Round AMOLED Badge Does All Kinds Of Cool Stuff

September 16, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

[curisama] has put together a project simply entitled The Badge. It’s simple enough, being a little round screen that you wear. Only, it does a wide variety of rather interesting things.

The build is based on the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C. It’s not a very fun part number, but it describes a device which combines a 466×466 round display with a milled aluminium case and an ESP32-S3 to drive everything.

[curisama] started building a custom firmware for the device, intending to use it as an air mouse. Soon enough it had a touchpad, too, a bunch of extra keys, as well as a clock and some games. It was given the ability to record audio too, up to 52 minutes in WAV format. From there, it also gained a rather fetching liquid simulation, with water sloshing around the round display with a little boat riding around on it. This took some optimization, with [curisama] pushing the animation from 3 FPS all the way up to 18 fps, making it much more fluid and satisfying to watch. There were other optimizations too, with [curisama] figuring out how enabling the CONFIG_PM_ENABLE flag and some other tweaks could push standby battery life from 11.9 to 19.6 hours. Not a bad gain at all.

If you need a handy yet unassuming round object to act as a human interface device and some other stuff besides, consider buying the Waveshare part and flashing it yourself. You can do so right from your browser. We’ve featured plenty of other interesting projects with Waveshare parts in recent years, too. The integrated-display-and-microcontroller market is booming for makers right now, and it’s one we’ll continue to follow with interest. If you’re doing innovative stuff in this space, be sure to notify the tipsline!

Hackaday Europe 2026: Bare Metal Made Easy

September 15, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 27 Comments

When we talk about programming in “bare metal,” it basically means writing software that runs right on the hardware with no operating system or abstraction layers in between. This gives the program the most direct possible access to peripherals and memory, with the tradeoff being that you don’t get the protection and ancillary features that come with an OS.

Sylvain Huet came down to Hackaday Europe 2026 to talk about making bare metal easy. Not just by ignoring operating systems and ever-bloating dependencies, but by rethinking the way we approach software development and by building a transparent platform from the ground up.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: Space Oddities

September 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 2 Comments

If you’re in motorsport, or maritime, or mining fields, you can always call on a technician to come down and fix something when it’s broken. You can lay hands on the parts, reconfigure things, make repairs, and get something working again. In space, that’s seldom possible. If you’re lucky enough to have a manned mission, you might be able to make some running repairs; if you’re working with an unmanned robot, probe, or satellite, your options are altogether more limited. If you can’t find a fix, it’s game over—a particularly brutal result when huge budgets and years of work are on the line.

Janelle Wellons came down to Hackaday Europe to talk about space. More particularly, the engineering and debugging operations that keep all sorts of space programs alive. Her talk dives into some of the creative solutions engineers have had to come up with to save million-dollar missions from becoming unrecoverable boondoggles.

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Purely Random TV In Your Browser

September 11, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 17 Comments

One of the things we used to appreciate about broadcast television is that… you kinda just got what you got. You didn’t have to choose beyond picking a channel, and then you settled in to imbibe whatever media the CRT was spraying at you. A vague recreation of part of this experience is now available, in the form of [Sergei’s] RND.TV.

The concept is simple enough—it’s a webpage that plays random videos from The Internet Archive. Each session draws videos from a random sequence, with no algorithm or fancy social media nonsense to push some videos over others. As you might expect, you’re in for lots of random and weird stuff, from old Army videos to middle-school basketball games. You can swipe to flick to a different “channel” if you don’t like what’s playing, or you can mark videos you like if you fancied what came up in the random feed. You can also use your phone as a remote if you want to sit back and flick channels like it’s the 90s again or something.

We’ve featured other projects in a similar vein before—like little TVs from The Simpsons that play episodes on repeat. Sometimes, it’s fun to just avoid the paralysis of choice, and a random stream of content can provide that relief. Or, alternatively, you could always hook up your TV to an antenna and watch free-to-air… it’s still out there, for those that wish to view it!

Lara Croft On A Microcontroller

September 10, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 16 Comments

Once upon a time, you had to carefully budget your microcontroller’s resources if you wanted to do something as simple as flash a bunch of LEDs. These days, they’re powerful enough to humiliate the game consoles of yesteryear. [alexkid77] demonstrates this well, having the ESP32-P4 run Tomb Raider.

Now, [alexkid77] hasn’t gone so far as to create a PlayStation emulator on the ESP32 or anything quite like that. Instead, this is a port—and not of the original Tomb Raider release, either. [alexkid77] started with OpenLara—the classic game running in an open-source engine. With the ESP32-P4 having two cores running at 400 MHz each, there was plenty of processing power on tap to run the engine with a software renderer at 320×240, which is hardware scaled up to 1024×600 via the Pixel Processing Accelerator (PPA) built into the chip. There’s also stereo audio with an ES8311 codec hooked up, while input is via a USB HID keyboard.

It’s funny to think that it could actually be cheaper and quicker to get Tomb Raider running on an ESP32 and a cheap LCD display versus actually going out to buy a PlayStation and an original game disc. But that’s the way the cookie crumbles in 2026. At least you don’t have to play it on an S3 Verge. Continue reading “Lara Croft On A Microcontroller” →

Little Droid Has Party Mode

September 10, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 7 Comments

Remember those tiny little droids skittering around the pristine corridors of the Death Star in Star Wars? [heychaostheory] has put together something vaguely along the lines of those charming little mobile toasters. It’s an autonomous mouse droid with party mode!

The build is interesting in that it’s based on an off-the-shelf metal robot chassis—which provides mounting points for the gearmotors and wheels that make up the drivetrain. The mouse droid body sits atop this, being a 3D printed part that is afixed with heat set inserts and nylon standoffs. It’s 3D printed and expertly decorated with a fun vibe. Inside the body lives an Arduino Uno, hooked up to an L298 motor driver board and ultrasound sensors used for obstacle avoidance. It’s also got a smattering of LEDs to flash, because blinkenlights matter. The best bit, though, is the party mode button, which fires off music via a DFPlayer Mini module.

The mouse droid may not be as flashy and imposing as the Droideka or as mechanically impressive as BB-8, but that just makes it more accessible and fun to build. You can easily create one at full scale without breaking the bank. If you’re cooking up your own fun droids in the workshop, don’t hesitate to let us know. Video after the break.

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3D Imaging Without A Lens

September 10, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 19 Comments

There are plenty of ways to capture 3D images or simulations of such if you know what you’re doing with camera hardware and fancy mathematics. However, a little more unusual is the idea of capturing a 3D image while using no lens at all — and yet, [okooptics] has achieved just that!

The basic concept builds on an older project from [okooptics], wherein images were captured from a Raspberry Pi camera with no regular lens element installed. In its place was a thin layer of Scotch tape over the sensor, acting as a diffuser. With the right deconvolution math, it’s possible to actually recover a real image out of the blurry mess this setup initially captures. [okooptics] was then able to push this into three dimensions by weighting the point spread function used to deconvolute the image.

Adding directional bias to the process creates a similar effect to slightly shifting the cameras position, actually revealing a view from a slightly different angle of objects in front of the camera. [okooptics] does a great job of explaining the science behind how this is possible and the practical limitations of the technique, also referencing research papers that have explored these ideas in great depth.

It’s math heavy to extract 3D data from what otherwise looks like blurry nothingness, but it’s possible if you know what you’re doing. For a fuller understanding, it’s worth diving into [okooptics] earlier work in this realm, taking photos with Scotch tape in place of a lens.

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