Author: Tyler August

559 Articles

ESP32 Music Sequencer Is Clearly Nailing The Y2K Aesthetic

August 15, 2026 by 2 Comments

Do you remember back when electronics came in clear cases? Back around the turn of the millennium, when translucency was chic. [3DSage] sure does, which is why he went to great lengths to make a clear case for his Clear Retro Music Sequencer.

The sequencer itself is based around an ESP32-S3 module with a built-in display, and a rotary encoder that handles most of the input. Most, because there’s a second button and a stylophone-like array of brass rods on one edge of the custom PCB he made with his fiber laser that can also handle note input. Other notable features include a phono jack with built-in switching so the tunes come out automatically from headphones or the internal speaker, and a AAA battery-lookalike. It’s a small detail, but that 666 mWh 3.7 V lithium cell is the demon’s meow for this project, seeing as it gives the convenience of a modern battery without compromising that Y2K look — remember you can see the battery through the translucent case.

About that translucent case: it’s 3D printed out of PETG, with settings similar to those we’ve reported on before: hot, slow, and don’t cross the streams! Which is to say every layer must line up with the one above. Oh, use filament fresh out of the drier of you live somewhere as humid as [3DSage]. The result is not totally see-through, but an application of clear enamel fills in the surface well enough to read through, giving the vintage look [3DSage] was after. To complete that Y2K feel, he turns the device into a slap bracelet, because why not? For those of you who missed due to the aforementioned federal prison arc, slap-on wristbands were all the rage amongst the kids back in those days.

The wristband is a length of measuring tape at its core, the springy steel having been cold-worked to hold the radius of [3DSage]’s wrist in its relaxed state, encapsulated in clear gorilla tape for comfort. We probably don’t have to tell you that getting slapped with a raw tape measure isn’t the nicest. For the actual operation of the sequencer, check out the video embedded below — the first 9 minutes cover the build, while the rest shows off the product.

Of course you don’t need an ESP32 for this kind of music maker– you can do it with a C64, or even discrete parts and rope-core memory. 

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Automatic Naptime With BabyBjorn Bouncing Servo

August 14, 2026 by 14 Comments

Any parent with a baby and deep pockets– or friends with deep pockets– will probably sing the praises of the BabyBjorn rocking sling chair. A simple spring-loaded sling seat allows you to rock a child to sleep like magic– but you do have to rock the child. In the tradition of fathers everywhere since the stone age, [Ceyhun Karataş] saw that as something to tinker around, creating his Automatic BabyBjorn Bouncer/Rocker with a servo, an Arduino, and some 3D printed parts.

You still can’t leave your child unattended with this hack, [Ceyhun] takes pains to point out, but it will free a hand so you can keep junior happy while tinkering up other toys for him or her. Music players are a popular staple, for example.

You should have plenty of time for such projects, because it won’t take long for you to replicate [Ceyhun]’s invention– it’s only as complicated as it needs to be, which is not very. The servo, a Futaba S3003 which is mounted to the bottom of the rocker in a 3D printed case, reels the baby in with a string tied to the bouncing seat portion.  The BabyBjorn’s built-in spring bounces junior back up. As stated, Arduino Nano controls the servo, with two potentiometers in the build allowing you to control the speed and amplitude of the bounce independently to get the perfect naptime ratio. Everything you need to get started — aside from the hardware and the child– is available at the link above. You can see it in action in the video below, which in spite what you may fear from the Turkish thumbnail, does have authentic English audio, not AI auto-dubbing.

If you’ve got the baby but not the bouncy chair, have a gander at this mechatronic crib that does something similar on a much larger budget.

Thanks to [Ceyhun] for overcoming the new-parent sleep deprivation to document this project and send in a tip.

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Have Scientists Stuck The Landing On The Glueball Discovery?

August 12, 2026 by 18 Comments

Exciting discoveries in particle physics are one of those things that it can be easy to get blase about. Some people get caught up in the obvious excitement, while others yawn: “Oh, you found the Higgs Boson, just like Higgs predicted. Call me when you have something new.” Well, if you’re in category B, prepare to yawn while the rest of us break out champagne, because it looks like we’ve finally found the glueball. 

