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This Maker Turned a Simple Stick Into a POV Display Using a Teensy 4.1, ESP32 and Fast APA102 LEDs YouTuber Zachary McCune from Corridor Crew has turned a simple fire spinning hobby into an ambitious engineering project that can create images in the air while spinning. The project uses the principle of persistence of vision (POV), where rapidly changing lights appear to form a continuous image when moved quickly through space. Instead of using a conventional screen, the device displays an… |
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He Gave His Open-Source Robot Pixel a Gemini-Powered Brain That Perceives Depth Without a 3D Sensor Naz Louis has upgraded his open-source robot Pixel, giving the walking desk robot a new AI system that can see, remember, and reason about its surroundings in real time. The new build runs on Gemini Robotics ER2, an embodied-reasoning model built by Google DeepMind for near real-time robotics applications. The model receives a continuous stream of camera and microphone input and has direct… |
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TICKEY Is a Small Clip-On Badge With an E-Ink Display That Can Show 48 Colors, Built on an ESP32 TICKEY is a compact clip-on gadget that combines a 3.7-inch, 720 × 480 color e-paper display with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and NFC. Instead of behaving like a normal LCD or OLED screen, its e-paper display is designed to keep a static image visible without continuously consuming display power. Users can show pixel art, photos, digital badges, QR codes, notes or personal… |
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Cat Collar Fits Two AI Models' Runtime Memory Into 48KB of Its 256KB RAM by Never Running Them Together An open source project called Meowtion packs two on device AI models onto a single microcontroller with only 256KB of RAM, using a scheduling trick rather than model compression to make it fit. Built by Jerome Graves and documented on Hackaday.io, the wearable collar tracks a cat's eating, drinking, and resting behaviour to flag early changes that can precede illness. The collar runs on… |
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MIT Built Logic Circuits From Bacteria, Using Living Cells as Transistors and Relays to Perform Digital Logic MIT researchers have built working logic circuits using engineered bacteria, creating biological versions of components that electronics engineers would normally associate with transistors, relays and digital logic. The work uses Pantoea agglomerans, a bacterium that commonly grows on surfaces, including plants. The researchers modified the cells so they could function as two types of… |
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This YouTuber Overclocked a 30-Year-Old Nintendo 64, Added Wireless Controls, and Upgraded It With HDMI Output YouTube creator Zac Builds has modified a Nintendo 64 by combining several hardware upgrades aimed at making the nearly 30-year-old console more practical to use with modern displays and accessories. The project retains the original N64 motherboard while adding a RetroGEM HDMI modification, USB-C-based power delivery, internal wireless controller support, CPU overclocking and improved cooling… |
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Students Built a Submarine to Map Ice Thickness Across Frozen Lakes and Somehow Made GPS Work Underwater A team of engineering students from ETH Zürich has developed POLARIS, an autonomous underwater robot designed to measure and map the thickness of ice from underneath frozen alpine lakes. The idea is to make ice surveys safer and faster, especially in places where people need to know whether the ice is strong enough for activities such as racing or other work on frozen lakes. Traditionally, ice… |
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A Drone That Tracks Its Leader Using Four Microphones and an ESP32, No GPS or Camera Needed Researchers at Duke University's General Robotics Lab have built a system that lets one drone follow another using nothing but the sound of its rotors. The project, called SonicFly, estimates a leader drone's bearing and distance from onboard audio alone, without GPS sharing, cameras, radio links, or any active signal exchange between the two aircraft. … |
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He Built a Robot Actuator From Scratch and Found That More Copper Windings Don't Mean More Torque A Sweden-based creator who posts under the name Food For Robots has hand-wound and machined a custom electric actuator from scratch for a bipedal walking robot project, and in the process documented a counterintuitive result about motor design: adding more turns of copper wire to a motor's stator does not increase torque output for a given amount of electrical power. … |
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Gerber to PCB in 30 Minutes at Your Desk: PewCB One Pairs a Laser With Vias-Ready Double-Sided Blanks A new desktop machine called PewCB One wants to bring PCB fabrication into the same room as the engineer designing it. Instead of exporting a design and waiting on a fab house, PewCB One promises to turn Gerber files into a populated double-sided circuit board without leaving your desk.
The system is built around a 20 W, 1064 nm pulsed laser that… |
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DigiKey and Engineering Influencer Shawn Hymel to Host Webinar and Video Series on Reinforcement Learning with Balance Bots THIEF RIVER FALLS, Minn., USA — DigiKey, the global distribution leader of electronic components and automation products, is hosting a webinar with Shawn Hymel: “Train a balance bot with reinforcement learning,” scheduled for Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026, at 10 a.m. CDT. The free 90-minute virtual event will be a hands-on robotics and AI workshop that will teach attendees how to get started in the… |
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Someone Turned 4 Trashed Laptops Into a Private ChatGPT That Got Faster With One Laptop Removed Maker Joe C-J has repurposed four discarded Lenovo ThinkPad L380 laptops into a working, self-hosted AI computing cluster, capable of running large language models entirely offline. Each of the four motherboards was stripped from its laptop chassis and mounted into a custom 3D-printed frame, designed in Fusion and reprinted to accommodate a fourth node after an earlier three-node version… |
