Open Source
|
A Maker Turned a $4 Toy Robot Into an AI Companion for a Kid, and a Tiny 0.8B Model Makes It Stop in 200 ms Talking robots usually have a lag problem: by the time a large language model has decided what "stop" means, the robot has already hit the wall. Maker Asten (beasaltfish) ran into exactly this while turning a $4 toy robot into a voice-controlled AI companion for their kid, and fixed it with a second, much smaller model. A fine-tuned 0.8-billion-parameter "reflex" model hears every command… |
|
DOOM on a $30 FNIRSI Clamp Meter: 32 KB of RAM, No Framebuffer and a Steady 29 fps Running DOOM on odd hardware is an old tradition, but Artur Bieniek has picked one of the tightest targets yet: the FNIRSI DMC-100, a budget clamp meter built around an Artery AT32F415 microcontroller with just 32 KB of RAM. His open-source port of doomgeneric plays the whole first episode of Freedoom on the meter's 320x240 colour screen, with sound effects on the buzzer, and it averages 29… |
|
KiCad in a Browser Tab: India's ZiroEDA Ports KiCad 10 to TypeScript So You Can Design PCBs With Nothing Installed If you have ever wanted to fix a footprint on a college lab PC or a Chromebook where you cannot install anything, this one is for you. Akshay Rukade and the ZiroEDA project have ported KiCad 10's C++ source to TypeScript, so KiCad's schematic editor, PCB editor, interactive router, ERC and DRC run in a normal browser tab. It opens and saves native .kicad_pro projects directly, with no import… |
|
Building a Private AI Media Library With Raspberry Pi 5 for Smart Photo Search and Auto Backups to Two USB Drives Alonso Vidales has built Off The Cloud, an open-source Raspberry Pi 5 project that lets users store, search and share family photos without relying on a traditional cloud photo and video -storage service. Instead of sending photos and videos to an external server for storage and AI analysis, the system keeps them on a device at home. It automatically backs up full-resolution photos and videos… |
|
An ESP32-S3 Project Lets AI Read an iPhone Screen and Execute Actions Through USB HID Without Jailbreaking An open-source project called ESP32 iPhone Agent lets an AI model control a real iPhone using a low-cost ESP32-S3 development board. Created by Henry Yuan, the project can perform actions such as tapping, swiping, typing text, drawing paths and pressing keys. It can also return to the home screen or complete a task. The Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32-S3 board costs around $7, and the project does not… |
|
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… |
|
The Negotiator II: A PCB Business Card Built to Unlock 48V Power Delivery From Any USB-C Charger Electronics and mechanical engineer Anas Malas has redefined networking hardware with The Negotiator II, a smart printed circuit board (PCB) business card that doubles as a portable USB Power Delivery (USB PD 3.1) lab power supply. Measuring just 2 mm thick, the wallet-sized card features nearly 200 surface-mount LEDs, dual USB-C ports, and live telemetry displays for voltage, current, and… |
|
FeroFlyF405: An Open Source Drone Flight Controller Designed From Scratch on the STM32F405, With INAV Ported FeroFlyF405 is an open source flight controller built around the STM32F405 microcontroller and running INAV firmware. It was designed from scratch by a maker named Farhan, who shared the hardware files on GitHub and documented the build in a video walkthrough.
The board has an LSM6DSL IMU, a DPS368 barometer, 12 motor outputs, a CAN bus, an I2C port… |
|
Python Tool Turns Your Image Into a PCB Layout in KiCad With LEDs Placed to Help Make Your Own Display Maker's Fun Duck has published a video that pairs a hands-on teardown of a commercial custom LED display with the release of an open-source Python tool, the Custom LED Display Generator, that automates the design of similar displays from scratch.
The video opens with a physical dissection of a commercial unit, the kind used for glowing logo signs.… |
|
He Trained a 2.9M-Parameter AI Image Generation Model, Ran It on a $1 RP2350 Chip and Open-Sourced the Project Generative AI image models usually require powerful processors and large amounts of memory, but a new project demonstrates that image generation can be pushed onto a small microcontroller. Tim, from Tim’s Blog, has implemented a generative AI image model on the RP2350, the microcontroller used in the Raspberry Pi Pico 2. Running on a Waveshare RP2350-Plus board, the system can generate 128×128… |
|
Maker Turns an ESP32 S3 Into a Pocket PC by Porting Open Source Tactility OS to a 2.4 Inch Touch Display This project transforms a compact MaTouch Lite development board into a fully functional, portable touchscreen computer. The project uses an ESP32-S3 microcontroller, featuring 16MB of flash and 8MB of PSRAM, which provides the necessary performance to run a graphical environment. By integrating a 2.4-inch resistive touchscreen and a microSD card for storage, the creator successfully… |
|
DEFCON 34's Badge Had a Hackable Open-Source Chip You Could Shine Infrared Through to Inspect Its Design Every year, DEFCON’s electronic badge becomes one of the most talked-about pieces of hardware in the security community, and the DEFCON 34 badge pushes that tradition further. The badge acts as an electronic identity and interactive device for conference attendees, helping them participate in DEFCON activities, access badge-related challenges and interact with other attendees. Designed by… |
