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 […]
One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star […]
One thing some people hate about voice control is that you need to have a process always running, listening for the wake word. If your system isn’t totally locally-hosted, that can raise some privacy eyebrows. Perhaps that’s part of what inspired [SpannerSpencer] to create this 24th century solution: a Comm Badge straight out of Star […]
Meshtastic has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance lately, as the off-grid, long-range radio text messaging protocol gains a ton of new users. It’s been used to create mesh networks in cities, during disasters and protests, in small groups while hiking or camping, and for search and rescue operations. Although it’s connected plenty of […]
An orrery is a beautiful type of mechanical contrivance, built to demonstrate the motion of heavenly objects. LEGO happens to offer just such a device, built using its Technic line of blocks, shafts, and gears. Only, it has a serious limitation—it has to be cranked manually to make it spin the Earth around the sun. […]
In many places, municipal water from a utility is something that’s often taken for granted. A local government or water utility will employ a water tower or pumping facility to ensure that there’s always water available to every home and business connected to it, all day, every day, and at a relatively constant pressure. This […]
Ham radio operators may be familiar with slow-scan television (SSTV) where an image is sent out over the airwaves to be received, decoded, and displayed on a computer monitor by other radio operators. It’s a niche mode that isn’t as popular as modern digital modes like FT8, but it still has its proponents. SSTV isn’t […]
Pomodoro timers are a simple productivity tool. They help you work in dedicated chunks of time, usually 25 minutes in a sitting, before taking a short break and then beginning again. [Clovis Fritzen] built just such a timer of his own, and added a few bonus features to fill out its functionality. The timer is […]