We have to admit, we didn’t know that we wanted a desktop electric jellyfish until seeing [likeablob]’s Denki-Kurage, but it’s one of those projects that just fills a need so perfectly. The need being, of course, to have a Bladerunner-inspired electric animal on your desk, as well as having a great simple application for that […]
We’re used to electronic parts of the same type staying predictably the same, sometimes over many years. An early Z80 from the mid 1970s can be exchanged with one from the end of production a few years ago, for example. This week, we’ve had DMs from several readers who’ve found that this is not always […]
What hardware hacker doesn’t have a soft spot for transparent cases? While they may have fallen out of mainstream favor, they have an undeniable appeal to anyone with an interest in electronic or mechanical devices. Which is why the Orbigator built by [wyojustin] stands out among similar desktop orbital trackers we’ve seen. Conceptually, it’s very […]
While it might not be comprehensive, [Bret.dk] recently posted a retrospective titled “Every Single Board Computer I Tested in 2025.” The post covers 15 boards from 8 different companies. The cheapest board was $42, but the high-end topped out at $590. We like the structure of the post. The boards are grouped in an under […]
Light aircraft often use a heading indicator as a way to know where they’re going. Retired instrumentation engineer [Don Welch] recreated a heading indicator of his own, using cheap off-the-shelf hardware to get the job done. The heart of the build is a Teensy 4.0 microcontroller. It’s paired with a BNO085 inertial measurement unit (IMU), […]
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, […]
Analog TV may have shuffled off its mortal coil years ago, but there are still plenty of old CRT TV sets around that could receive it. [Kris Slyka] has just such a device, and decided to feed it something from an STM32 microcontroller. An STM32G431, to be precise, and he’s doing it using the on-chip […]
When [101 Things] didn’t want to copy Morse code, he decided to build a Pi Pico system to read it for him. On the face of it, this doesn’t seem particularly hard, until you look at the practical considerations. With perfectly timed dots and dashes, it would be trivial. But in real life, you get […]
Fidget toys are everywhere these days. A particularly popular type simply puts some keyboard switches on a plate to provide a certain type of clicky satisfaction. [wjddnjsdnd] took that concept a step further, building a keychain-sized fidget toy that actually has games on it. The build is based around six key switches in a 2 […]
Much like how BusyBox crams many standard Unix commands and a shell into a single executable, so too does BreezyBox provide a similar experience for the ESP32 platform. A demo implementation is also provided, which uses the ESP32-S3 platform as part of the Waveshare 7″ display development board. Although it invokes the BusyBox name, it’s […]