Author: Zoe Skyforest

3683 Articles

3D Print This Retro Desktop Case

April 25, 2026 by 9 Comments

Once upon a time, not every computer lived in a vertical “tower” case. Many decades back a horizontal arrangement was a popular choice, sometimes just referred to as the “desktop” style. [PuTaTuo] is helping to bring it back, with this amazing 3D printed case design.

The case is designed to suit mini-ITX motherboards, while supporting standard ATX-size power supplies. The printed components are all designed to measure less than 220 mm in any dimension to ensure they can easily be produced on smaller printers. The case has a 3.5″ drive bay cutout up front, which you can use for the front panel I/O or a floppy drive if you’re super-retro like that. The front panel is otherwise relatively simple, with buttons for power and reset as well as power and SSD status LEDs.

Assembly is via M3 hardware and heat set inserts. If you’d like to print your own, you can grab the files from Thingiverse or Printables depending on your taste.

We’ve featured some great 3D printed cases over the years, like this colorful build that focuses on ease of access and servicing. The cool thing about designing your own case is you can optimize it to suit your own desires, and customize it to look as cool as you need it to be.

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A Smart Thermostat For 120V Fan Coil Systems

April 24, 2026 by 14 Comments

Many HVAC systems in North America operate off 24V systems, which can be readily upgraded with off-the-shelf  smart thermostats quite easily. However, there are many people living in buildings with 120-volt fan coil units who aren’t so lucky. [mackswan] is one such individual, who set about building a smart thermostat to work in these situations.

The build is based around an ESP32 running ESPHome firmware. It rocks a 2.42″ OLED screen with automatic brightness adjustment for showing temperature and control parameters. There’s a rotary encoder on the front with an integrated button for control, with [mackswan] building the physical device to look as clean and neat as possible. The device uses a relay to switch the fan coil system on and off to heat or cool as needed, with an SHTC3 temperature and humidity sensor used to monitor current conditions in the home.

If you’re in an apartment building or live in a condo with this kind of setup, [mackswan’s] build might be just what you’re after to improve your HVAC control. We’ve featured plenty of other DIY thermostat hacks over the years, too. Meanwhile, if you’re finding creative ways to better heat and cool your living space, we’d love to hear about it on the tipsline!

A Solar Powered Plant Monitor That Almost Works

April 23, 2026 by 7 Comments

Keeping plants alive is easy if you’re diligent and never forget to check on your green friends. However, a little electronic help never hurts. To that end, [Narrow Studios] built a simple solar powered monitor to assist in plant maintenance, and it mostly does the job.

An ESP32-C3 development board serves as the brains of the operation. It’s set up with a capacitive soil moisture sensor, a great choice because they tend to last longer than other types. Power is courtesy of a small lithium-polymer battery and a solar panel, which keeps everything running off the juice from interior lighting alone. SK6812 addressable LEDs are used to show current soil moisture status. To avoid excessively draining the batteries with the limited power available, a HCSR505 PIR motion sensor is used to only light the status LEDs if the device detects someone in the vicinity.

There were some issues in the build. The voltage regulator doesn’t supply enough current to enable the ESP32 to jump on WiFi, so soil dryness indication is via LED only. The solar setup is a little weak, too. Still, the project was a great learning experience and with a few mods, would be even more capable.

We’ve featured some great plant monitors over the years, like this Hackaday Prize entry from 2023.

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GameCube Bot Records Your Play In A Weird Way

April 23, 2026 by 8 Comments

If you wanted to record yourself playing on a GameCube, you could use a VCR to capture the video output on tape. But there is a more interesting way to do it—which is precisely what [jiinurppa] built GameCube bot for. 

The concept is simple—GameCube bot is a small device that captures controller inputs and records them to an SD card. It can then play them back on command, allowing it to recreate gameplay as it happened the first time right on the console. A Raspberry Pi Pico is the brains of the operation, which is able to intercept signals from a standard GameCube controller. It’s paired with the aforementioned SD storage as well as an ST7735 display for showing status information. The device records in the DTM (Dolphin TAS Movie) format, which can be played back on the device when hooked up to a GameCube console, or in emulators like Dolphin itself.

