Photographing The ISS With A Thrift Store Lens Is Challenging

May 3, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 8 Comments

There are plenty of photos of the International Space Station out there on the Internet, but taking your own from ground level is a special challenge. [saveitforparts] recently decided to attempt this feat using a $15 thrift store lens.

What a setup! The lens is so big it has its own tripod mount.

The cool thing about the digital photography revolution is that there is a lot of old film gear that can be had for cheap. In this case, [saveitforparts] found a 400 mm Sigma XQ lens with a 2x teleconverter for just $14.99. Paired with an adapter, it sat nicely on a Sony NEX-3 digital camera, ready to try and capture the ISS as it passed overhead.

But as you might imagine, aiming at the space station is not a point-and-shoot job. N2YO.com was used to figure out the best time to try and capture it. [saveitforparts] was able to capture the ISS as a white dot as it passed over, but couldn’t quite get enough zoom to really see the Station in detail. He was able to repeat the feat with a Canon camcorder, but the image was still pretty blobby and didn’t show much. Later attempts involved capturing transits as the ISS passed by the Sun, though the orbiting complex mostly appeared as a small speck.

[saveitforparts] did technically capture the ISS, just not closely enough to see much beyond a dot. It’s not the first time we’ve seen this attempted, though! If you try and capture the ISS with something truly ridiculous, like a Game Boy Camera or Kodak Charmera, you are honor-bound to tell us on the tipsline. Continue reading “Photographing The ISS With A Thrift Store Lens Is Challenging” →

A Tool For Testing CANopen Networks

May 3, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

If you find yourself working with CANopen CC networks, you might find yourself in need of a tool for monitoring what’s happening on the wire. [Michael Fitzmayer] whipped up a piece of software to fulfil just that role.

CANopenTerm might be named after the CANopen standard, but it’s really a terminal-driven tool for working with CAN buses in general. The software is built for real-time use, allowing sniffing raw frames on the wire, tracing, and probing of nodes, all from within the console. It’s also possible to add scripting via Lua or Python for more advanced work, as well as do protocol-aware inspection if that’s relevant to your use case. The key idea of the software is to be fast and scriptable to suit a given need, rather than bogging everything down with a heavy GUI interface that’s slower to work with.

If you aren’t afraid of getting into the nitty gritty with CAN and like lightweight text-based interfaces, this might be the tool for you. We’ve also explored some other CAN visualization tools lately, as well. Ultimately, there is a lot of machinery out there running on some variant of CAN or other, so it pays to know how to work with it. If you’ve got your own projects cooking up in this space, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

Building A C-3PO You Can Really Talk To

May 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 7 Comments

C-3PO is one of the more famous movie robots out there. However, we don’t see a lot of replicas built, perhaps because in speech and mannerisms, he’s quite hard to replicate. Of course, that feat has become much more achievable with modern AI tech, as [Samuel Potozkin] demonstrates.

We’re not looking at a full C-3PO build here, it’s just the head—but for the project’s purposes, that’s all that was really required. The build relies on a Raspberry Pi 5 as the brains of the droid. It’s running a mic hooked up to a real time speech to text engine, and that text is then sent to a large language model for interpretation. Responses are then generated, passed through a processing layer to capture C-3PO’s general tone and vibe, and then handed off to a text-to-speech synth to imitate the iconic voice, played via speaker. The end result is a C-3PO you can actually talk to, which is something that might have knocked a few socks off when the movie first launched in 1977. In-depth materials for the build can be had via Google Drive and on Github.

This ersatz C-3PO isn’t an exact dupe of the movie ‘bot. The protocol droid is a little slow to respond, and the patter isn’t quite on point, even if the voice synth makes a good effort at mimicking the original. Overall, it’s a little… robotic… something you wouldn’t say of the character in the movies. Still, it’s a great effort, and something we haven’t really seen much of before. If you like more classic droid replicas, though, we’ve featured those too. Video after the break.