The glueball has got to be one of the oddest particles to fall out of the Standard Model. It’s not a fundamental particle, but its makeup contains no quarks– those itty bits that make up protons and neutrons– nor any leptons like electrons or muons. No, the glueball is a hadron made entirely of bosons: specifically, gluons, the force-carrying particles of the strong nuclear force. It’s also been called gluonium or a gluon-ball, but glueball is more fun.

Try and imagine a proton without any quarks. Remember that inside the proton there are three quarks, held together with force-carrying gluon particles. If you have zero quarks, but enough of those gluons tangled up in the right ways, and you get a tangible, if short lived particle. That’s the glueball, a neutral particle that will decay almost immediatly in to Pions. It works because gluons have ‘colour charge’– the strong nuclear force’s answer to electric charge.

It’s also one of those things that will probably never be seen in nature: odds are, even in the hottest collisions, you’re going to get a quark or two mixed up with your gluon soup. That’s okay; the gluonic state is what we’ve been looking for. As long as the particle is mostly gluons, and behaves as the Standard Model predicts it should, physicists are inclined to call it good enough. The latest candidate to hit “good enough” is X(2370), which fell out of a collision in the Beijing Electron–Positron Collider II (BEPC II), as detected by the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III). The paper hit ArXiv at the end of July. It’s taken the collaboration this long to make sure of what they were looking at, as they sorted through the terabytes of data an instrument like this generates.

Is this likely to affect you in any way? No. It confirms what we already thought we knew about the universe, and the particle itself is too short-lived to ever exist outside of some very extreme– mostly man-made– environments. On the other hand, it’s an excuse to celebrate scientific discovery, and we’ll take any of those we can, just like when the Muon Magnetic Moment measured in at the expected value, or neutrinos transmuted elements in exactly the way the models said they would. Besides, if we’re really lucky this result will turn out not to be a glueball, but something new and interesting. Then even the most jaded nerds will have reason to celebrate.

Header image: The Bejing III Spectrometer, BESII.

3 KB Solitaire Fits In QR-Code, Runs In DOS

August 12, 2026 by 18 Comments

In these days of hundred-gigabyte-and-more monster games, it can be nice to stop and remember what a human can do with assembly language and very, very little storage space. In this case, only 3 KB — yes, three kilobytes — to play TinySol, a tiny solitaire game for DOS that’s compatible with the common CGA/EGA/VGA graphics modes. [ClassicBits] even fits the 640×400 AT&T 6300 mode that was used for some GRiD computers in that 3 KB.

The “full” version is actually 3.5 KB. That extra half kilobyte gets you the ability to load and save games, plus mouse support. The 3 KB version you must play through to the end using only the keyboard, but if you’re hitting this on the minimal-supported-hardware target of the IBM 5150, you probably don’t have a mouse. The smaller build can still score the game, auto-finish, congratulate you on a win, and even automatically detect the correct graphics mode for you. It can also be launched from a QR code, which [LGR] demonstrates in a video embedded below. Check it out for a play demo, but it’s Klondike Solitaire. If you don’t know what to expect by this point, you must not have used a PC in the last 30 years.

Even smaller versions of TinySol are available if you know you’re only going to need, say CGA, but even with 360 KB floppies we’re not sure we’d feel the need to save a kilobyte. If it doesn’t fit on the floppy, just print it onto the sleeve as a QR code, like [ClassicBits] did with the floppies he was giving away at Vintage Computer Festival Southwest 2026. Well, technically that’s the “Tiny” version on the QR code, but we have faith there’s some visual code that could hold the 3 KB “medium” game.

[ClassicBits] takes care to point out that his game is 100% human-written, which is something you cannot guarantee even for retro assembly-language products. We’ve already seen that Claude can code for the Z80, which means the 8088 won’t escape it either. Of course these old machines have a lot to recommend them if you want to escape modernity and learn to code without the help.

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Titanic-esqe Telegraph Keeps Relationship Afloat

August 11, 2026 by 25 Comments

When people say the key to a happy, long-lasting marriage is communication, they generally mean the verbal kind: talking things out with your spouse, sharing your feelings, and all that lot. [Rich] AKA [Thumblegudget] took it another way, and built a engine-room telegraph for intramarital communication.

Now, this is less crazy than it sounds. Like the ship’s telegraph, which matched the position of an indicator on the bridge and in the engine room, [Rich]’ telegraph pairs an indicator in his office with one in the living areas of the house. He sets himself to “busy” and the arrow on the matching unit in the basement moves to that position. This naturally goes both ways, which allows his wife to point the needle to remind [Rich] that it may be time for hugs, dinner, or — most essentially for a brit — tea.

