AI Controls IPhone Via ESP32

October 14, 2026 by 16 Comments

Do you want to get an AI agent to do something to an iPhone? You could try and jailbreak the device and do some heavy software hacking, or… you could grab a microcontroller off the shelf and have it do the hard work. [Henry Yuan] explains how to achieve this with an ESP32.

The first step is getting an AI agent access to the current state of the phone screen—which [Henry] achieves with AirPlay screen mirroring and UxPlay. A Gstreamer pipeline is then used to feed the screen as a JPEG stream to the AI agent of your choice. Then comes control, which is achieved by an ESP32-S3 acting as a USB-HID device, emulating both USB mouse and keyboard. With iOS AssistiveTouch enabled, this gives the agent control over inputs to the device. From there, it’s up to the AI agent to figure out the actions to make to achieve the desired behavior, which is obviously very use-case specific.

It might sound a little convoluted, but this approach has benefits. There’s no requirement to have an Apple Developer Account, or XCode, or a Macintosh at all. You can just get your agent tinkering away on the phone without any of that fussy overhead. We’ve featured some other great iPhone hacks of late, as well. Video after the break.

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Single Button, Handheld Gaming Console

October 14, 2026 by 6 Comments

Those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s might be familiar with the Atari 2600 console and its now relatively unrecognizable (by modern standards) controller with only a single button and stiff whole-hand joystick. By comparison, the Steam Deck has somewhere around 24 buttons and two joysticks depending on how they are counted. But even the Atari might be providing more user inputs than are really necessary for quality gaming. Take a look at the Dinoboy, a handheld console with only a single button.

Part of what makes this system work is that it’s playing the classic dinosaur jumping game first included in Google Chrome which loads when the browser can’t connect to the Internet, and the user’s single input was the space bar. In this case, the handheld has its single button where the user’s thumb naturally rests. The console itself is in two parts, hinged where the button is placed. When unfolded, the top half reveals a wide screen and the bottom half is held by the hand. The screen supports two color formats, a black and white style and another which replicates the dot matrix display of the original Game Boy.

The small handheld console has another trick up its sleeve too. [Paul], the system’s creator, built it as a way to stop doomscrolling so along with having this quick-deploying game on hand, there’s also an NFC tag hidden near the hinge which, when swiped passed a phone, also turns that phone’s airplane mode on. It’s a double-whammy of removing the gamer from the dark patterns and algorithms dominating the mainstream Internet. And, this isn’t [Paul]’s only dinosaur jumper console either. We recently featured a similar (but much larger) build of his housed in a classic arcade-style cabinet.

Using An ESP32-C3’s RF Hardware For DVB-S2 Video Transmission

October 14, 2026 by 11 Comments

Generally the DVB-S and -S2 standards require a satellite somewhere in Earth orbit to provide a signal to receive, but you can also transmit your own DVB-S2 stream with any RF transmitter if you’re so inclined. Courtesy of recent breakthroughs in using the RF hardware of the ESP32 on a raw level, [SP8ESA] has created the ESP32-DATV project using which you can broadcast a DVB-S2 signal using an ESP32-C3.

While a host PC side application handles the heavy lifting of turning the input video signal into a DVB-S(2) compliant signal, it is the ESP32-C3 that prepares the samples for transmission before sending them off to its RF block, with no external hardware needed.

If this brings to mind the idea of using an off-the-shelf DVB-S2 receiver to play back the signal, the frequency range for DVB-S2 is 10.7 – 12.7 GHz, while the ESP32-C3 is limited to roughly 2.4 GHz courtesy of it targeting only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals.

Using the ESP32 to transmit is already heating up.

Thanks to [ftg] for the tip.

Tiny E-Paper Display Delivers 30 FPS Of Game Boy Fun

October 14, 2026 by 13 Comments

Slow refresh, ghosting and low-contrast — wait, are we talking about passive matrix LCDs, or e-paper displays? That might be why e-paper Game Boy emulators are a thing: the limitations of the black-on-grey e-paper screens remind us of the grey-on-green LCDs Nintendo used in the 80s. In this case [Bo Made It] made it out of a Waveshare ESP32-S3-ePaper-1.54, and got 30 FPS from it. 

Now, regular readers might be thinking, “So, we’ve seen the 60 FPS e-paper monitor, how is this special?” It’s a fair question. The answer is that [Bo] is doing this on a randomly chosen dev board with a built in wavetable e-paper controller, rather than the bare inputs that allowed the [Wenting Zhang]’s project to work. On the other hand, [Bo] does credit [Wenting], particularly his e-ink PaperBoy project, with directly inspiring both the project and his implementation.

