Open Source Stream Deck Targets Flexibility

August 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 Comments

Stream decks are very useful when you’re live on camera and you need to hit some complicated macro at a glance. However, there is sometimes a perception that commercial options are a touch expensive for what they are, an attitude which has spawned many DIY builds. [Fady Faheem] has developed just such a device of his own.

Named Stream32, the build is intended to be simple to understand and adapt to one’s own individual workflow. Putting one together is as easy as buying a display, hooking it up to an ESP32, flashing the firmware, and then adding pages of shortcuts as desired. [Fady] has designed the firmware to be flexible with regards to screen choice — currently, it can be set up for a 4″ Waveshare LCD or a nice roomy 10.1″ display from Elecrow. Since it’s open source, adapting to a wider range of displays is a potential exercise for the builder.

The great thing about custom stream decks is you have all the freedom in the world to customize them to your own specific setup. Play with the code, the functionality, the visual layout—all to suit your own needs. If you’re working on your own custom hardware, be sure to tell us on the tipsline.

Browser-based 3D Editor Covers The Basics While Staying Local

August 1, 2026 by Donald Papp 9 Comments

Got an idea and want to make a simple 3D model, but don’t want to install a full-fledged CAD modeling suite and queue up a few hours of tutorial videos? Check out SketchForge, a 3D modeling program that runs locally in one’s browser without any need for an account, or external services.

SketchForge takes a more WYSIWYG approach to 3D modeling by making it easy to put an object together with primitive shapes, and making it extra easy to specify dimensions and align parts with one another. There’s also a sketch feature that makes it easier to create more complex shapes by making a 2D drawing, then extruding or revolving it into a solid. We like that it has STEP format export as an option, making it easy to import your creation into another CAD program of your choice later. Most 3D printer slicers natively support the STEP format nowadays, too.

It’s a bit reminiscent of Tinkercad in concept, but entirely local. It’s still new, but there’s a demo online that gives a good idea of its capabilities if you’d like to give it a spin.

We’re reminded of CaDoodle, another project that takes the “Tinkercad, but local” approach but as a standalone executable, instead of browser-based.

Commercialization And Innovation

August 1, 2026 by Elliot Williams 7 Comments

The last year or two has seen relatively affordable multi-material printers hit the market, and the question that [Tom Nardi] and I were kicking around when he was writing up the 2025 year-in-review article was what it was going to mean for our folks. I don’t think he got it wrong per se, but his heading for that section “Grandma is 3D-Printing in Color” only tells half the story.

He did get that part right, though. We’ve certainly seen a flourishing of multi-material designs out there that take advantage of the availability of (usually) four colors. The ability to print in color has given life to the purely decorative models, of course. Think full-color Pokemon desktop toys, for instance. But even functional prints have benefited from contrasting color labels printed right into the box, not to even mention the multi-material supports that pull off easier and cleaner than ever before.

Since most of these multi-filament machines are pretty much locked down as far as hardware tinkering goes, our sights were firmly locked on what the end-user would do with the new capability. But we overlooked the third axis of 3D printering: the software hackers. And it’s precisely in this area of slicer and path-planning that we’ve seen some of the coolest developments this year. Why? Because people have the hardware in their hands that they need to test out the algorithms.

FullSpectrum and the more recent ImageMap are two techniques to get the missing in-between colors out of a four-filament printer, and in particular ImageMap tries to get the job done faster, and with fewer purges. We are amazed to see two different approaches to color blending popping up in just a few months of each other, and we have no doubt that work on this is going to continue.

At the end of the day, this really is just “put new tools in the hands of creative hackers, and they’ll find new ways to use them”, so we shouldn’t have been surprised at all. But if this is what comes out of the commercialization of the multi-material printer, what’s going to come when some of the more esoteric machine designs go mainstream? We can’t wait to find out!

Testing A 3D Printed Cycloidal Gearbox Design

August 1, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Cycloidal gearboxes are a recurring theme in the hobbyist space due to the performance they promise in a compact package. They are capable of taking in a high-speed input and reducing it down to a set ratio with very low backlash, which theoretically makes them perfect for a wide range of projects where size and weight matter. Correspondingly, [Advanced Hobby Lab] has been tinkering with a 3D printed design to fit on NEMA 17 stepper motors.

