Build A Stranger Things Wall You Can Freak Out At In Your Own Home

November 19, 2025 by Lewin Day No comments

When Stranger Things premiered in 2016, it was a cultural force. Foreign DJs gushed over the lush 80s soundtrack, fashionistas loved the clothing, and the world became obsessed with the idea of using Christmas lights to communicate across material planes. [kyjohnso] has recreated that experience with the technology of today.

If you haven’t watched the show — Joyce Byers is trying to communicate with her son Will, who just so happens to be stuck in another plane of existence called the Upside Down. She screams questions at her living room wall, upon which hangs a series of Christmas lights, marked with the letters A to Z. Will is able to communicate back by causing the lights to flash, one letter at a time.

This build works a little differently. You basically type a message into a terminal on a Raspberry Pi, and it gets sent to a large language model—namely, the Claude API. The response from Claude (or Will Byers, if you’re imagining) is then flashed out on a WS2812B set of LED Christmas lights on the wall. [kyjohnso] added dramatic pauses whenever there’s a space in the output, somewhat replicating the dramatic elements of the show itself. Files are on GitHub for the spooky and curious.

It’s a neat build that would be a hit at any Halloween party. We can’t imagine how much more immersive it would be if paired with a speech-to-text engine so you could actually scream at the thing like a distraught Midwestern parent who has just lost her youngest child. It’s all about committing to the bit; if you build such a thing, don’t hesitate to notify the tipsline!

Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia

November 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 37 Comments

We’re taught how to call emergency numbers from a young age; whether it be 911 in the US, 999 in the UK, or 000 in Australia. The concept is simple—if you need aid from police, fire, or ambulance, you pick up a phone and dial and help will be sent in short order.

It’s a service many of us have come to rely on; indeed, it’s function can swing the very balance between life or death. Sadly, in Australia, that has come to pass, with a person dying when their Samsung phone failed to reach the Triple Zero (000) emergency line. It has laid bare an obscure technical issue that potentially leaves thousands of lives at risk. Continue reading “Why Samsung Phones Are Failing Emergency Calls In Australia” →

Smart Bandage Leverages AI Model For Healing Purposes

November 19, 2025 by Lewin Day 11 Comments

If you get a small cut, you might throw a plastic bandage on it to help it heal faster. However, there are fancier options on the horizon, like this advanced AI-powered smart bandage.

Researchers at UC Santa Cruz have developed a proof-of-concept device called a-Heal, intended for use inside existing commercial bandages for colostomy use. The device is fitted with a small camera, which images the wound site every two hours. The images are then uploaded via a wireless connection, and processed with a machine learning model that has been trained to make suggestions on how to better stimulate the healing process based on the image input. The device can then follow these recommendations, either using electrical stimulation to reduce inflammation in the wound, or supplying fluoxetine to stimulate the growth of healthy tissue. In testing, the device was able to improve the rate of skin coverage over an existing wound compared to a control.

The long-term goal is to apply the technology in a broader sense to help better treat things like chronic or infected wounds that may have difficulty healing. It’s still at an early stage for now, but it could one day be routine for medical treatment to involve the use of small smart devices to gain a better rolling insight on the treatment of wounds. It’s not the first time we’ve explored innovative methods of wound care; we’ve previously looked at how treatments from the past could better inform how we treat in future.

Hacking A Pill Camera

November 18, 2025 by Lewin Day 23 Comments

A gastroscopy is a procedure that, in simple terms, involves sticking a long, flexible tube down a patient’s throat to inspect the oesophagus and adjacent structures with a camera fitted to the tip. However, modern technology has developed an alternative, in the form of a camera fitted inside a pill. [Aaron Christophel] recently came across one of these devices, and decided to investigate its functionality.

[Aaron’s] first video involves a simple teardown of the camera. The small plastic pill is a marvel of miniaturization. Through the hemispherical transparent lens, we can see a tiny camera and LEDs to provide light in the depths of the human body. Slicing the camera open reveals the hardware inside, however, like the miniature battery, the microcontroller, and the radio hardware that transmits signals outside the body. Unsurprisingly, it’s difficult to get into, since it’s heavily sealed to ensure the human body doesn’t accidentally digest the electronics inside.

