The famous cuckoo clock, with its moving, chirping mechanical bird indicating various divisions of time, has been around since at least the 1600s. The most famous of them come from the Black Forest area of Germany, and are still being made worldwide even today. Other clocks with different themes take their inspiration from the standard […]
Sometimes you really need to know what the weather is doing, but you don’t want to look at your phone. For times like those, this neat weather display from [Jordan] might come in handy with its throwback retro vibe. The build is based around the ESP32-2432S028—also known as the CYD, or Cheap Yellow Display, for the […]
[Jakub] is a musician, and found himself in need of a simple way to trigger samples via MIDI when on stage. So many commercial solutions exist, but most were overkill for the job or too messy and complicated to justify their use in a live environment. Thus, [Jakub] worked up Samplotron to do exactly the […]
This week Jonathan chats with Valentyn Danylchuk about BreezyBox — an interactive shell and toolkit that provides various tools and a compiler on an ESP32 microcontroller. What was the inspiration for this impressive project, and what direction is it heading? Watch to find out! https://github.com/valdanylchuk/breezydemo https://github.com/valdanylchuk/xcc700 https://www.linkedin.com/in/valdanylchuk https://hackaday.com/2026/02/06/breezybox-a-busybox-like-shell-and-virtual-terminal-for-esp32/ Did you know you can watch the […]
Every ham radio shack needs a clock; ideally one with operator-friendly features like multiple time zones and more. [cburns42] found that most solutions relied too much on an internet connection for his liking, so in true hacker fashion he decided to make his own: the operator-oriented Ham Clock CYD. A tabbed interface goes well with […]
Reading analog clocks is a pretty straightforward skill to learn. However, if you’ve already learned to read and don’t want to pick up the extra skill, a word clock is a perfect solution for telling time. [povey_tech] found some nice examples in the wild but didn’t appreciate the price, so he set about building his […]
[Yeckel] recently put the finishing touches on an ambitious implementation of a simple D-STAR (Digital Smart Technologies for Amateur Radio) transceiver using some very accessible and affordable hardware. The project is D-StarBeacon, and [Yeckel] shows it working on a LilyGO TTGO T-Beam, an ESP32-based development board that includes a SX1278 radio module and GPS receiver. […]
Having an AI assistant is all the rage these days, but AI assistants usually don’t know about your automation setups and may have difficulty dealing with tasks asynchronously. Enter zclaw. It gives you the option to have a personal assistant on an ESP32 backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter. The whole thing fits in 888KB, […]
[Matt Denton]’s SpoolBot is a surprisingly agile remote-controlled robot that doesn’t just repurpose filament spool leftovers. It looks exactly like a 2 kg spool of filament; that’s real filament wound around the outside of the drum. In fact, Spoolie the SpoolBot looks so much like the real thing that [Matt] designed a googly-eye add-on, because […]
Random numbers are very important to us in this computer age, being used for all sorts of security and cryptographic tasks. [Theory to Thing] recently built a device to generate random numbers using nothing more complicated than simple camera noise. The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which [Theory to Thing] first paired […]