So You Want To Make Your SDR Work On Other Frequencies

October 15, 2026 by No comments

Perhaps the most exciting news of the past few weeks in the world of hardware hacking has been the unlocking of hidden SDR functionality in the Wi-Fi radios found on Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers. They can be used as both transmit and receive SDRs, and given that it’s early days for this hack we expect that great things are yet to come.

There’s one snag though, despite speculation that they might be dragged down to much lower frequencies, as far as we know they’re only proven to work around the Wi-Fi frequencies. Though the reality may be wider we’ll take that for a 2.4 GHz part as a 100 MHz slice from 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz. Plenty of possibilities there, and they might even work down to 1.8 GHz, but there would be so much more to do if it could work elsewhere in the spectrum. So it’s time to look at the converter, a tried and tested old way to make a radio work on a different frequency.

Continue reading “So You Want To Make Your SDR Work On Other Frequencies” →

A Thermal Camera That Uses WebUSB

October 15, 2026 by 5 Comments

When creating a peripheral for a mobile phone, an obvious path is to create a companion app with which to talk to it. But as we all know today’s app is tomorrow’s non-functional abandonware, so to give his infrared camera a long life, [Cezar Chirila] made it talk WebUSB to a browser instead.

The hardware is conventional enough, a FLIR sensor talking to an RP2040. There’s very little in the way of supporting circuitry save for a power supply regulator, as so much that might be on a standalone project is already present in the USB host device. Running the thing is as simple as going to a landing page in a browser that supports WebUSB, and using the camera. The whole lot is in a GitHub repository, if you’re interested.

We’re big fans of WebUSB, for exactly the reason it’s been used here. While there are a few browser features which have been deprecated over the years — who remembers the BLINK and MARQUEE HTML tags — it’s likely WebUSB won’t be one of them. This could only be topped by having the microcontroller share a small USB disk with the landing page as an HTML file.

Meanwhile if you’re strapped for cash, there are cheaper thermal cameras out there.

Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller

October 15, 2026 by No comments

The Soonpho M7 Pan Tilt Head is a useful photography tool for remotely aiming a decently-sized camera. Only, [Kyle Housley] wanted a little more control than was available out of the box. Hence, he built a custom controller that could deliver just that.

The project is based around an ESP32-S3 paired with an NRF24L01 wireless module. The ESP32-S3 is hooked up to a computer to receive commands over serial on what movements to make. It then transmits over the NRF24L01 to another NRF24L01 module that has been hacked into the original M7’s controller. In doing so, it can command the M7 to move to a given specific pan and tilt position, or to make a smooth motion along a vector. It can also trigger shutter release in the attached camera as needed, to capture whatever is being looked at.

[Kyle] has used this rig to create a motion tracking system for aircraft photography. With a Yolo vision model running on a laptop, the pan-tilt head can be commanded to track aircraft passing by and photograph them when they’re in frame. It’s a pretty slick setup; we’d love to see similar done with the aid of ADS-B data, too—perhaps even with automatic image tagging and upload.  Continue reading “Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller” →

Pager Converted To Meshtastic Node

October 14, 2026 by 1 Comment

Text messaging has been around on cellular networks en masse for around three decades now. It’s so common that it’s difficult to remember a time without it. Its two-way quick messaging is incredibly useful, but for even simpler communications there’s a one-way system that predates it. Pagers are able to receive simple messages, but outside of hospitals are rarely used nowadays. Eventually some added in two-way communications like this Motorola T900, but they’re still mostly obsolete. That’s why [zindustries87] converted it to operate on the Meshtastic network instead.

To get this pager working, a lot of reverse engineering was needed. There is essentially no documentation on the chips in these devices, so the screen and keyboard both were reverse-engineered to work with other hardware. In this case, [zindustries87] found space for a Heltec V4 with an ESP32-S3, a popular Meshtastic node with a small form factor. Some programming was needed to get everything communicating together, but from the looks of things it seems to have basic functionality.

[zindustries87] points out that this is a prototype, and didn’t know going in if the keyboard and screen could be brought back to life, or if the other hardware would fit in the case. But with it working on this level, they plan to add a number of other features in and possibly build a drop-in PCB replacement for these devices. They were once fairly popular so there are plenty around, and they’re a good form factor for a dedicated Meshtastic device that doesn’t need a smartphone to work. The only other ways of bringing pagers back to life involve bootstrapping an entire pager network, and Meshtastic is a bit more useful than that now.

AI Controls IPhone Via ESP32

October 14, 2026 by 9 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.

Continue reading “AI Controls IPhone Via ESP32” →

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 9 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.