Unwilling to stop there, [Aaron] pushed onward—with his second video focusing on reverse engineering. With a little glitching, he was able to dump the firmware from the TI CC1310 microcontroller. From there, he was able to get to the point where he could pull a shaky video feed transmitted from the camera itself. Artists are already making music videos on Ring doorbells; perhaps this is just the the next step.

Smart pills were once the realm of science fiction, but they’re an increasingly common tool in modern medicine. Video after the break.

Continue reading “Hacking A Pill Camera” →

Humane Mousetrap Lets You Know It’s Caught Something

November 18, 2025 by Lewin Day 46 Comments

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door,” so goes the saying, but VHS beat Betamax and the world hasn’t been the same since. In any case, you might not get rich building a better mousetrap, but you can certainly create something more humane than the ol’ spring’n’snap, as [nightcustard] demonstrates.

The concept is the same as many humane mousetraps on the market. The mouse is lured into a confined cavity with the use of bait, and once inside, a door closes to keep the mouse inside without injuring it. [nightcustard] achieved this by building a plastic enclosure with plenty of air holes, which is fitted with a spring-loaded door. When a mouse walks through an infra-red break beam sensor, a Raspberry Pi Pico W triggers a solenoid which releases the door, trapping the mouse inside. This design was chosen over a passive mechanical solution, because [nightcustard] noted that mice in the attic were avoiding other humane traps with obvious mechanical trigger mechanisms.

As a bonus, the wireless connectivity of the Pi Pico W allows the trap to send a notification via email when it has fired. Thus, you can wake up in the morning and check your emails to see if you need to go and release a poor beleaguered mouse back into the wild. This is critical, as otherwise, if you forget to check your humane trap… it stops being humane pretty quickly.

If you’re looking for more inspiration to tackle your mouse problems, we can help. We’ve featured other traps of this type before, too. Meanwhile, if you’ve got your own friendly homebrew solutions to pesky pest problems, don’t hesitate to hit up the tipsline.

A Quick Primer On TinkerCAD’s New Features

November 18, 2025 by Lewin Day 7 Comments

TinkerCAD had its first release all the way back in 2011 and it has come a long way since then. The latest release has introduced a raft of new, interesting features, and [HL ModTech] has been nice enough to sum them up in a recent video.

He starts out by explaining some of the basics before quickly jumping into the new gear. There are two headline features: intersect groups and smooth curves. Where the old union group tool simply merged two pieces of geometry, intersect group allows you to create a shape only featuring the geometry where two individual blocks intersect. It’s a neat addition that allows the creation of complex geometry more quickly. [HL ModTech] demonstrates it with a sphere and a pyramid and his enthusiasm is contagious.

As for smooth curves, it’s an addition to the existing straight line and Bézier curve sketch tools. If you’ve ever struggled making decent curves with Bézier techniques, you might appreciate the ease of working with the smooth curve tool, which avoids any nasty jagged points as a matter of course.

While it’s been gaining new features at an impressive rate, ultimately TinkerCAD is still a pretty basic tool — it’s not the sort of thing you’d expect to see in the aerospace world or anything. ut it’s a great way to start whipping up custom stuff on your 3D printer.

Continue reading “A Quick Primer On TinkerCAD’s New Features” →

Micro:Bit Gets Pseudo-Polyphonic Sound With Neat Hack

November 18, 2025 by Lewin Day 3 Comments

The Micro:bit is a fun microcontroller development platform, designed specifically for educational use. Out of the box, it’s got a pretty basic sound output feature that can play a single note at a time. However, if you’re willing to get a bit tricky, you can do some pseudo-polyphonic stuff as [microbit-noob] explains.

The trick to polyphony in a monophonic world? Rapidly alternating between the different notes you want to be playing at the same time. Do this fast enough and it feels like they’re playing together rather than seperately. [microbit-noob] demonstrates how to implement this with a simple function coded for the Micro:bit. Otherwise, it uses the completely stock sound hardware. However, the IR receiver is added to the device in order to allow a simple remote control to be used to command the notes desired, along with some extra tactile buttons to add further control.

Is it chiptune? Well, it’s a chip, playing a tune, so yes. Even if it is through a tiny speaker stuck to the PCB. In any case, if you’re trying to get some better bleeps and bloops out of the Micro:bit, this is a great place to start. If you’ve got other hacks for Britain’s educational little board, let us know on the tipsline!