community news
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LakeShark Turns an ESP32-P4 Into a Pocket Radio Scanner With LR2021 or RTL-SDR 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… |
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This Solar Robot Pet Has No Microcontroller - Just Analog BEAM Circuits 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… |
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Vortex Spins Two LED Panels on a Raspberry Pi 4 Into a True Volumetric 3D Display 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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This Raspberry Pi 4 Cyberdeck Bridges an Off-Grid HaLow Mesh to a TAK Server 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… |
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One Custom PCB, Two Faces: Click-Wheel Music Player and GBA Emulator on ESP32-S3 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… |
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He Built a PC Hardware Monitor That Looks Like a Four-Gauge Aircraft Instrument Panel 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… |
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A Spare ST7735 and an ESP32 Became a From-Scratch Game Boy That Runs Pokemon 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… |
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This Amphibious Robot Swims Like an Eel and Crawls Over Gravel, All From a Single Motor 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… |
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One Maker Runs His Whole Lettuce Grow Room on 12 ESP32s, From Misting Valves to pH Dosing 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… |
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This DIY Wax Motor Held Its Position to Within 5 Microns for 12 Hours, Just by Melting Wax 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.… |
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He Wouldn't Pay for a Smart Blood Pressure Monitor, So an ESP32-CAM Now Reads His Old One 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,… |
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This 10 cm Cube Is a Raspberry Pi 5 Camera That Shoots RAW Video and Takes C-Mount Lenses 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… |
