Author: Lewin Day

3321 Articles

Bluetooth Earrings Pump Out The Tunes

September 27, 2025 by 14 Comments

When you think of a Bluetooth speaker, you’re probably picturing a roughly lunchbox-sized device that pumps out some decent volume for annoying fellow beachgoers, hikers, or public transport users. [Matt Frequencies] has developed something in an altogether different form factor—tiny Bluetooth speakers you can dangle from your earlobes! They’re called Earrays, and they’re awesome.

The build started with [Matt] harvesting circuit boards from a pair of off-the-shelf Bluetooth earbuds. These are tiny, and perfect for picking up a digital audio stream from a smartphone or other device, but they don’t have the grunt to drive powerful speakers. Thus, [Matt] hooked them up to a small Adafruit PAM8302A amplifier board, enabling them to drive some larger speaker drivers that you can actually hear from a distance. These were then installed in little 3D printed housings that are like a tiny version of the speaker arrays you might see hanging from the rigging at a major dance festival. Throw on a little earring hook, and you’ve got a pair of wearable Bluetooth speakers that are both functional, fashionable, and very audible!

[Matt] has continued to develop the project, even designing a matching pendant and a charging base to make them practical to use beyond a proof-of concept. Despite the weight of the included electronics, they’re perfectly wearable, as demonstrated by [DJ Kaizo Trap] modelling the hardware in the images seen here.

We’ve seen plenty of great LED earrings over the years, but very few jewelry projects in the audio space thus far. Perhaps that will change in future—if you pursue such goals, let us know!

An LED Sphere For Your Desk

September 27, 2025 by 1 Comment

The Las Vegas Sphere is great and all, but few of us can afford the expense to travel to out there to see it on the regular. If you’re looking for similar vibes you can access at home, you might enjoy the desk toy that [AGBarber] has designed.

The scale is small — the sphere measures just 98 mm (3.6 inches) in diameter — but that just means it’s accessible enough to be fun. The build is based around various sizes of WS2812B addressable LED rings, and contains 120 individual RGB LEDs in total. They’re wrapped up in a 3D printed housing which does a great job of diffusing the light. Transparent filament was used to print parts that light up with a richly-saturated glow with few visible hotspots. Commanding the LEDs is an ESP8266 microcontroller in the form of a Wemos D1 Mini, which provides plenty of grunt to run animations as well as great wireless connectivity options. [AGBarber] relied on their own Pixel Spork library to handle all the cool lighting effects. Files are on GitHub for the curious.

Maybe you don’t like spheres, and icosahedrons are more your speed. Well, we’ve featured those too—with 2,400 LEDs, no less.

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Detecting Surveillance Cameras With The ESP32

September 26, 2025 by 36 Comments

These days, surveillance cameras are all around us, and they’re smarter than ever. In particular, many of them are running advanced algorithms to recognize faces and scan license plates, compiling ever-greater databases on the movements and lives of individuals. Flock You is a project that aims to, at the very least, catalogue this part of the surveillance state, by detecting these cameras out in the wild.

The system is most specifically set up to detect surveillance cameras from Flock Safety, though it’s worth noting a wide range of companies produce plate-reading cameras and associated surveillance systems these days. The device uses an ESP32 microcontroller to detect these devices, relying on the in-built wireless hardware to do the job. The project can be built on a Oui-Spy device from Colonel Panic, or just by using a standard Xiao ESP32 S3 if so desired. By looking at Wi-Fi probe requests and beacon frames, as well as Bluetooth advertisements, it’s possible for the device to pick up telltale transmissions from a range of these cameras, with various pattern-matching techniques and MAC addresses used to filter results in this regard. When the device finds a camera, it sounds a buzzer notifying the user of this fact.

Meanwhile, if you’re interested in just how prevalent plate-reading cameras really are, you might also find deflock.me interesting. It’s a map of ALPR camera locations all over the world,  and you can submit your own findings if so desired. The techniques used by in the Flock You project are based on learnings from the DeFlock project. Meanwhile, if you want to join the surveillance state on your own terms, you can always build your own license plate reader instead!

[Thanks to Eric for the tip!]

How Water Vapor Makes Smartphones Faster

September 25, 2025 by 25 Comments

Once upon a time, home computers were low-powered enough that they barely needed any cooling at all. An Amiga 500 didn’t even have a heatsink on the CPU, while the early Macintosh got by with a single teeny little fan.

Modern smartphones are far more powerful than these ancient machines, packed with multi-core processors running at speeds of many gigahertz. Even still, they’ve generally been able to get by without any active cooling devices. However, as manufacturers continue to push the envelope of performance, they’ve had to scramble for ways to suck heat out of these handheld computers. Vapor chamber cooling has risen as a solution to this problem, using simple physics to keep your handset humming along at maximum speed for longer.

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Radio Shack Rebirth May Have Gone Awry In Alleged Ponzi-Like Scheme

September 25, 2025 by 33 Comments

Oh, Radio Shack. What a beautiful place you once were, a commercial haven for those seeking RC cars, resistors, and universal remotes. Then, the downfall, as you veered away from your origins, only to lead to an ultimate collapse. More recently, the brand was supposed to return to new heights online… only to fall afoul of the Securities and Exchange Commission. (via Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg)

The Radio Shack brand was picked up a few years ago by a company known as Retail Ecommerce Ventures (REV). The company’s modus operandi was to take well-known but beleaguered brands and relaunch them as online-only operations. Beyond Radio Shack, REV also owned a number of other notable brand names, like Pier 1, Modell’s Sporting Goods, and Dress Barn.

Unfortunately, the Radio Shack rebirth probably won’t reach the stellar heights of the past. Namely, because REV has been accused of operating a Ponzi-like scheme by the SEC. Despite huge boasts allegedly made to investors, none of REV’s portfolio of brands were actually making profits, and the SEC has charged that the company was paying investor returns with cash raised from other investors — unsustainable, and a major no-no, legally speaking. In any case, the SEC charges apply directly to REV. The RadioShack brand has since been acquired by Unicomer Group, which operates the current online business, and has no ties to REV or its former operators.

We were cautiously optimistic when we heard about the REV buyout back in 2020, but at this point, it’s probably best to come to terms with the fact that Radio Shack won’t be returning to its former glory. The name will linger in our hearts for some time to come, but the business we knew is long gone. Sometimes it’s better to look to the future than to try and recreate the magic of the past, especially if you’re doing inappropriate things with other people’s money in the process.

How Regulations Are Trying To Keep Home Battery Installs Safe

September 24, 2025 by 81 Comments

The advent of rooftop solar power generation was a huge step forward for renewable energy. No longer was generating electricity the sole preserve of governments and major commercial providers; now just about any homeowner could start putting juice into the grid for a few thousand dollars. Since then, we’ve seen the rise of the home battery, which both promises to make individual homes more self sufficient, whilst also allowing them to make more money selling energy to the grid where needed.

Home batteries are becoming increasingly popular, but as with any new home utility, there come risks. After all, a large capacity battery can present great danger if not installed or used correctly. In the face of these dangers, authorities in jurisdictions around the world have been working to ensure home batteries are installed with due regard for the safety of the occupants of the average home.

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