Process 4 Billion Pixels Per Second From 16 DIY Cameras For The Best V-Tubing Rig Ever

June 10, 2026 by 22 Comments

[Dennis] is on YouTube with his channel “Made By Dennis,” but for the record he is a maker, not a V-tuber. On the other hand, his latest project– creating a profesisonal-level tracking rig with DIY IR cameras and a whole lot of moxie–does mean he’s now equipped to make the move to the prestigious, high-status world of pretending to be an anime girl.

That is of course not why he did it. Like most projects around here, the motivation was more a case of “I wonder if I can…”– in this case [Dennis] wondered what it would take for him to pull off the same sort of optical motion capture, or MoCap, that is used in Hollywood studios. Optical mocap has the advantage of being very precise, able to track things at high speeds, and not being in any way limited to the human form like the slew of AI-assisted methods hitting the market right now. The disatvantage is that you need to place markers on any part of your subject you want tracked, film them from all angles, and process a whole lot of pixels. In [Dennis]’s case, it ended up being about four billion. Keeping in mind that actually locating those points in 3D space is dependent on knowing exactly where your cameras are: if you want sub-millimeter precision, your cameras need to be fixed with sub-millimeter tolerance. It’s a big project, hence a long video, which is embedded below.

The DIY cameras use a AR0234 MIPI camera on a custom PCB with M12 lenses and IR filters. To improve the signal-to-noise ratio on optical MoCap, it’s standard to use near-IR light. The camera boards, as you might expect given the MIPI interface, hook into Raspberry Pi compute modules– the cheapest CM4 should work, though he’s using CM5s. The compute modules sit on custom boards that provide PoE, and some other niceties– like a small microcontroller driven by the pulse-per-second pin to help trigger the cameras in sync.

Each camera gets a ring light of near-IR LEDs that pulse at 160 W, which would be way more than PoE is specced to provide, but since the LEDs are only on when the camera is taking a frame, the average power is well within allowable limits. With 16 cameras each having their own ring light, that’s a lot of near-IR photons. Don’t forget your safety squints!

Rather than process the images with OpenCV, he has his own custom solution optimized for this use-case that [Dennis] reports is 300x faster. Luckily, he’s put his implementation on GitHub, along with the rest of the project. Even if you don’t have any v-tubing ambitions, this project is very impressive and worth checking out in its entirety.

Optical MoCap isn’t the only game in town, of course. If you want to do this cheap and easy, you can strap a bunch of IMU sensors to yourself– just don’t expect the same precision.

Thanks to [Dennis] for the tip!

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Introducing Boron Buckyballs

June 10, 2026 by 17 Comments

A buckminsterfullerene, also known as a buckyball, is typically a fullerene consisting of sixty carbon atoms (C60) arranged in a way that resembles a football-like sphere. Extending this arrangement to other types of atoms has until now however proven as elusive as finding non-carbon-based lifeforms. In a paper by [Hyun Wook Choi] et al. and published in Chemical Science the discovery of boron buckyballs is detailed. There is also a soft-paywalled article in the Chemical & Engineering News magazine for a higher-level perspective.

The discovered boron-based buckyball ups the number of atoms to eighty, forming B80 (boron fullerite) with a slightly larger diameter than C60 at 0.85 nm versus 0.71 nm. Perhaps more interesting are the claims by the authors that boron fullerite may have more practical applications than its carbon-based cousin, mostly due to it being predicted to be a semiconductor with an 0.8 eV energy gap and better electron acceptance that provides interesting doping prospects.

Producing these boron structures used laser vaporization with a helium carrier gas that was seeded with argon to increase cooling efficiency. Inside this boron cluster the reported structures were then discovered and characterized as described in the paper.

Obviously, going from a fascinating laboratory discovery to bulk production won’t be easy, and the predicted properties of boron fullerite may turn out to be incomplete or have a dark side that we aren’t aware of. Regardless, they’re bound to be more useful at least than the carbon version that’s remained mostly a curiosity despite many years of research.

4:3 screenshot? Either period-appropriate hardware or a VM.

Meshcore And Haiku: A Match Apparently Made In Italy

June 10, 2026 by 12 Comments

No, we’re not talking about cultural appropriation of Japan’s most famous form of short poem–this is the other Haiku, the open-source descendant of BeOS, which now has a fully-native meshcore chat client called Sestriere, thanks to the efforts of one [Atomozero]. Of course you’ll need a LoRa radio to act as a modem, but anything that speaks USB serial– which is any of the ESP32-based offerings on the market–should work.

This is interesting in that we don’t see many desktop applications leveraging LoRa networks– meshtastic or meshcore– so for one to appear for the relatively-obscure BeOS derivative is just neat. It’s also a nice peice of work: the chat window is full featured, organizing your contacts, and communicating not just with text but emojis and reaction GIFs. GIFs seem a bit extravagant for LoRa bandwith, but apparently it works. There are also Codec2-based voice messages, another thing that we didn’t expect to see over LoRa, since most ‘chat’ projects restrict themselves to text messaging.

