconductor solutions, today announced the RL78/G21, a new member of its RL78 family. Renesas holds the No. 1 global market share in 16-bit MCUs (Note 1). The RL78/G21 MCU extends that leadership into the next generation of smart appliances. Optimized for smart system control, the new MCU product series RL78/G21…
E-paper is supposed to be slow: great for shelf labels and e-readers, terrible for games. So when makers started running Game Boy games at 30 frames per second on cheap e-paper boards, two questions came up fast. Does the display eat the battery, and does it wear out? Bo Made It, who wrote the fast driver in the first place, measured both on a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper board. The answer to the…
Big satellite dishes from the 80s and 90s still sit in fields everywhere, usually rusting. YouTuber and fabricator Cranktown City found an eight-foot one and turned it into a working satellite ground station on his new plot of land, with a Raspberry Pi doing the aiming and the decoding. The build video has passed 220,000 views.
Pointing an eight-foot dish…
The Tamagotchi was the toy every 90s kid carried, and its newest version, the Tamagotchi Paradise, turns out to be very hackable. Maker Squalius has built a small USB-to-UART adapter that plugs into the toy's link contacts and connects it straight to a web browser. In the demo the Tamagotchi then runs DOOM and a Game Boy emulator playing Super Mario Land on its little colour screen.
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