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Is 30 FPS Killing E-Paper? A Maker Ran 2.16 Million Frames on an ESP32-S3 to Find Out 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… |
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A Wheelchair Motor and a Raspberry Pi Turn an Old 8-Foot Dish Into a Satellite Ground Station 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… |
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Three Nickel Strips and a USB Adapter Get This Tamagotchi Running DOOM and Super Mario 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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A $23 Used Phone's Motherboard Becomes the 4G Video and Control Link for This RC Plane Most RC planes lose their link a few kilometres out, because a normal 2.4 GHz radio only reaches so far. Mountain DS Lab took a different route: an 8-year-old Xiaomi Mi 8, bought used for $23 with a cracked back and a damaged screen, stripped down to its motherboard and fitted inside a foam RC plane. The phone's own LTE modem now carries both the live FPV video and the control commands over… |
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A 1984 Tomy Omnibot Gets a Raspberry Pi 5 Brain and an AI Camera That Knows 80 Objects In 1984, Tomy sold the Omnibot as the robot butler of the future. It could roll around, play cassette tapes and carry drinks on a tray, but it had no real intelligence: everything came from a remote or a pre-recorded tape. Forty-two years later, maker Mario Cruz has given a donated Omnibot at Moonlighter FabLab in Miami the brain it was promised, using a Raspberry Pi 5, the Raspberry Pi AI… |
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Instead of a $40,000 Electric Pickup, This Maker Bought a 100,000-Mile BMW i3 at Auction and Cut It Into a Mini EV Truck 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… |
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This Open-Source 1.2 m Humanoid Runs on a Raspberry Pi 5 and a Radxa CM5, and After a Year of Building It Is Now Walking in Public 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,… |
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A Maker Turned a $4 Toy Robot Into an AI Companion for a Kid, and a Tiny 0.8B Model Makes It Stop in 200 ms 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… |
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A $5 ESP32-P4 Chip Now Writes Down Everything You Say, Live and Offline, With About 4 Wrong Words in 100 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… |
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A 1-Metre 3D-Printed RC Jet Just Hit 273 mph on Its Maiden Flight, and Its Makers Are Now Going After the 465 mph World Record 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… |
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A Son Built His Offline Dad an ESP32 E-Paper Frame That Shows Which Airliner Is Flying Over the Alps Right Now 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… |
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Pac-Man, Space Invaders and Manic Miner Run on a Plain Arduino Uno at 50 fps, With Two Resistors for Video and No Framebuffer 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… |