The chat window. One nice thing about Haiku APIs is that look-and-feel isn’t in question.

The software will also map all the nodes with which you are in contact, both diagrammatically and geographically, overlaid on OpenStreetMap tiles. The network map conveniently colour-codes your contacts by the link quality, but what’s even more interesting is the WireShark-inspired packet sniffer built into the software to let you keep a really close eye on traffic on the mesh network.

Neither Haiku or MeshCore are to everyone’s tastes, but as an OS it is a worthy daily driver, even if you have to jump through some hoops to install it if you have a UEFI-only system.

If you need more range, try a Yagi.

Safely Using Old EV Batteries In Your Home Solar Setup

June 10, 2026 by 31 Comments

As straightforward as the concept of taking battery packs out of an old electric or hybrid car and reusing them for home power storage sounds, this thought process skips a few essential steps. As argued by [Ed] in a recent video based on his own experiences with high-voltage Nissan Leaf batteries in a home PV system, the main problem is that you’re taking a battery out of a larger system including a lot of the management hardware and software.

The referenced Battery Emulator project is an open source effort to create a suitable interface between these EV batteries, with the mentioned Nissan Leaf being just one example in the project Wiki, with the connection scheme shown in the top image. It’s also noted that the Leaf battery BMS is not designed to operate continuously, so they need to be restarted every day or so lest they become too inaccurate.

These and other things are all solid reasons why you have to be absolutely certain that you want to integrate these high-voltage battery packs into your 12 – 48V low-voltage DC system. You’re after all assuming all the responsibility of setting up a system that’s both safe and reliable, so having a good read through something like the Battery Emulator Wiki and sourcing first-hand experiences from the folk in this community would be a very wise first step.

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FLOSS Weekly Episode 870: Open Source Gardening

June 10, 2026 by 6 Comments

This week Jonathan chats with Alexander Neumann about Restic, a particularly compelling backup and restore solution written in Go. Why did the world need one more backup program? And what’s Alexander’s personal take on transitioning from programmer to maintainer? Watch to find out!

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DIY CO2 Scrubber In DIY Sub By A Hacker Braver Than Most

June 10, 2026 by 34 Comments

If you look around your environment, you can probably pick off quite a few things that you’ve made, at least if you’ve been at this a while. You probably aren’t reading this from the bottom of a body of water though, which means you lack the incredible confidence of submarine builder [Hank Pronk]. Not only is he building himself a capable-looking diesel-electric submarine over on YouTube, he’s even DIYing CO2 scrubbers for it! Yeah, that’s a man who believes in himself.

Luckily [Hank] is not anywhere near the Caribbean, so needn’t worry about being misidentified as a narco-sub, but he still has to be concerned about his oxygen supply when tooling around beneath the local lakes. Perhaps more important than the oxygen supply in a sub is the build up of CO2. It doesn’t matter how many oxygen tanks you bring down with you if you can’t scrub CO2 out of the air to make room for it. Just like the Apollo missions, he’s using a chemical adsorbent to take carbon dioxide out of the air — and just like Apollo 13, he’s switching from square to round.

Or, rather, from a rather rectangular commercial model to a DIY little round unit. That’s because he doesn’t need the big scrubber in this sub: being diesel-powered, he expects to spend a lot of time at snorkel depth, where both the pilot and the engines can get clean air through the tube. Dives are expected to be short, and in that use case, too big of a CO2 scrubber is really a waste. If for some reason he gets stuck on the bottom, well, the lake isn’t that deep. He can swim to surface, and has a detailed bailout plan. If he wants to stay under overnight to avoid bailing at night, he’s carrying enough extra adsorbent for that.

There’s a reason almost every submarine we’ve featured on this site over the years is an ROV. It’s not that a homemade submarine is automatically a death trap, but you sure do have to be confident in your design.

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NASA Announces Artemis III Crew And Ambitious Goals

June 10, 2026 by 28 Comments

When the Artemis lunar program was first conceived, the third mission would have seen astronauts step foot on the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. But as hard as getting into space is, a sojourn to our nearest celestial neighbor is even more mindbogglingly complex, and so earlier this year it was announced that actually landing on the Moon would be pushed out to the fourth mission.

In turn Artemis III would take a page out of the Apollo 9 playbook and test out rendezvous and docking procedures with commercial landers while operating in the relative safety of low Earth orbit. Moving the target date for the landing a few years down the road gave all involved parties a little more breathing room, but it also provided a valuable opportunity to gain insight into the performance of the vehicles and systems ahead of the critical moment. In the original timeline, the first time Orion would attempt to dock with the lander would have been just before descending to the lunar surface — leaving precious little time to troubleshoot should anything go wrong.

Yesterday NASA held a press conference to update the public on their progress towards the planned 2027 launch of Artemis III, which included the long-awaited announcement of the crew that will kick the tires on the next-generation lunar landers being developed by SpaceX and Blue Origin

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