The speed that computers have gotten smaller is a bit mind-bending. Most of us now walk around with computers in our pockets that would have rivaled the supercomputers from a few decades ago. And, although it seems like the speed at which things are getting smaller and faster has slowed a bit compared to the rapid pace of the 90s and 00s, some truly minuscule computers are accessible nowadays. So much so that it’s possible to do useful computing inside a walnut shell.
The first step in this build is to crack into a walnut. Most have a natural seam that separates two hemispheres, so splitting it open, enjoying a small snack, and then adding some small neodymium magnets on the inside of that seam to close up the shell is not too difficult. From there, some LEDs were installed at various points in the shell, with an ESP32-C3 installed in the middle to control everything and oriented so that its USB port is still accessible.
Although putting a small microcontroller in a nutshell might seem like a novelty, [JSK-koubou] is actually using the LEDs to perform a useful task. The walnut sits in his living room and connects to a home automation system through the ESP32, and when it receives a command it uses the LEDs to send infrared signals to non-connected devices. Hiding projects in unexpected places is a fun pastime, like this Meshtastic node hidden in a landscape light.
Add a microphone and you’d have a pretty neat espionage device…
not if you’re spying on a someone who follows a paleo diet or a tree woodchuck
okay, the next step, install something in a walnut that can run Doom!
This joke is stale. It’s no longer an accomplishment to get anything to play doom. It’s been done so many times on invariably everything.
i don’t think anyone has gotten Doom to run on a 555 timer yet, which would hit too threadbare HaD tropes in one go
Yeah yeah they have….
https://hackaday.com/2026/08/28/doom-played-on-series-of-555-timers/
Thank you for saying this
Such a tired meme, it honestly kind of made me hate Doom a little
I still haven’t seen it run on a dead badger. How’s that for a stale joke?
Thank you for saying that.
So then why comment? Stick with being the life of every party you attend.
AFAIK Doom hasn’t been ported to 68030 (e.g. a Macintosh SE/30).
https://github.com/retrospectmike/MacDoomSE30
That guy has either huge hands or huge nuts.
Small* hands or huge nuts?
I mean tiny hands of course…
Wow, this is nuts.
How does the ESP handle the blasting? I hope it’s all programmed in some shell magic!
Nuttin to see here, just acorny pun…
Now this is real shell scripting
Why can’t I find the code ?
Without having read it, I assume it’s just some configuration with ESPhome.
No custom code required.
It’s probably been squirrel away somewhere…
Serious question.
This guy has close to 2 million subscribers. I assume he makes some portion of his living from these videos.
The video is nearly 20 minutes long.
Who has 20 minutes (or even 12.5 minute) to watch this stuff?
I can read at easily 3x as fast as I can comprehend the spoken word, even when accelerated. So, based on the content, this would be an unremarkable 2 minute Instructables read with easy links to the repo and the BOM.
Instead we get underwater video of fish.
AND 300,000+ people are watching this.
With ads.
What is happening here?!
Please note that at no point in my posting did I refer to or speculate on the age of anyone. For all I know or care all 300,000 viewers are in retirement communities or in nappies (or both).
My incredulity is that anyone would spend 20 minutes watching this video, with advertising, when 95% of the same content could be consumed by reading 3 paragraphs (maybe) in about 2 minutes.
I watch videos like this during dinner, when doing chores or sometimes even while playing videogames.
P.S. I am also genz(2005) and I would like to apologize for the other commenter. I was lucky to have many good and understanding seniors to chat with. Some may be a bit sensitive, and I wish this would lessen the sour experience of interacting with our generation. I hope this also answers your question.
The ESP32 in a nutshell…
The nut appart, this guy is using an ESP32 to IR control a ventilator from a smartphone BLE ?
Some smartphones come with an IR interface (I got one), get one and go swimming all day!
This is all written out pure love towards younger generations i do not hate on kids nor do I condone hating on younger generations, I just think the generation wars has to stop somehow and/or someway.
What war are you referring to? The only thing I see is a lot of young people misusing the term boomer to the hilarity of the generation being called it.
Basically a generation war is the term that refers to older generations from the very beginning of all generations since the 1900s that make fun of or find every bit of a younger generation more annoying than usual saying that they are in fact worse than them in many aspects in a lot of ways like for example with the previous generation that became parents of millennials they were said to the previous generation whenever gen x was watching TV for too long of their parents’ liking the parents would call them out saying “watch TV any longer and you’ll get squared eyes” and then the previous generation started doing the exact same with millennials even if they didn’t realize that the generation before millennials was saying “get off the internet or you’ll get square eyes” and some going as far as saying the entire generation is all a goner and are basically hopeless. And in recent years there’s been a term for that exact thing between older and younger generations that is now called the Generation wars