Welcome Your New AI (LEGO) Overlord

May 15, 2025 by 13 Comments

You’d think a paper from a science team from Carnegie Mellon would be short on fun. But the team behind LegoGPT would prove you wrong. The system allows you to enter prompt text and produce physically stable LEGO models. They’ve done more than just a paper. You can find a GitHub repo and a running demo, too.

The authors note that the automated generation of 3D shapes has been done. However, incorporating real physics constraints and planning the resulting shape in LEGO-sized chunks is the real topic of interest. The actual project is a set of training data that can transform text to shapes. The real work is done using one of the LLaMA models. The training involved converting Lego designs into tokens, just like a chatbot converts words into tokens.

There are a lot of parts involved in the creation of the designs. They convert meshes to LEGO in one step using 1×1, 1×2, 1×4, 1×6, 1×8, 2×2, 2×4, and 2×6 bricks. Then they evaluate the stability of the design. Finally, they render an image and ask GPT-4o to produce captions to go with the image.

The most interesting example is when they feed robot arms the designs and let them make the resulting design. From text to LEGO with no human intervention! Sounds like something from a bad movie.

We wonder if they added the more advanced LEGO sets, if we could ask for our own Turing machine?

Smart Terrarium Run By ESP32

May 15, 2025 by 8 Comments

A terrarium is a little piece of the living world captured in a small enclosure you can pop on your desk or coffee table at home. If you want to keep it as alive as possible, though, you might like to implement some controls. That’s precisely what [yotitote] did with their smart terrarium build.

At the heart of the build is an ESP32 microcontroller. It’s armed with temperature and humidity sensors to detect the state of the atmosphere within the terrarium itself. However, it’s not just a mere monitor. It’s able to influence conditions by activating an ultrasonic fogger to increase humidity (which slightly impacts temperature in turn). There are also LED strips, which the ESP32 controls in order to try and aid the growth of plants within, and a small OLED screen to keep an eye on the vital signs.

It’s a simple project, but one that serves as a basic starting point that could be readily expanded as needed. It wouldn’t take much to adapt this further, such as by adding heating elements for precise temperature control, or more advanced lighting systems. These could be particularly useful if you intend your terrarium to support, perhaps, reptiles, in addition to tropical plant life.

Indeed, we’ve seen similar work before, using a Raspberry Pi to create a positive environment to keep geckos alive! Meanwhile, if you’re cooking up your own advanced terrarium at home, don’t hesitate to let us know.

Fancy Adding A Transputer Or Two To Your Atari ST?

May 14, 2025 by 9 Comments

Has anybody heard of the ATW800 transputer workstation? The one that used a modified Atari ST motherboard as a glorified I/O controller for a T-series transputer?  No, we hadn’t either, but transputer superfan [Axel Muhr] has created the ATW800/2, an Atari Transputer card, the way it was meant to be.

The transputer was a neat idea when it was conceived in the 1980s. It was designed specifically for parallel and scientific computing and featured an innovative architecture and dedicated high-speed serial chip-to-chip networking. However, the development of more modern buses and general-purpose CPUs quickly made it a footnote in history. During the same period, a neat transputer-based parallel processing computer was created, which leveraged the Atari ST purely for its I/O. This was the curious ATW800 transputer workstation. That flopped as well, but [Axel] was enough of a fan to take that concept and run with it. This time, rather than using the Atari as a dumb I/O controller, the card is explicitly designed for the Mega-ST expansion bus. A second variant of the ATW800/2 is designed for the Atari VME bus used by the STe and TT models—yes, VME on an Atari—it was a thing.

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Inside Starlink’s User Terminal

May 14, 2025 by 33 Comments

If you talk about Starlink, you are usually talking about the satellites that orbit the Earth carrying data to and from ground stations. Why not? Space is cool. But there’s another important part of the system: the terminals themselves. Thanks to [DarkNavy], you don’t have to tear one open yourself to see what’s inside.