For [Advanced Hobby Lab] the primary goal was to check that his cycloidal gearbox design was a real improvement over the planetary gearbox alternative. Although the 3D printed cycloidal drive worked well enough, some testing put real numbers to it, including a 92% efficiency. The gearbox also adds some noise over the stepper motor, but less so than the 3D printed planetary gearbox.

Of course, all of this is within the limits of FDM 3D printing and with a few metal parts, so there’s always room for improvement, but in the world of hobbyist 3D printed gearboxes it’s not a bad showing. The print and project files are available for anyone who is also feeling the itch. Of course, you can also opt for the dual-nested cycloidal design that we recently featured, as it promises to be even more compact, have even fewer parts and smoother action.

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A Compact Game Controller For Your Phone

August 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 5 Comments

[Gil Yankovitch] noted that playing games on a touchscreen phone gave up a certain something in terms of the tactile feedback one gets from real buttons. To that end, he was inspired to build a controller specifically for phones that solved this very problem.

The result was JoyFon. It’s a small gamepad built around the Raspberry Pi Pico, and can be put together around an RP2040 or an RP2350 as desired. It has four face buttons, a directional pad, and start and select buttons, as well as additional shoulder buttons up top in later revisions.

The JoyFon enumerates as a standard USB HID gamepad, so you could use it to play games on just about any PC, laptop, or tablet. However, the JoyFon is specifically designed for use with smartphones in the vertical orientation. This guided the design of the 3D printed enclosure, which positions the USB-C port to plug into the base of a phone, such that the buttons sit neatly beneath it. It does cover some of the phone screen, but that’s not always a problem when playing emulated games with a 4:3 or similar aspect ratio. The result is a button and screen layout not dissimilar to that of the original Game Boy handhelds.

We’ve seen some other great custom controller builds over the years, like this fantastic design using keyswitches.

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Casual Repair And Maintenance On An Amiga 1000

July 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

Recently [Drygol] had an Amiga 1000 system over for some repairs as well as maintenance and general TLC. This is a Motorola 68000-based home computer from 1985 that also has the distinction of being the first Amiga system to be released by Commodore. At a time when the IBM PC was still strutting its monochrome and EGA graphics alongside PC speaker beeps, the Amiga 1000 featured relatively high-res graphics and advanced stereo audio courtesy of special accelerator chips.

Overall the system was in a pretty good condition, even coming with the very nifty modern Parceiro expansion that adds 8 MB of fast RAM, an SD card slot and RTC. This thus meant that they mostly just had to perform the typical maintenance task, such as recapping the PSU and mainboard, as well as recapping and lubing up the floppy drive. The original 230 VAC fan in the PSU also got swapped with a 12V unit that was much quieter.

After disassembling the keyboard for some deep cleaning and retr0brighting, a little glitch in the form of the use of a too long screw by a previous owner was addressed, as well as a broken plastic clip. With how little attention the Amiga 1000 received after its release it’s good to see some of these units still kicking.

Turning Glass Into A Touch-Sensitive Button

July 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 2 Comments

Although generally glass isn’t associated with touch-sensitive surfaces, the addition of an ITO (indium tin oxygen) coating adds the exciting property of not only being transparent to the visible light part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but also of being electrically conductive. The logical result is that fine folk like [Sokol] simply had to use their newly acquired ITO-coated glass to make a button out of.

Here the easy option is of course to just use it as a capacitive sensor where the conductive ITO layer is used for the capacitive charge and the glass provides the insulator, but here we see it demonstrated how to create a pressure-sensitive implementation instead.

The measured conductivity on the ITO-coated glass in the video is pretty good, at just over 20 Ohm. This thus makes said capacitive button very easy to achieve. To make it a touch-sensitive button, two pieces of glass are used, with the ITO sides facing. Paper is used to create a spacer, after which the slight flex of the glass allows for the two ITO surfaces to touch, completing the circuit.

This is somewhat similar to how resistive touch screens work, with the position of the finger or stylus determined by the resistance between the two sides. In a hobbyist setup this would make it fairly easy to create a multi-position touch screen using just two pieces of glass and some firmware.

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