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This DIY Quadcopter Flies on a Homemade STM32 Flight Controller and Remote, No Betaflight Most hobby quadcopters fly on an off-the-shelf flight controller running Betaflight or INAV. Maker tynix5 went the hard way instead. The 5 inch quad, called No Fly Zone, flies on a flight controller PCB that the maker designed and hand-assembled, paired with a handheld remote built on a second custom PCB. All of the flight and remote firmware was written from scratch, and the full write-up,… |
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ROSCon Returns to Bengaluru & Circuit Digest Joins as Media Partner ROSCon India 2026 will take place from 2-4 December at the JN Tata Auditorium, IISc Bengaluru, and Circuit Digest will be there as a Media Partner. If you work with ROS, build robots, or are just getting into robotics, this is one to know about. It's a gathering of India's ROS community, and it's been growing every year since its first edition in 2023. The 2025 edition in Pune recorded… |
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This Pocket Meshtastic Node Snaps Onto a Phone by MagSafe and Tops Up From a Solar Panel Most Meshtastic nodes end up either in a pocket or stuck on a window, and each needs a different case. Maker Koosh designed one pocket-sized node that does both, with swappable back plates, and posted the files on Printables with a full bill of materials. The post on r/meshtastic passed 280 upvotes in under a day. The hardwareThe node is built on a RAK19003 base board with a RAK4631… |
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This ESP32-S3 Touchscreen Runs Its Own X11 Server, So Linux Apps Draw on It Over Wi-Fi If you want a small touchscreen as a Linux display, the usual choices are to build a whole Linux computer into it or treat it as a dumb remote framebuffer. Sergey Zorin took a third route. Woodland X11 is an experimental X Window System server that runs directly on an ESP32-S3, so ordinary Linux X11 programs open their windows on a cheap touchscreen. X11 written from the specification… |
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This DIY Home Assistant Remote Runs an ESP32-H2 Over Zigbee for About 4 Months a Charge A wall-mounted tablet can run the whole house, but sometimes you just want a button. Reddit maker Zweetkonijn built his own Home Assistant remote control with a custom PCB, a 3D-printed case that looks a lot like a Google TV remote, and an ESP32-H2 that talks Zigbee. Total material cost was about 40 euros, and the post passed 900 upvotes on r/homeassistant in half a day. Why the ESP32-H2… |
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This ESP32-C3 Clock Projects the Time on the Ceiling With Just an OLED and a 50 mm Lens Most bedside clocks are either too bright to sleep next to or too dim to read. Reddit maker udota wanted a soft white clock that does not light up the whole nightstand, so he skipped the LEDs entirely. His build throws the time onto the ceiling using nothing more than a 1.3 inch OLED, an ESP32-C3 and a single glass lens. The OLED is the light sourceCommercial projector clocks usually… |
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This Open-Source ESP32-S3 Stepper Driver Cut Joint Error From 0.065 to 0.014 Degrees A stepper motor can reach its target while the robot joint it drives is still in the wrong place. That gap comes from backlash in the gearbox, and it is the reason cheap 3D-printed robot arms feel sloppy. Arctos Robotics, the maker behind the open-source Arctos arm, built CLMD, an open-source ESP32-S3 stepper driver that reads a second encoder right at the gearbox output and corrects the joint… |
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This Lenovo ThinkSmart View Now Runs Debian and a Rust Voice Butler for Home Assistant Thousands of Lenovo ThinkSmart View displays were built for Microsoft Teams calls and are now turning up second-hand for very little money. They have no battery, decent microphones and a speaker, and they are designed to stay switched on. Reddit maker m_s_ik turned one into a dedicated Home Assistant voice assistant and wall panel by replacing Android with a minimal Debian and a single program… |
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This 1986 Apple II Monitor Is Now a Live Flight Tracker, Driven by an ESP32 and Two Wires Most people who want a flight tracker on a desk reach for a Raspberry Pi and an HDMI screen. Reddit maker Virtual-Bet-4566 went the other way: a 1986 Apple II monochrome monitor, a classic ESP32-WROOM-32 and exactly two wires. The green phosphor CRT now shows a live radar view of the aircraft overhead, and no video converter sits in between. Composite video straight from a DAC pinThe… |
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Sesame Drone: This 264 g ESP32 Quadruped Folds Its Legs Into Propellers and Flies Earlier this year we covered Sesame, an open-source ESP32 quadruped you can build for about $50 to $60. Its maker, Dorian Todd, has now made it fly. Sesame Drone walks somewhere, folds its legs out flat into propeller arms, takes off, lands and walks away again. Two brains with no link between them The robot is really two machines sharing one 2S LiPo.… |
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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… |