The terminal consists of two parts: the router and the antenna. In this context, antenna is somewhat of a misnomer, since it is really the RF transceiver and antenna all together. The post looks only at the “antenna” part of the terminal.

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LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow

May 14, 2025 by 4 Comments

Plywood is an interesting material: made up of many layers of thin wood plys, it can be built up into elegantly curved shapes. Do you need to limit it to just wood, though? [Zach of All Trades] has proved you do not, when he embedded a light guide, LEDs, microcontrollers and touch sensors into a quarter inch (about six millimeter) plywood layup in the video embedded below.

He’s using custom flexible PCBs, each hosting upto 3 LEDs and the low-cost PY32 microcontroller. The PY32 drives the RGB LEDs and handles capacitive touch sensing within the layup. In the video, he goes through his failed prototypes and what he learned: use epoxy, not wood glue, and while clear PET might be nice and bendy, acrylic is going to hold together better and cuts easier with a CO2 laser. Continue reading “LED Layer Makes Plywood Glow” →

Your Own Core Rope Memory

May 14, 2025 by 12 Comments

If you want read-only memory today, you might be tempted to use flash memory or, if you want old-school, maybe an EPROM. But there was a time when that wasn’t feasible. [Igor Brichkov] shows us how to make a core rope memory using a set of ferrite cores and wire. This was famously used in early UNIVAC computers and the Apollo guidance computer. You can see how it works in the video below.

While rope memory superficially resembles core memory, the principle of operation is different. In core memory, the core’s magnetization is what determines any given bit. For rope memory, the cores are more like a sensing element. A set wire tries to flip the polarity of all cores. An inhibit signal stops that from happening except on the cores you want to read. Finally, a sense wire weaves through the cores and detects a blip when a core changes polarity. The second video, below, is an old MIT video that explains how it works (about 20 minutes in).

Why not just use core memory? Density. These memories could store much more data than a core memory system in the same volume. Of course, you could write to core memory, too, but that’s not always a requirement.

We’ve seen a resurgence of core rope projects lately. Regular old core is fun, too.

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2025 Pet Hacks Contest: Automatic Treat Dispenser Makes Kitty Work For It

May 14, 2025 by 10 Comments

Treat dispensers are old hat around here, but what if kitty doesn’t need the extra calories — and actually needs to drop some pounds? [MethodicalMaker] decided to link the treat dispenser to a cat wheel, and reward kitty for healthy behaviors. The dispenser can be programmed to make the cat run long enough to burn the calories of its treat. Over time, kitty can be trained to run longer between treats to really melt off the pounds.

The wheel itself is an off the shelf model called “One Fast Cat”; apparently these are quite cheap second hand as most cats don’t really see the point in exercise. [MethodicalMaker] glued evenly-spaced magnets along the rim in order to track the rotation with a hall effect sensor.  A microcontroller is watching said sensor, and is programmed to release the treats after counting off a set number of revolutions. Control over the running distance and manual treat extrusion is via web portal, but the networking code had difficulty on the Arduino R4 [MethodicalMaker] started with, so he switched to an ESP32 to get it working.

The real interesting part of this project is the physical design of the treat dispenser: it uses a double-auger setup to precisely control treat release. The first auger lives inside a hopper that holds a great many treats, but it tended to over-dispense so [MethodicalMaker] methodically made a second auger that sits beneath the hopper. The handful of treats extruded by the first auger are dispensed individually by the second auger, aided by a photosensor inside the exit chute to count treats. This also lets the machine signal when it needs refilling. For precise control, continuous servos are used to drive the augers. Aside from the electronics, everything is 3D printed; the STLs are on Printables, and the code is on GitHub.

If you don’t have a cat wheel, DIY is an option. If you don’t have a cat, we’ve also highlighted dog treat dispensers. If you don’t have either, check with your local animal shelter; we bet good money there are oodles ready to adopt in your town, and then you’ll have an excuse to enter one of your projects into our ongoing Pet Hacks Contest.

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