Again, the big difference is going through the blob of the controller, but it turns out you can still address individual pixels through it. [Bo] gave each pixel a ‘budget’ for up to 8 pulses it depending on how much it needs to change, speeding things up immensely. Our favorite part is how he achieves the Game Boy’s 4-bit greyscale by, in effect, deliberately ghosting the display. Pixels aren’t driven long enough to fully flip them if they’re going only one shade lighter or darker. This complicated matters, since going from black to ‘white’ now takes longer than ‘white’ to the next darker grey, and the exact timing needs to be worked out for each color transition. Getting that timing right took a lot of calibration, and we like how he used video to help automate the process.

That process is still ongoing, so there’s no GitHub link yet. [Bo] will open source everything when it’s ready, and we look forward to it. We also look forward to the PDA-like device he’s going to be using this display driver for. If this all sounds similar to a recent 20 FPS e-paper hack, that’s because it’s the same underlying technology.

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2026 Hackaday Supercon: Workshops Are Open!

October 14, 2026 by 11 Comments

Supercon is Hackaday’s annual gathering, and you absolutely need to be there.

Today, we’re pleased to announce our lineup of workshops, and it’s more than we’ve ever offered, thanks to moving to a bigger venue and to our awesome community of hackers stepping up to give them. There’s something here for everyone, so if anything strikes your fancy, be sure to book yourself a slot soon. (If you have a ticket already, you sign up for the workshop as an “add-on”, BTW.) Workshops always fill up fast, due to the small and hands-on nature of the beast.

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DIY Force Sensing Joysticks Are A Cheap Way To Go

October 14, 2026 by 16 Comments

Traditional joysticks typically use potentiometers or hall effect sensors to determine the displacement of the stick itself when moved by the operator. Force-sensing joysticks are considered more desirable for certain purposes like side-stick flight simulators, because they measure the force applied instead, as per the name. They can be expensive to buy off-the-shelf, but you can build a cheap set on your own if you know what you’re doing, as [tekasza] demonstrates.

The build that [tekasza] put together is based around the Teensy 4.0 microcontroller. It’s set up to read a series of load cells that determine the force applied to the stick in the X and Y axes. The cells are wired up to HX711 load cell amplifiers so they can be easily read by the microcontroller. The Teensy does the work to take the load cell readings and convert them into axis outputs for a USB HID game controller, allowing the stick to be used with just about any game or simulator on the market. [tekasza] has the stick integrated with pedals as well as a whole bunch of buttons and switches to control other simulator features, built up into a full seated sim setup.

If you’ve ever wanted to use a force-sensitive stick like modern fighter pilots do, this build could be very relevant to your interests. We’ve also seen plenty of other great sim hardware builds in recent years, too.

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What’s A Nonius?

October 14, 2026 by 9 Comments

If you already know what a nonius is, you can probably skip this post. But, if like us, you would have to look it up, we’ll tell you what we found out. It turns out, a translation mistake taught us a new word and some history we weren’t aware of.

In the manual, this is captioned: Figure 4-7 Nonius Display (Standard Mode)

Have a look at the adjacent graphic from a waveform display. What would you call the vertical red lines at positions 139 and 200?

We’d probably call them markers. Or maybe cursors. The manual, however, calls each one a “nonius”. It refers to them that way multiple times.

Oddly, the manual also has sentences like “Select one nonius and right-click, and then select ‘Remove Marker’ in the next window to delete the nonius.”

So, clearly, a nonius is the vertical line marker or cursor. But that, of course, begs a question…

What is a Nonius?

“Nonio originale” by [Henrique Leitão]
Have you ever heard of the vernier scale? If you’ve done navigation, used a traditional caliper, or tuned an old shortwave receiver, you probably have. [Pierre Vernier] developed it in 1631 as a way to better interpolate values on a scale.

However, there was an earlier version used to improve measurements on astrolabes. A Portuguese navigator named [Pedro Nunes] created this type of astrolabe in 1542. The Latinized version of his name is [Petrus Nonius]. What are the odds of him inventing… oh wait, they named it after him. That does make more sense.

The nonius is a series of concentric circles traced on the instrument. Working towards the center, each circle has fewer divisions than the previous one. In fact, if the outer ring had 90 marks for 90 degrees, the next ring would have 89, and the following one would have 88.

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