[jiinurppa] notes that the device isn’t accurate enough to use for tool-assisted speed runs. Most notably, small errors in optical drive reads can lead to desyncs compared to the original machine state that make frame-accurate replays impossible. Still, it’s a neat build that can be useful for capturing game play and later analysis.

We’ve explored the world of Tool Assisted Speedruns before, though this device isn’t directly applicable to that world. Video after the break.

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Autonomous Coin Flipper Flips Expensive Coin

April 22, 2026 by 27 Comments

[Térence Grover] had a very special coin—a  €1,000 commemorative piece only available to Monégasque nationals. If you want to flip one, normally you’d have to go snatch one up from somebody in Monaco—or you could just do it online!

Yes, he built an automated online coin flipper to flip this very special piece of coinage. A 12-volt solenoid is fired to flip the coin into the air. It then lands on its 3D-printed tray, where a Raspberry Pi-based computer vision system built with OpenCV and a TFLite model classifies whether the result is heads or tails via a machine learning algorithm. An iris mechanism operated by servo motor then centers the coin on the tray, so it sits back over the solenoid, ready to flip once again. [Térence] was eventually able to refine this simple homemade build to the point that it ran autonomously for a full 50,000 flips on a livestream without issue.

The mechanism in this build is not dissimilar to a coin flipper we’ve seen before. We’ve also explored the statistics involved, too. Video after the break.

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ESP32 Hosts A Public Website

April 22, 2026 by 19 Comments

If you wanted to host a website, you could use any one of a number of online services, or spin up a server on a spare computer at home. If you’re a bit more daring, you could also do what [Tech1k] did, and run one on an ESP32 microcontroller.

The site in question is available (or at least, should be) at HelloESP.com. The first revision ran entirely on an ESP32, serving pages from a SPIFFS filesystem. The device was also fitted with a BME280 environment sensor and an OLED screen. It had an uptime of 500 days before the board failed.

The site has since been relaunched, running on a board that is framed on [Tech1k]’s wall. It runs on an ESP32-WROOM-32D, paired with a BME280 again, along with a CCS811 CO2 and air quality sensor and a DS3231 RTC for accurate timekeeping. The ESP32 is setup to hold an outbound WebSocket to a Cloudflare worker, with the Worker routing HTTP requests to the site via that route. This avoids the need for port forwarding for the ESP32 to be visible to the outside world, and the Cloudflare Worker will also serve a static version of the page in the case of WiFi dropouts or other temporary failures.

It’s true that this isn’t a completely unheard of project—microcontrollers have been working as simple web servers for a long time now. Still, [Tech1k] did a great job of making this as robust as possible and more like a real functional webserver rather than just something that runs on a local network to serve up a config page. That’s worthy of note.

You can run webservers on all kinds of chips these days, even the Raspberry Pi Pico. If you’re doing web stuff on something weird, you know we always wanna hear about it on the tipsline!

Wearable MIDI Controller Built With Raspberry Pi

April 21, 2026 by 7 Comments

Most synths happily get by with keyboard or pad inputs and make lovely sounds in response. [Becky Clarke] and her fellow collaborators are building a synth that works rather differently. DigitSynth is a wearable controller that’s rather fun to interact with.

The heart of the build is a Raspberry Pi 5. It’s set up to talk to a TI ADS1115 ADC chip that lets it read a bunch of analog flex sensors embedded in a right-hand glove, while the Pi can also read a bunch of tactile buttons activated by the left hand. The flex sensors are used to control synth parameters like LFO rate and filter cutoffs, while the buttons control chord changes. The Raspberry Pi runs custom code to read these devices and generate the requisite MIDI commands to send to a Roland JD-Xi synth which is responsible for actually making the sound. Both sets of fingers are also dotted with LEDs for visual feedback, controlled via a TLC59711 PWM driver.

It’s a fun build that creates some ethereal sounds in an intuitive way, thanks to the nature of the interface. We’ve featured some similar builds before, using the flexure of the hand to create musical soundscapes. Video after the break.

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