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Let Twitch Chat Control Your LED Strings

May 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 1 Comment

Once upon a time, someone set up a livestream wherein the messages from Twitch chat could control a game of Pokemon. Since then, we’ve seen Twitch control all sorts of things. If you’d like to have them play with some LEDs in your house, you might like this project from [pfeiffer3000].

The concept is simple enough. The heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller, which is easy to integrate with web services thanks to its onboard WiFi capability. It’s hooked upt o a string of WS2812B addressable RGB LEDs. The LEDs themselves are installed within table tennis balls to act as nice, spherical diffusers, and installed in a square frame made of PVC pipes. As for code, the rig uses the WLED library to drive the LED strings, and code from TwitchIO to interface with Twitch chat itself. It’s as simple as rigging up a bit of Python. With everything assembled, [pfeiffer3000] had an attractive LED grid that could be controlled directly by anyone watching their Twitch stream.

We’ve explored how to control things via Twitch before, too. It’s a fun way to add some interactivity to your livestream that really gets viewers involved. If you’ve been building your own audience-controlled projects, we’d love to hear about them on the tipsline!

IR Device Control That Lives Off The Cloud

May 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 4 Comments

There are lots of smart home systems that will let you blast your older dumb appliances with infrared to control them. However, many are tied to ugly cloud systems that can frustrate you on a regular basis. [Steelcuts] whipped up a cloudless solution to this problem instead.

IR2MQTT does pretty much exactly what it says in the name. It allows integrating things like air conditioners and televisions into a Home Assistant setup with the use of an IR blaster and a neat, tidy web app. You use it with an ESP32 or ESP8266 running a firmware based on ESPHome to actually do the IR blasting. In turn, IR2MQTT is a back-end plus a web interface that lets you setup all your IR devices without having to manually capture IR codes and create YAML files to do everything. It’s also integrated with large databases of IR codes for common appliances so in many cases, you can just look up your gear and get it working the easy way.

Sometimes all you need to get the job done is an IR LED and the will to use it. If you’re cooking up your own infrared hacks, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline.

Rust Helps Make A $1 Handheld Console

May 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 25 Comments

These days, even an old Game Boy will set you back $100 or more, and a new handheld console will be many multiples of that. However, you can build a really cheap handheld gaming toy if you follow [Chris Dell’s] example.

In [Chris]’s own words, he used Rust to build a $1 handheld gaming console. How is that possible? Well, it all comes down to the CH32V003—a microcontroller cheaper than just about anything else out there. It sells for just 9 cents in bulk, and it’s no slouch either. The RISC-V device is a fully-fledged 32-bit chip running at 48 MHz, though with only 2 KB of RAM and 16 KB of flash. Still, that’s more than enough to make some little games. To this end, [Chris] paired the CH32V003 with an SSD1306 OLED display, and three tactile pushbuttons. He then whipped up some code in Rust with the aid of the ch32-hal project, implementing a neat platform game that ran at a healthy 25 fps.

The CH32V003 probably won’t be starring in a new handheld gaming revolution anytime soon. Still, it’s always interesting to see just what can be achieved with one of the cheapest microcontrollers on the market.

[Thanks to Kian Ryan for the tip!]

3D Printed Orrery Runs On A Single Motor

May 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 17 Comments

The solar system is kind of hard to observe in motion all at once. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a little model to look at, so you can see the relative motions of celestial bodies play out in front of you. Such a device is called an orrery, and [illusionmanager] has built rather a nice example of their own.

The build represents all the planets in the solar system, plus the sun and our very own Moon. An ESP32 lives at the heart of the build, running an astronomical simulation to calculate the proper positions of all the celestial objects. It then drives a small stepper motor via a TMC2209 driver, turning the mechanism back and forth until all the pieces are positioned correctly, using a reed switch and magnet to detect the initial zero position. The orrery is able to be driven by a single motor in this manner thanks to an ingenious mechanism, wherein the rings interlock with each other using small tabs. The Moon is controlled by a separate geared mechanism connected to the main rotation.

It’ s a nice decoration that also serves as a great conversation piece, particularly if you like talking about the heavens. We’ve featured some fine works from [illusionmanager] before, too, like this exquisite reverse sundial. Video after the break.

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