Bakelite To The Future – A 1950s Bluetooth Headset

A decade ago, [Jouke Waleson] bought a Dutch ‘model 1950’ PTT (The Dutch Postal Service) rotary-dial telephone of presumably 1950s vintage manufactured by a company called Standard Elec…

An International Hackerspace Map

If you’re looking for a hackerspace while on your travels, there is more than one website which shows them on a map, and even tells you whether or not they are open. This last feature is powe…

Pac-Man Ghost Helps With Air Quality Sensing

In the past, building construction methods generally didn’t worry much about air quality. There were enough gaps around windows, doors, siding, and flooring that a house could naturally &#822…

The Design Process For A Tiny Robot Brain

As things get smaller, we can fit more processing power into devices like robots to allow them to do more things or interact with their environment in new ways. If not, we can at least build them f…

Forget Flipper, How About Capybara?

One of the hacker toys to own over the last year has been the Flipper Zero, a universal wireless hacking tool which even caused a misplaced moral panic about car theft in Canada. A Flipper is cool …

Little RC Car Project Takes Inspiration From Mario Kart

RC cars used to be pretty simple. They’d go forwards, backwards, and steer if you got a full-function toy. However, with modern technology, it’s pretty trivial to make them more advance…

Tiny LoRa GPS Node Relies On ESP32

Sometimes you need to create a satellite navigation tracking device that communicates via a low-power mesh network. [Powerfeatherdev] was in just that situation, and they whipped up a particularly …

Solve: An ESP32-Based Equation Solving Calculator

We’re suckers for good-looking old-school calculators, so this interesting numerical equation-solving calculator by [Peter Balch] caught our attention. Based around the ESP32-WROOM-32 module …

Internet Connected TI-84 To Cut Your Academic Career Short

In an educational project with ethically questionable applications, [ChromaLock] has converted the ubiquitous TI-84 calculator into the ultimate cheating device. The foundation of this hack lies in…

An ESP32 Delivers Perfect Slot Car Control

If your memory of slot cars as a childhood toy is of lightweight controllers with wire-wound rheostats inside, then you’re many years behind the state of the art when it comes to competitive …

Large Language Models On Small Computers

As technology progresses, we generally expect processing capabilities to scale up. Every year, we get more processor power, faster speeds, greater memory, and lower cost. However, we can also use i…

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Batch Craze Is Portable Charades, Kind Of

So there’s this commercial electronic game out there called Catch Phrase, which, as the game’s own catch phrase explains, is the game that’s played one word at a time. See, a word…

3D Printed RC Crane Has Epic 3-Foot Reach

Have you ever looked out the window at traffic and seen a giant crane driving alone the road? Have you ever wanted a little 3D printed version you could drive for yourself without the risk of demol…

CL-32: The Minimum Possible For A Useful Handheld Computer

For almost as long as there have been microcomputers, there have been attempts with varying success to make tiny handheld microcomputers. Sometimes these have been very good, and other times they&#…

2024 Tiny Games Contest: Save The Stranded Puppies Of Moon Base P!

Usually, if something is tiny, it’s probably pretty cute to boot. [Luke J. Barker]’s lunar navigation game is no exception to this unwritten rule. And as far as contest rules go, this o…

The Sunchronizer Keeps Your Solar Panel Aligned

In the past few years, the price-per-watt for solar panels has dropped dramatically. This has led to a number of downstream effects beyond simple cost savings. For example, many commercial solar fa…

From Vehicle-to-Grid To DIY Home Powerwalls

As battery-to-grid and vehicle-to-home technologies become increasingly mainstream, the potential for repurposing electric vehicle (EV) batteries has grown significantly. No longer just a niche pur…

MechDog AI Robot Dog features ESP32-S3 controller, supports Scratch, Python, and Arduino programming - CNX Software

Hiwonder's MechDog is a compact AI robot dog with an ESP32-S3 controller, 8 coreless servos, and ports for sensor expansion.

Tulip Is A Micropython Synth Workstation, In An ESP32

We’re not sure exactly what Tulip is, because it’s so many things all at once. It’s a music-making environment that’s programmable in Python, runs on your big computer or on an ESP32-S3, and comes …

RC Car Gets Force Feedback Steering

Remote-controlled cars can get incredibly fast and complex (and expensive) the farther into the hobby you get. So much so that a lot of things that are missing from the experience of driving a real…