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This Pocket AI Assistant Fits Between Two Fingers: An ESP32-C3, an OLED and a Brass Frame 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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This Robot Plays Othello Without Flipping a Single Disc, Thanks to 64 Color-Changing LEDs 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… |
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A Flipper Zero Can Now Act as an Industrial Crane Remote, Because Its Radio Has No Checksum 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… |
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A 185 mg Insect-Sized Robot Took a Flyswatter Hit and 11,000x Its Weight, Then Flew Again 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… |
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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… |
