The Seven Sensors And Breakout Boards To Avoid In A Product

August 2, 2026 by Maya Posch No comments

We’ve all seen these sensors and modules kicking around, as part of beginner kits, strapped into prototypes and potentially even in products deployed in the field. Yet as [John Teel] rightfully points out in a recent video, most of these have no business ever being used in a real product, and might not even be suitable for prototyping.

First up is a combination of the related DHT11 and DHT22 temperature-humidity sensors. As common as these are, they’re also pretty sketchy with their proprietary one-wire protocol and at most questionable accuracy, worsened by not having a good supply chain. The replacements are plentiful: the SHT40 and SHT41, the Bosch Sensortec BME280 or BMP180, as well as TI’s HDC3020. These get you standard I2C communication and a supply chain plus a datasheet you can trust.

Second is the HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor. Although fine for prototyping, it’s a 5 V module, lacks temperature compensation and other features that’d be needed outside a temperature-controlled room. Here ST’s VL53 Time-of-Flight sensors are a good alternative, containing a range of sensors of which we covered the fancier VL53L5CX previously for 3D scanning a room. Of course, you can also use reflective IR as a good cheap alternative.

Third is the HC-SR501 passive infrared (PIR) motion module. This one is also fine for PIR and motion sensing prototyping, but is too inconsistent and power-hungry for production. Instead you can get much better and much smaller PIR modules, like the Panasonic EKMC and EKMB, or the ST STHS34 IR motion and presence sensor.

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UV Printer? 3D Printer? HeyGears Says “Why Not Both”?

August 1, 2026 by Tyler August 2 Comments

There’s a new contender in the prosumer UV printer world up on Kickstarter, the HeyGears G1. This one’s particularly interesting as they’re explicitly marketing it as being able to produce full-color 3D prints along with the “print-on-anything” functionality we’ve come to expect from a UV flatbed printer.

You get two choices of bed, with the larger being 420 mm x 320 mm x 130 mm. Hardly the largest build volume we’ve seen around here. You can fill that with up to 6 KG of UV ink/resin from its Epson-brand head in glorious full color and layers as small as 10 um. The ink isn’t super cheap — the CMYK kit looks to MRSP at 189 USD — but you aren’t locked in to expensive cartridges at least. HayGears sells ink in bottles, and you’re free to grab any other brand’s bottles if you want to risk it.

The Kickstarter is ongoing, and it will be some time before backers get their printers. But we can report that the early review copies, like the one [Steve Makes Everything] got for the video embedded below, seem to live up to the manufacturer’s claims, which is promising indeed. Certainly the idea of SLA quality without the mess is very appealing to many — though the super-early-bird price of two grand on Kickstarter and the doubtless higher MRSP may temper some of that interest.

If you’re curious about this UV printer business and why a maker might want one that doesn’t do 3D, our own [Tom Nardi] went hands-on with the EufyMake E1 last year.

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Bike Trainers As Video Game Controllers

August 1, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 3 Comments

While we’ve largely settled on analog sticks and digital buttons for controlling video games, there’s all sorts of projects to create truly esoteric controllers that allow playing games in unique ways. This one from [sukolupo] lets you use data from standard bike trainers to get your virtual character moving.

Called Deck de France, it maps the data coming from one of the supported bike trainers to a virtual controller which can then be “plugged in” to a gaming console of choice, in this case a Steam Deck mounted to the trainer’s handlebars. Although a bike trainer doesn’t have the same number of inputs as a modern gaming controller, it does have enough to play games like Rocket League. As you might expect, it’s also perfect for biking titles such as the Tour de France series.

As far as unique controllers for video games go, this one is surely up in the rankings with a real trombone or a controller purpose-built for riding virtual horses. It’s also a great way for those who are getting a bit bored of riding their trainers to breathe some new life into their exercise routine. We’ve also seen some open-source alternatives for modern bike trainer software as well, which is another great way to get excited about exercise equipment too.

Stewart Platform Walker Gains Feeling In Legs From Resistors

August 1, 2026 by Tyler August 2 Comments

Stewy is a very interesting robot, with some slightly odd kinematics. Its head is a Stewart platform, which is a common-enough 6-DOF actuated plate normally used with a fixed base. By connecting legs to the same servos running the Stewart platform, [JD] turned it into an adorable hexapod walker. The walker had a problem, though: it can’t feel its feet, and [JD] thinks that would make it much more mobile on uneven surfaces. So he got some resistors to turn the cheap servos in its legs into force-sensing actuators.

Well, almost. He’s not actually putting strain gauges or anything like that into the legs; he’s just measuring the voltage drop across a resistor in series with the servos. Since the motors draw more current the more torque they’re putting out, he has a very quick and easy way to sense the current and thus the torque using good old Ohm’s law and an analog input on the microcontroller driving the robot. It’s a simple hack, but the data he’s getting is surprisingly good for how much work it is to add to a robot, as you can see in the video — at least once he slowed down the servos a touch.

Perhaps this isn’t a ground-breaking innovation, but [JD] does a very good idea explaining it. Of course if you want to use resistors to sense force directly, force-sensitive resistors are a thing that we’ve seen in everything from Twister-mat MIDI controllers to self-leveling 3D printers.

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Open Source Stream Deck Targets Flexibility

August 1, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 4 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 11 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 10 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!