In operation each unit has a gimbal motor paired to a rotation sensor and an ESP32-S3 driving it. Thanks to that rotation sensor, the gimbal motor is programmed to lock itself into the positions on the wheel when you poke it, and the ESP32 wirelessly synchronizes the two units. A moving arrow might not be enough to get [Rich] to come down to dinner, so just like the ship’s telegraph you may remember from Titanic, [Rich]’s comes equipped with a bell to draw attention to itself.

Given [Rich]’s wife participated in the video and isn’t filing for divorce, it seems he may be onto something. Perhaps good communication doesn’t need to involve cumbersome human speech at all; maybe all a marriage needs is a telegraph like this and some paddles to send more complicated messages via Morse code.

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The countertop in its natrual habitat: a van.

Cotton-Fiberglass Composite Makes Lightweight RV Countertops

August 10, 2026 by 20 Comments

You’ve seen fiber-reinforced-plastic before, no doubt, but perhaps never quite like in this video by [Whitburn Studio]: it’s still got the usual resin, but instead of glass or carbon fibers, he’s using printed Japanese cotton to create strong, lightweight and good looking parts for the interior of his RV– specifically the countertops.

The technique is very similar to the sort of moldless composite work Burt Rutan pioneered in aircraft use. The fiber-reinforced plastic is formed around a positive ‘buck’ that remains inside the final part, adding stiffness and some backing. Unlike Rutan’s designs, which used pure Styrofoam inside, [Whitburn] is using a sandwhich of two layers of thin ply (3.6 mm) with XPS foam in between. Adding plywood means you don’t need many layers of fiber– again, that’s a decorative cotton, here– to get a surface that won’t dent into the styrofoam when you drop a coffee cup on it.

Indeed, with the plywood providing much of the strength, he’s only using a single layer of cotton and a second of fiberglass– though the glass fibers are really there to protect the pretty print from oopsies while sanding, rather than for their mechanical properties, by the sounds of it. Everything is held together with clear epoxy resin, which also fills the weave of the fabrics. Multiple coats of that are required to get the smooth, shiny surface he shows off at the end, but all that sanding and buffing really pays off. That’s also where you have to be really careful to avoid oopsies– go through the cotton and you have to start over.

Aside from the aesthetics, since this is going in a vehicle the weight is an important consideration– the bigger of the two counters he makes, pictured here, weighs in at only 2.4 kg or 5.2 lb including the cutout covering the sink. That’s pretty good all things considered– a lot lighter than a cement countertop, or even one made of DIY resin tiles.

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Even On The Red Planet, Hexagons Are The Bestagons

August 10, 2026 by 19 Comments

Though their pure Platonic Forms may only exist in the world of ideas, certain regular shapes can’t help but keep falling out of natural processes– case in point, the six-sided solid we call a hexagon, which is indisputably the bestagon. Don’t take it up with us– start an argument with the God of War, because its his planet that’s showing off six sided features, dubbed “polygonal fractures” which NASA’s Curiosity rover is currently crushing under tread in Valle Grande. Now, you might look at the photos and say– well, that’s clearly a dried mudflat. Evidence of water! No brainier, let’s all get Nobel Prizes. Not so fast.

Nothing in nature is ever single-sourced or that simple; if you live somewhere you get dried mud, you may have seen such hexagonal features, but ask anyone from the land of the ice and snow and they’ll tell you that freeze-thaw or frost heave can bring a field of rigolith’s inner Catan board out as well. Sure, we usually call it “dirt” here on Earth, but it’s rigolith by any other name. So NASA isn’t jumping the gun, and their announcement conservatively says that they aren’t sure how the polygonal features formed. Which is both fair enough and very interesting, as figuring it out is going to give some clues into what was going on in this part of Mars in the geologically recent past, especially since this vast field of grid tiles stretches as far as the camera can see. The consensus is that Mars was once “warm and wet” but that’s a relative term– how warm, and how wet, are very much up for debate.

Speaking of crushing hexagons under Curiosity’s wheels– did anyone think said wheels would last this long? They were already tweaking the traction control to extend their life nine years ago. Between it’s plutonium power and ongoing software updates, its a fair bet that Curiosity will outlast the late, lamented Opportunity who currently holds the endurance record at 15 Earth-years.