Let Twitch Chat Control Your LED Strings

May 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest No comments

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!

Pushing As Many Pixels As Possible To A CRT: Interlaced 4K

May 2, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

Some people love CRTs to a degree that the uninitiated may find obsessive. We all have our thing, and for [Found Tech], it’s absolutely pointing particle accelerators at his face to play video games. He likes modern games, with modern resolutions– none of this 1080p nonsense. Today’s gamers demand 4K! Can a CRT keep up? The answer is a resounding “No, but actually, yes!”

[Found Tech] has an IBM P275 monitor, which is one of the last generation of CRTs. Officially, the resolution maxes out at 1920 dots by 1440 lines. While one might (inaccurately) call that UHD output “2K”, you certainly cannot claim it is 4K. So, what’s the secret? Interlacing. Yes, interlacing, like old analog TV signals.

Apparently, in spite of what the manual says, getting the screen to absorb the 2880×2160 interlaced signal wasn’t the hard part, but generating it was. NVIDIA and AMD graphics cards are absolutely unable to create an interlaced signal, but Intel integrated GPUs are– if you get the right combo of chip and old driver. Sadly, the video doesn’t list exactly what he used. Of course an iGPU isn’t going to give you a very good gaming experience at this high resolution, so [Found Tech] has his games do their rendering on the discrete card before piping that over to the iGPU for display on the CRT.

Technically, you still can’t call the 2880×2160 picture “4K”, as that trademark refers to 2160p at 16:9, and this is both interlaced and 4:3. Still, close enough. In spite of the artifacting that turned us all against interlaced signals back in the day, this apparently has [Found Tech]’s eyes fooled– he says it’s as good as 2160p on his OLED, plus the extra magic that comes with glowing phosphors.

It certainly looks great in a recording, but the monitor in the recording isn’t displayed at a high enough resolution to say for sure if it’s 4K. Still, if you’re into CRT gaming, maybe give this high-res interlacing a try. If you still don’t get what’s so great about CRTs, check here, and remember it could be worse– at least we’re not going on about Plasma TVs. Continue reading “Pushing As Many Pixels As Possible To A CRT: Interlaced 4K” →

IR Device Control That Lives Off The Cloud

May 2, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 3 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.

Peripherals Hacks

May 2, 2026 by Elliot Williams 5 Comments

Custom peripheral projects are among the most rewarding. Especially if you’re like me and you sit at the computer eight hours per day, anything that you can use on a daily basis is super satisfying. This topic of DIY peripherals came up on the podcast while chatting with Kristina, who is no stranger to odd inputs herself.

We were talking about a trackball that had been modified to read twisting gestures, by a clever hijacking of the twin mouse sensors inside. If you do a lot of 3D modeling, you can absolutely get by with just a mouse and shift-ctrl-alt as modifiers, but it’s so much more immediate to use a dedicated 3D input device. (I’ve got an ancient serial Space Mouse just under my left hand as I type this.)

My old favorite, which I haven’t used in ages, is the guts of a 5” hard-drive platter stack that I turned into a scroll wheel. Unfortunately, I don’t have space for it on my desk anymore, but it was just so pleasing to scroll through a document with something that had some real chonky momentum to it.

And it’s easier than ever to make your own. The classic blocky macropad is a great introduction, but as long as you’re doing the design yourself, why not extend it, or at least make it fit your hand? Or take your flights of fancy even further away from the mainstream. Consider the Bluetooth mouse ring, for instance.

Point is, the software side of almost any peripheral device you can imagine is sorted out already, and interfacing with the hardware is equally simple. Peripheral hacks have such a low barrier to entry, but afford so many creative hardware possibilities. And nothing says “Jedi” like building your own lightsaber.

This Handy Synth Packs An ESP32

May 2, 2026 by Jenny List 7 Comments

Since the first electronic hobbyist wired up a multivibrator to a keyboard many decades ago, electonic synthesisers have been a staple of home-made projects. Now with the proliferation of significantly powerful microcontrollers it’s possible to make a synth that surpasses many of the high-end models from days gone by.

Among those we’ve seen of late perhaps none does this better than [Povle] with their Spark portable keyboard. It’s a tiny thing that reminds us of those little Casio synths of the 1980s, but in its 3D printed case it packs a load of features.

Hardware wise it’s an ESP32 with a 3D printed keyboard using keyswitches. There are a load of pots for sound adjustment, and buttons for functions. A small OLED display shows what’s going on. Software wise it relies upon the AMY synth library, and there are repositories for both its hardware and software.

There’s a demo video we’ve placed below, and in it you hear the keyboard at work. And here maybe we’ve saved the best until last, because alongside being a fully featured synth, it’s also a sampler and a Bluetooth MIDI keyboard. Is there nothing this thing can’t do!

Continue reading “This Handy Synth Packs An ESP32” →

Debugging A Stopped Foucault Pendulum’s Electronics

May 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 11 Comments

After the Foucault pendulum at the Houston Museum of Natural Science stopped working a while back after maintenance on the building, workers set out to determine what was wrong with the mechanism that normally keeps it in motion. Fortunately, it turned out that all they had to do was fiddle with some knobs to get everything dialed back in proper-like.

When we previously covered this dire event, it was claimed that this was a one-off system, hacked together by some random bloke. But as can be seen in the video and further detailed in the comments to the video the reality is far more interesting.

This particular Foucault pendulum is one of many that were created by the California Academy of Sciences, with hundreds of them installed throughout the US and possibly elsewhere. That said, since a pendulum of any description will never be a perpetual motion device, the electromagnet installed near the top of the installation has to carefully add some kinetic energy back that was lost due to friction as the pendulum moves around.

Sadly the video doesn’t go into much detail on what exactly was wrongly configured with this particular pendulum. Keeping a weight at the end of a long cable moving around at a set velocity is a tricky business, so it’s little wonder that getting some parameters wrong would engage and disengage the electromagnets at the wrong times and making the pendulum stop swinging.

Continue reading “Debugging A Stopped Foucault Pendulum’s Electronics” →

Rust Helps Make A $1 Handheld Console

May 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 12 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!]