Author: Jenny List

3584 Articles

You Wouldn’t Download A Car…

November 9, 2026 by 18 Comments

For as long as there have been sports cars, there have been blokes in tin sheds making their own sports cars. It’s a pursuit that has birthed famous marques and more than one motor racing series. Over the years these home made autos have been variously made of steel, aluminium, and fibreglass, and now thanks to [Kevin Kuehn] they can also be 3D printed.

His car little open top number with a body 3D printed ion PETG, and finished with a layer of carbon fibre. The styling is very organic, but maybe that windscreen needs a little work.  Under the hood are the mechanicals from a Nissan Leaf. It’s fully driveable, and road legal in California.

Perhaps the most unexpected part is that the PETG part was 3D printed in 600 small parts and heat-stapled together. He’s even created the software to do this, which could be useful in other large projects.

Having been involved in a few builds, we can see that this is a fascinating project that we hope will be the first of many. If the next generation of self-built cars are 3D printed, that can’t be a bad thing. Perhaps the worthy successor to the most hackable car will be 3D printed.

Free Your Harley From The Dealer

November 9, 2026 by 19 Comments

Vehicles have come with diagnostic ports for many years now, and there are a host of easily available tools to interrogate them. Despite that, there are still proprietary aspects that remain out of reach. For one of them there may be a way to know more though, as [Daniel Henzulea] has made what he describes to us as a dealer-grade diagonostic tool for Harley-Davidson motorcycles. These machines don’t come with the familiar OBD-II port.

The Harley diagnostic port is a custom six-pin socket that carries a CAN bus. Into this is plugged a CAN transceiver, and to that is connected one of the Xtensa-based ESP32s. The magic then is in the software, which exposes and makes accessible every function. What used to be closed source and prohibitively expensive, is now open to all.

You might not be surprised to read that this isn’t the first time we’ve featured a project diving into a Harley-Davidson’s data bus.

Header: Reinhold Möller, CC BY-SA 4.0.

From Phone, To SDR, No Extra Hardware

November 9, 2026 by 16 Comments

One of the more exciting recent developments has been the discovery that many radio chips used in common and cheap wireless network interfaces, microcontrollers, LoRa interfaces and others can be persuaded to give access to their baseband data streams This gives them full SDR functionality, which on cheap devices is hugely interesting. Continuing that trend and taking it to a new height is [Logan Zarov], who’s converted an LG D325 Android phone into a wideband receiver with very minor modification indeed.

The phone is rooted and runs LineageOS as you might expect, and there’s a modem firmware update to supply the SDR baseband magic. There’s also a mod for an antenna wire. Where this becomes especially interesting is in its receive frequency range. The modem talks in the GHz, but this radio receives in the MHz, it can pick up shortwave. This is achieved by using the Bluetooth radio as a local oscillator, oddly in a similar manner to that we suggested a few weeks ago.

This is hackery at its most epic, we love it, and look forward to the similar hacks which will certainly follow. There’s a video below the break, and you can see it doing its thing.

Continue reading “From Phone, To SDR, No Extra Hardware” →

Proper Linux, On An ESP32

November 7, 2026 by 35 Comments

The ESP32 series of microcontrollers feature a lot on these pages, offering as they do a significantly powerful processor and in most cases, wireless connectivity. One recent member of the bewilderingly large family is the ESP32-S31, It’s a dual-core RISC-V unit with WiFi 6, and if that’s not interesting enough there’s the news that it runs Linux. Not -nommu Linux, but the full-fat version, as it has a memory management unit.

Before you imagine a superlative experience, it’s worth the reminder that the available resources will not give it much when it comes to computing power. But there’s an Espressif GitHub repository, and work on a port of a 6.x kernel, so you should be able to do something with it. A quick look on AliExpress finds dev boards at a range of prices, so the cost of experimenting shouldn’t be too high.

This moment at which the paths of microcontroller and full-fat SoC start to cross has been on the horizon for quite a while, and it’s exciting to see it finally arrive. Expect more similar chips in competition with this one, and more power too. Meanwhile see our noting the launch of the S31.

The Hidden Microcontroller Inside A LoRa Chip

November 7, 2026 by 15 Comments

If you’ve ever done anything with LoRa, the chances are you’ve used a LoRa chip or module as a peripheral for a microcontroller, and left it at that. But that’s not always the case. Rather than being a pre-programmed ASIC under the hood, the Semtech LR2021 has its own on-board microcontroller whose firmware can be updated. [Alex Beale] has managed to unlock its secrets.

The use of LLMs can elicit strong opinions at times, but in this case we agree with him that the task of reverse engineering this hidden microcontoller would have been a near-impossible task without their help. Having done so though,he can write custom firmwares, which he’s able to demonstrate. Running the required FFTs for a waterfall display on-chip for example is now possible, as is running your mesh network node on the chip itself.

This work continues a streak of recent discoveries unlocking software-defined radio functionality inside dedicated radio chips, with both WiFi and LoRa chips falling prey to reverse engineering. It’s an interesting time, if SDR is your thing.

Thanks [Notbasa] for the tip.

Automate That Halloween Treating

November 6, 2026 by 4 Comments

We live a Jetsons future of ubiquitous automation, in which the most trivial of human tasks has a machine to take the work out of it. Take doling out Halloween candy for example, why the effort of doing it by hand when a machine can take the  strain? [Christian] is here to show us the way with the Halloween Candy Mosnter. It’s a cardboard monster ehad that delivers candy when you press its nose, but there’s a bit more to it than that.

Behind the scenes there’s an ESP32 running the show, with the candy dispensed by a stepper motor with a finger wheel. An IR break beam detects candy dispensing, and an array of flashing lights and sounds complete the celebration. It’s a bit of fun, but with more substance than at first meets the eye. Everything sits in a GitHub repository should you wish to take a peek.

Halloween comes but once a year, and thus we only have a few days in which to show off these hacks. Oddly this one isn’t the first dispenser of candy we have brought you.

It’s Alpine Linux, On A Kindle Paperwhite 3

November 6, 2026 by 6 Comments

As computing power becomes cheaper and microprocessors become more capable, a steady trend over recent decades has been to see more everyday devices hiding Linux under the hood somewhere. Sadly in most cases that’s where it stays, but some such machines have a level of hackability. One such is the 7th generation Kindle PaperWhite 3, for which [pragyaangaur] has produced a distro that gives it the Alpine Linux userspace and a few other tricks.

As you might expect, the Kindle must be jailbroken, and is limited to the rather ancient Amazon kernel. The distro comes with a few extras for the custom front end. There’s a selection of games, a browser, an ArXiv search client, an ePub reader, and Quill, a local chatbot running SmolLM2 over llama.cpp on the Kindle’s own processor. At 1.7 words per second it may not be the fastest, but the important thing is that everything stays on the device. Best of all, it’s easy enough to return your Kindle to stock should you tire of the distro.

A quick look at everyone’s favourite auction site finds these readers available for well under $100, so should you wish to join the fun it at least shouldn’t cost an arm and a leg. Meanwhile, Kindle hacking is somewhere we’ve taken you before.