community news
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Engineer Turns Mini Fridge Into a SLAM-Guided Tank Robot You'd Have to Chase for a Cold Drink Engineer Dorian Todd has built a self-driving mini fridge on tank treads that can autonomously chase or flee a person and reward them with a cold drink if caught. The project replaces the fridge's standard base with a tracked drivetrain powered by Repeat Robotics Ultra Mark II brushless gear motors designed for 12 lb combat robots. Todd 3D scanned both the metal tread assembly and the… |
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ESP32-S3 Runs a 28.9-Million-Parameter LLM, Borrowing a Memory Trick From Google's Gemma Developer slvDev has published an open-source project that runs a 28.9-million-parameter language model directly on an ESP32-S3, a microcontroller that costs roughly $8. The model runs entirely on the chip itself, with no data sent to a server, generating text at roughly 9 tokens per second and outputting it to a small connected display. The achievement stands out because of how little working… |
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Quaddle Is an Open-Source Desk Robot That Can Move Omnidirectionally With Just 4 Servos Petoi, the team behind the open-source Bittle and Nybble quadruped kits, has opened early access for its next robot, Quaddle. The company describes it as a four-servo quadruped capable of walking, strafing sideways, and spinning in place, a claim that stands out mainly because of how few actuators it uses to pull it off.
Most legged robots that can… |
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Maker Builds an ESP32 Powered Spider Man Web Shooter in This Brand New DIY Project YouTuber Plentiful Props 3D has developed a functional Spider Man-inspired web shooter that combines custom electronics, 3D-printed parts, and a servo-actuated spray mechanism to fire web-like strands from a wrist-mounted wearable. The project uses an ESP32-S3 Mini development board mounted on a custom PCB to control the firing mechanism. According to the creator, the electronics package… |
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Romu: A 15.5mm USB Development Board Built on the RP2354A Bitmerse is preparing to launch Romu, a USB Type-A development board small enough to disappear almost entirely into the port it plugs into. The project is currently listed as "Coming Soon" on Crowd Supply. It's built around Raspberry Pi's RP2354A, a variant of the RP2350 chip that pairs a dual-core Arm Cortex-M33 running at 150 MHz with 2 MB of stacked onboard flash and 520 KB of SRAM. The… |
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Phantom Twist: The Spinning Drone That Hides in Plain Sight Northwestern University engineers have unveiled Phantom Twist, a groundbreaking low-visibility UAV that exploits human visual perception to hide in plain sight. The drone spins its entire body at up to 25 rotations per second using a single motor and counter-rotating propeller system. Unlike traditional quadcopters with stationary bodies, Phantom Twist has no fixed… |
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EWskills Launches EWsim.io - A Free Browser-Based Circuit Simulator Pune, India — July 2026. EWskills, the Industry focused skill-building platform for electronics and embedded engineers, has announced the launch of EWsim.io, a browser-based mixed-signal circuit simulator that executes microcontroller firmware. The tool is free to use, requires no installation, and is aimed at Engineers, students, educators, hobbyists, and Makers.Developed by the team behind… |
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Need a Custom Motor Coil? This Open-Source Machine Has You Covered Winding electromagnetic coils by hand is a slow and challenging process, especially when you're trying to achieve neat, consistent turns for motors or actuators. To solve this problem, creator BubsBuilds designed an open-source automated coil winding machine that can produce custom coils based on specific project requirements. Originally built to support the… |
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Paintable Skin Electrode That Tracks Your Body Researchers from the Pennsylvania State University have developed a paintable on-skin dry electrode that sticks comfortably to the skin and reads biological signals with impressive stability. Because the sensor starts as a liquid paint, it flows into the microscopic lines, wrinkles, and pores of your skin before it dries. This creates a perfect, seamless bond that… |
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Soan Papdi FPGA Development Board Is Set to Launch on Crowd Supply Ashok Tinkering Labs, based in Ahmedabad, India, is preparing to launch Soan Papdi, an FPGA development board aimed at beginners, on the crowdfunding platform Crowd Supply. According to the company, the board comes with onboard LEDs, switches, and GPIO headers, and is designed so users can begin digital design work without additional hardware setup. The listing states the project is currently… |
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Jurassic Park's Legendary Dinosaur Input Device Recreated Using Modern Technology Long before today's advanced motion capture systems became commonplace, Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) developed an ingenious hardware solution known as the Dinosaur Input Device (DID) for Jurassic Park. Instead of animating dinosaurs frame by frame with a mouse, animators manipulated a physical dinosaur puppet embedded with magnetic rotary encoders at every… |
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MIT Develops a Robotic Bird That Can Fly, Dive, and Swim We've seen drones that fly and underwater robots that swim, but combining both into a single machine has remained a major engineering challenge. Researchers at MIT's Department of Mechanical Engineering have now developed a bio-inspired robotic bird capable of flying through the air, diving into water, swimming beneath the surface, and taking off again. Inspired by… |
