community news
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iPod Lives Again: Open-Source RPi Motherboard Adds Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C, 2TB Storage, Spotify, Apple Music & More For nearly two decades, vintage Apple iPods have been dormant in desk drawers, victims of dead batteries, obsolete charging cables, and retired iTunes libraries. Now, a London-based hardware startup called Certain Things is changing the narrative with Sprout, an open-source replacement motherboard that drags early-2000s music players kicking and screaming into the modern wireless era. Rather… |
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Maker Transforms ESP32-S3 Microcontroller Into a Mini Retro TV With Touch Control and Audio Output In an era where microcontroller boards are becoming increasingly powerful, Tech Talkies recently showcased an interesting use for the versatile ESP32-S3 chip by turning it into a fully functional, pocket-sized retro television. Leveraging the display and audio capabilities of modern hobbyist hardware, the project demonstrates how low-cost microcontrollers can easily drive video playback and… |
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These ESP32-Powered PCB Badges Run Among Us and Let Hackathon Participants Build Their Own Games A simple event badge can do more than display a name. Nick Ficara designed and developed programmable electronic badges for Hack the North, a major student hackathon in Canada, after being approached by Alex, a project manager at the event. Unlike ordinary event badges that only display a name or event logo, this ESP32-powered hacker badge works as a small computer that participants can… |
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Autonomous Lake Mapping Catamaran Steers With Air Propellers and Not a Rudder. Two Years of Iteration An autonomous 3D-printed catamaran built by hobbyist Cy Antony Ash has mapped the depth of a lake in North Wales, the result of a two-year build. The boat carries a Deeper castable fish finder along a programmed route across Llyn Celyn, so the sonar no longer has to be cast from a rod. Instead of underwater propellers, it uses drone motors mounted above the waterline, which keeps the props… |
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This ALBATROSS Robot Uses a Teensy 4.1 and Autorotating Wings to Land on Water and Sail With Wind Power Researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) have developed ALBATROSS, a robot that can descend from the air, land on water, and then sail using wind power. Its name stands for Airborne Lander with Buoyant AuToROtating Sailing Sensor. The robot is designed to carry sensors to remote lakes, reservoirs, and other water bodies that are difficult to reach by boat. When… |
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ESP32-S3 3D Scanner Brings Budget Space Carving and 3D Mesh Generation to Embedded Hardware Projects A recent project shared on reddit - r/esp32 showcases how much computer vision potential can be squeezed out of inexpensive, low-power hardware. Built around a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 board paired with its dedicated round screen extension, the handheld device doubles as a self-contained 3D object scanner. Originally intended as a platform for an augmented reality game, the creator pivoted… |
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ESP32-S3 E-Paper Board Runs a Game Boy Emulator at 30 FPS. It Barely Hit 2 FPS Before a Custom-Built Driver A developer who goes by kuslota has released InkBoy, a custom display driver and firmware that runs a Game Boy emulator at around 30 frames per second on Waveshare’s ESP32-S3-ePaper-1.54 V2 board. Waveshare specifies about 300 ms for a partial refresh on the board’s 200x200 panel, and the stock driver managed barely 2 fps in the developer’s testing. The code is on GitHub under an MIT license… |
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This ESP32-C5 Picks Up India’s NavIC Satellite Signal Using Its Built-In 2.4 GHz Radio, in Early Test The open-source snappnt project, developed by h-shiono, explores whether an affordable ESP32 board can detect signals from India’s NavIC satellite navigation system. NavIC is used for satellite-based navigation, but this project does not work like a normal GPS tracker. Instead, it captures very short samples of radio signals and uses software to search for a known satellite signal pattern.… |
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SignalSweep: Open-Source BLE and Wi-Fi Scanner on ESP32-C5 That Can Detect AirTags, Flock Cameras and Drones SignalSweep, an open-source project published on GitHub by a developer using the handle B0z0dcl0wn, turns a Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-C5 into a pocket-sized scanner for trackers, surveillance hardware and drones. It is licensed GPL-3.0-or-later. The C5 is the main target because it can listen to both 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz Wi-Fi alongside Bluetooth LE, and the developer argues that more cameras and… |
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Instead of Training a Robot, He Let a General-Purpose Multimodal LLM Control It to Pick Up and Bin a Toy Harrison Kinsley, the YouTuber behind Sentdex, has shown a Vulcan Robotics Sourccey, a 3D-printed robot he calls “Chonk,” picking up a toy from the floor and dropping it in a bin with no task-specific training. In part three of his “Everything is LLM” series, published Oct 8, a general-purpose multimodal language model made the task decisions. The planning and control came from DeepSeek’s V4.1… |
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This Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W Runs a Virtual Viking Dragon That Feeds on Nearby Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals What if your virtual pet could find food from the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals around you? Meet Harald, a virtual dragon created by a Raspberry Pi enthusiast. Built using a Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W and a Waveshare V4 e-paper display, Harald treats nearby Wi-Fi networks and Bluetooth devices as food. Discovering new devices makes the dragon happier, turning everyday wireless activity into a virtual… |
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This DIY ESP32-S3 Wi-Fi Sensing System Detects People and Tracks Movements Without a Camera at 80% Accuracy Better Stack from Youtube recently used an open-source project called RuView and explored how Wi-Fi signals can be used to detect human presence and movements without relying on a camera. He describes how Wi-Fi signals change as he travels through a room and bounce off walls, furniture, and people. When someone moves, their body alters the signal's strength and phase across different frequency… |
