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UK Startup Fires Up 1,000°C Space Furnace, Pushing Semiconductor Manufacturing Beyond Earth The next generation of computer chips may not come from factories on Earth, but from satellites circling the planet. A UK company’s successful test of a 1,000°C furnace in space is bringing that futuristic vision closer to reality. Space Forge, a startup based in Cardiff, Wales, has confirmed that its microwave sized orbital furnace was successfully switched on and reached the temperature… |
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Self-Hosting Mini C Compiler for ESP32 The xcc700 is a very small, lightweight C compiler designed specifically for the ESP32 microcontroller. It is like a mini version of GCC or clang, but this system has some limitations. Instead of generating Windows .exe files, it produces ELF binaries for the Xtensa CPU, which is the processor architecture used in ESP32. Because it is so small, the compiler itself can run on the ESP32 and… |
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Porcospino Flex: Lightweight Design and Flexible Spine Enhance Robotic Performance When robots face tight spaces and unpredictable terrain, most machines come to a stop. Researchers at the University of Genoa’s RICE Lab are changing that with Porcospino Flex, a bio-inspired single-track robot designed to go where traditional wheeled or legged robots fail. Inspired by segmented invertebrates, it features a flexible 3D-printed vertebral column made from ABS and TPU, allowing… |
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ProtoV MINI Brings USB-C Powered Dual-Rail Power to Breadboards A new breadboard-friendly power supply called ProtoV MINI has been announced and is expected to launch soon. Roughly the size of a credit card, the device is designed to plug directly into a standard breadboard and power both rails independently using a single USB Type-C input. Each channel can be adjusted up to 20 V with fine digital control and includes current limiting and built-in… |
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Using an ESP32 as a Small Wireless Desktop Monitor An ESP32 driving a 1.14-inch LCD is not an obvious candidate for desktop display mirroring, but that is precisely the constraint explored in a recent DIY project by developer Tucker Shannon. The project streams a live view of a computer monitor to a TENSTAR ESP32 T-Display over Wi-Fi, presenting a compact and well-documented example of remote rendering on a resource-limited microcontroller… |
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DIY Smart Clock with Air Quality Monitoring, Alarm and Timer A tiny clock that integrates air quality monitoring, a timer, and an alarm sounds cool, right? Let's get into the article and know how it is built. It is a Cyber-style multifunction clock that can monitor air quality, show real-time data, run a timer, trigger alarms, and another cool feature is that it's a mini retro game. From a technical perspective, the system is built around an ESP32-C3… |
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Hydrogen Powered Drone from China Flies for Four Hours How far can a hydrogen-powered drone really fly? That question came to life at Beihang University’s Hangzhou International Campus as the long-range UAV “Tianmushan-1” made its public debut. Government officials, university leaders, and research teams gathered for the maiden flight ceremony, touring advanced laboratories and witnessing firsthand how cutting-edge aviation research is taking… |
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Ultra-Low-Power Neuromorphic Chip Enables Always-On Voice Detection A new neuromorphic chip has shown it can perform continuous voice activity detection while using extremely low power, addressing a major challenge in devices that rely on batteries or operate at the edge of a network. The chip identifies human speech with very fast response times by running neural network calculations in the analog domain. This method keeps voice detection running without… |
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World’s Smallest Programmable Micro-Robots Open a New Frontier in Robotics Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan have unveiled the world’s smallest fully programmable autonomous robots. Measuring just 0.2 × 0.3 × 0.05 mm, these microscopic swimming robots are barely visible to the naked eye yet can independently sense their environment, process information, and perform programmed tasks. Each robot integrates sensing,… |
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ESP32 Meets On-Device AI: The ESP Private Agents Platform Espressif introduces the ESP32-based AI voice assistant with on-device processing by the ESP32 Private Agents Platform. It helps developers and students to build customizable AI assistants for the ESP32. The traditional way, which is the embedded AI assistant, requires stitching together multiple complex components such as cloud backends, device firmware, and speech recognition. ESP32… |
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How MIT's Aerial Microrobots Fly as Agilely as Insects Engineers from MIT have developed aerial microrobots that are roughly 450% faster with about 250% better acceleration in comparison to prior demos. “We want to be able to use these robots in scenarios that more traditional quadcopter robots would have trouble flying into, but that insects could navigate,” said Kevin Chen, an associate professor at MIT. The robot's controller is… |
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Custom Quad-Rotor Drone Hitting 605 km/h Sets Unofficial World Record The Drone Pro Hub team recorded their drone reaching a top speed of 605 km/h. The feat was the outcome of an 18-month effort headed by FPV specialist Benjamin Biggs. The quad-rotor drone, mounted on a base for take-off, featured onboard GPS telemetry that allowed speed monitoring. While not recognized as an official record, they tested the right way and calculated the average speed of… |
