Hackaday Europe 2026: Half Quad, Half Blimp: Test. Fly. Survive.

July 23, 2026 by 1 Comment

A great many drones out there, whether homebuilt or store-bought, follow the same basic format. Four motors, some kind of controller, and a lithium-polymer battery supplying the juice to keep everything in the air. It’s a format that produces a remarkably capable air vehicle, suitable for everything from high-speed camera work to urban search and rescue.

With that said, the format does have its limitations. [Suryansh Sharma] has been working on alternative designs for fancy and interesting drones that are half quadcopter and half blimp, and he came to Hackaday Europe 2026 to tell us all about it.

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60 FPS NES Emulator On ESP32

July 22, 2026 by 9 Comments

At least in theory, video games are more resistant to becoming lost media thanks to their digital nature — they’re easy to copy and emulators have saved many titles that are otherwise locked in corporate vaults. But emulators give us something beyond simple preservation: they can also be used to enhance games well beyond the capabilities of the original systems while still preserving the souls of the games, as this NES emulator manages to do.

The emulator is called Anemoia-ESP32, and as its name suggests is a re-write of the Anemoia emulator specifically built for the ESP32. By modern standards these little chips don’t pack much of a punch, but compared to original NES hardware they’re more than up to the task of gaming. This project aims to recreate the Nintendo Entertainment System experience as faithfully as possible, hitting 60 FPS in most instances, as well as maintaining full audio emulation. Running on an ESP32 enables some truly small handheld options that would be difficult to achieve with more traditional platforms for emulation. There are some PCBs available here as well, but aren’t required to explore this project with.

As far as extra features compared to original NES hardware, the emulator does support save states and has a number of other settings improvements. Installation is as easy as flashing any other firmware image onto an ESP32, which these days can even be done from the browser. No word on whether or not it will eventually support emulating dual Picture Processing Units, but we can hope.

20 FPS On E-Paper Display Without Help

July 21, 2026 by 30 Comments

If electronic paper displays have one downside, it’s generally refresh rate. Earlier versions of the tech might only have been able to do single-digit frames per second, while modern, mid-range devices can sometimes manage 10-20 FPS — and that’s not including the frames needed to blank the display. Getting up past that double-digit barrier typically requires higher-end displays, more powerful processors or FPGAs, and more money. On the other hand, [Tony] was recently able to get 20 FPS out of an ESP32-based device without using any extra processing power.

The key to improving e-paper performance is understanding how the display actually works. The “ink” consists of microscopic charged pigment particles that physically move in response to electric fields, making the display much slower than LCD or OLED panels. Rather than fully erasing and redrawing every frame, the software takes advantage of the particles’ existing state by generating optimized driving waveforms that only move the particles needed to produce the next image. On the software side, an MPEG-like encoding is used so only changes between frames are transmitted and converted into these waveforms, reducing unnecessary data transfers and allowing much higher frame rates.

[Tony]’s method is able to drive 960×540 panels, like those found in the Lilygo or M5PaperS3, to 20 FPS, and these platforms are based on nothing more than the capable but limited ESP32 chip. It’s an impressive push, and worth checking out the video in the linked project page. We assume you’d need a little more to drive something like the massive e-paper display found in this home automation setup, though.

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Hackaday Europe 2026: Project Gigapixel

July 20, 2026 by 10 Comments

There was once a race to put out cameras with ever higher numbers of megapixels to snare customers eager to take the highest quality digital photos. These days, we know that things like optics, processing, and finer qualities of an image sensor are all very important beyond pure resolution. But, for a time, companies behaved as if megapixels mattered over all else.

But what if you could go farther—shooting not millions, but billions of pixels in a single image? That’s precisely what [Yannick Richter] came to Hackaday Europe to talk about, covering his Project Gigapixel build.

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Hackaday Links: July 19, 2026

July 19, 2026 by 6 Comments

We’ll start this week off by giving our congratulations to Skyroot Aerospace of India for successfully launching the country’s first privately developed orbital rocket yesterday. The company’s Vikram-1 booster stands 24 m (79 ft) tall and uses a somewhat unusual four-stage arrangement, with the first three stages using solid propellant and the final liquid-fueled stage being responsible for putting the payload into a precise orbit. With this successful launch, India becomes only the third country in the world with a private company capable of performing orbital launches.

Generally, the rocket should be moving when the countdown hits zero.

On the other end of the spectrum, we have SpaceX’s prototype Starship, which elected not to leave Earth during a last-second (literally) launch termination on Thursday. Aborted launches are, of course, nothing new in the world of rocketry, especially when dealing with an in-development vehicle that has 33 engines that need to fire up at the same moment before it can leave the pad. But this dramatic abort was unique as it was the first time lift-off of the massive 124.4 meter (408 ft) rocket had been called off when the engines were already running.

Onboard systems took advantage of the very narrow window between the time the Raptor engines are switched on and the rocket actually leaves the launchpad to decide that it was not a good day to visit space after all. Word from SpaceX is that two of the Raptor engines on the first stage will be replaced and that they should be ready to make another launch attempt sometime this upcoming week.

While getting rockets off the ground is never easy, one thing that seems to have no trouble going up is the price of gasoline. Even still, Americans seem largely uninterested in electric vehicles, or at the very least, the slate of EVs that are currently available to them — especially now that the $7,500 federal tax credit has ended. Yesterday, TechCrunch ran an article about all the EVs that have exited the US market over the last year due to stagnant sales or import difficulties, and it’s quite a list.

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Write 2D And 3D Games In Modern MoonBASIC

July 18, 2026 by 8 Comments

One of the major strengths of the BASIC programming languages has always been their no-fuss setup and rich set of commands for operations that would take considerably more work in a bare-bones language like C. MoonBASIC continues this legacy with a BASIC variant optimized for both 2D and 3D game development.

Included in the package are Raylib, Box2D, and Jolt, whose functionality is exposed via over 4,200 commands in their respective namespaces. You can also download a whole IDE package based around VS Code, use it on the command line, or add it to an existing VS Code installation.

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ESP32-driven Roulette Wheel Could Have Used A 555, But That Didn’t Have WiFi

July 18, 2026 by 5 Comments

Sometimes you see a project and immediately, before going into the details, your mind throws up the old refrain: “coulda used a 555” — well, [Hulk] actually agrees when it comes to his ESP32-based, 3D printed roulette wheel. The first version did use a 555, but then feature creep kicked in and the final project ended up with an ESP32 instead. We’ve all been there.

The roulette wheel circuit is retained from the 555 version, with the ESP32 providing clock pulses instead of the venerable oscillator chip — it uses a pair of decade counters to create the chase effect of the LED around the wheel. With a handsome printed enclosure, [Hulk] could have stopped there, but then he’d have to keep track of scoring and the like manually like some kind of dark age peasant. It’s the 21st century, we have computers to to that for us!

Now, even though the ESP32 is still driving the LED chase via the decade counters, it can keep track of where the “ball” of light lands, and reports that via WiFi or serial. While it would have been an option to run the whole game on the ESP32. [Hulk] just has those values put into an SQL database on a server, which also runs the game front-end via PHP. The resulting web page lets two players make their bets and track their wins and losses over time. You can see that in action in the video embedded below.

Overkill? Sure, but we suspect [Hulk] already had the equipment and experience to make this the fastest way to get a playable game. There are easy ways to serve web content from an ESP32, but the easiest tool to use is always the one in your back pocket, right?

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