Neither Android Nor IOS: DIY Smartphone Runs On ESP32!

March 4, 2026 by Tyler August 10 Comments

You may or may not be reading this on a smartphone, but odds are that even if you aren’t, you own one. Well, possess one, anyway — it’s debatable if the locked-down, one-way relationships we have with our addiction slabs counts as ownership. [LuckyBor], aka [Breezy], on the other hand — fully owns his 4G smartphone, because he made it himself.

OK, sure, it’s only rocking a 4G modem, not 5G. But with an ESP32-S3 for a brain, that’s probably going to provide plenty of bandwidth. It does what you expect from a phone: thanks to its A7682E simcom modem, it can call and text. The OV2640 Arducam module allows it to take pictures, and yes, it surfs the web. It even has features certain flagship phones lack, like a 3.5 mm audio jack, and with its 3.5″ touchscreen, the ability to fit in your pocket. Well, once it gets a case, anyway.

Continue reading “Neither Android Nor IOS: DIY Smartphone Runs On ESP32!” →

The Joys Of 3D Printing

February 28, 2026 by Elliot Williams 38 Comments

Al and I were talking on the podcast today about a sweet 3D printed wide-format camera build, and we got to musing on why we 3D-print.

For Al, it’s an opportunity to experiment with 3D printing itself: tweaking his machines to get the best performance out of them. Other people make small, functional objects that they need in their daily life, like bag clips or spare parts for broken appliances. Some folks go for the ornamental or the aesthetic. The kids in my son’s class all seem obsessed with sci-fi props and fidget toys. The initial RepRap ideal was to replace all commercial fabrication with machines owned by the individual, rather than by companies – it was going to be Marxist revolutionary.

But there’s another group of 3D printer enthusiasts that I think doesn’t get enough coverage, and I’m going to call them the hobbyist industrial designers. These are the people who design a custom dog-poop-bag holder that exactly fits their extra-wide dog leash, not because they couldn’t find one that fit in the pet store, but because it’s simply fun to design and fabricate things. (OK, that’s literally me.)

It’s fun to learn CAD tools, to learn about how things are designed, how they work, and how to manufacture them at least in quantity one. Dreaming, designing, fabricating, failing, and repeating until you get it right is a great joy. And then you get to use the poop-bag holder every day for a few years, until you decide to refine the design and incorporate the lessons learned on the tough streets of practical use.

Of course none of this is exclusive to 3D printing. There were always people who designed-and-built things in the metal machine shop, or made their creations out of wood. In that sense, the 3D printer is just another tool, and the real fun isn’t in using the 3D printer, but rather in the process of bringing things out of your mind and into the world. So maybe there is nothing new here, but the latitude that 3D printing affords the hobby designer is amazing, and that makes it all the more fun, and challenging.

So do you 3D print for necessity, to stick it to the man, to pimp your printer, for the mini-figs, or simply for the joy of the process of making things? It’s all good. 3D printing is a big tent.

3D Print This MRI Safe Torque Wrench If You’re Rich

February 28, 2026 by Lewin Day 12 Comments

MRI machines come with a variety of safety warnings. Perhaps most importantly, you have to be very careful not to take ferrous metal objects anywhere near them, since strong magnetic fields can send them flying, causing damage and injuries. To that end, you might find yourself in need of magnetically-safe tools when working on such machines. [Sam Schmitz] recently whipped up a nifty example of an MRI-safe torque wrench himself.

The torque wrench mechanism, which operates in one direction only.

It’s a 3D printed design which can be produced on a Formlabs Fuse 1+ as a single piece in nylon using a selective laser sintering process. The torque wrench works in a deceptively simple manner. As the handle is rotated, a flap mates with the flat side of a fin on the shaft. This allows the shaft to turn. However, apply more than 0.6 Nm of torque, and the fin will eventually give in, snapping over the lip and stopping any further rotation that would over-tighten the fastener. [Sam] suggests these printed torque wrenches largely come out to the correct torque spec when printed, and can survive a thousand cycles or more while remaining in a usable spec.

The wrench does have one drawback though—it is apparently painfully loud to use. When the handle snaps past the detent, the “click” is quite piercing. [Sam] has measured the sound at up to 125 dB. Not exactly the best when it comes to ear safety!

If you work on MRI machines regularly, you already have the tooling to do your job. However, it’s neat to see that such a specialized tool can be easily and reliably 3D printed… with the slight drawback that you need a $60,000 SLS printer to do it. SLS isn’t readily available at the DIY level just yet, but it is slowly getting there. We’re waiting with bated breath.

AI Assistant Uses ESP32

February 27, 2026 by Al Williams 15 Comments

Having an AI assistant is all the rage these days, but AI assistants usually don’t know about your automation setups and may have difficulty dealing with tasks asynchronously. Enter zclaw. It gives you the option to have a personal assistant on an ESP32 backed by Anthropic, OpenAI, or OpenRouter. The whole thing fits in 888KB, and while it doesn’t host the LLM, it does add key capabilities to monitor and control devices connected to the ESP32.

You communicate with the assistant via telegram. You can say things like “Remember the garage sensor is on GPIO 4.” Then later you might say: “In 20 minutes, check the garage sensor and if it is high, set GPIO 5 low.” It has an RTOS for scheduling tasks and is aware of the timezone and common periods. Memory persists across reboots, and you can pick different personas.

Continue reading “AI Assistant Uses ESP32” →

Video Game Archive Myrient To Shut Down On March 31

February 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 23 Comments

Recently the Myrient game video archive announced that they’re shutting down on March 31st of this year, for a couple of reasons, but primarily the skyrocketing financial costs of hosting the archive. One advantage of Myrient over e.g. Archive.org is that – per the FAQ – every game on the site is curated and checked against a checksum of a known good copy. The site also focuses on fast downloads, making it a good resource if you’re trying to find ROMs of some more obscure old gaming system.

Amidst the mourning it seems also pertinent to address the reasons behind this shutdown. Although finances are the main reason for this hobby project to be shut down, it’s due to (paywalled) download managers that have recently appeared, and which completely bypass the donation requests and similar on the website. Despite use of Myrient for commercial, for-profit purposes having always been explicitly forbidden, this has been ignored to the point where the owner of Myrient had to shell out over $6,000 per month to cover the difference after donations.

Along with the rising costs of hosting due to rising storage and RAM prices courtesy of AI datacenter buildouts, this has meant that a hobby archive like this has become completely unsustainable. Barring good ways to block illegal traffic like these download tools and/or a surge in donations, it would seem that all archives like this are at risk of shutting down, along with other sites that contain commercially interesting content.

Hackaday Podcast Ep 359: Flying Squids, Edible Passwords, And A CAD Automaton

February 27, 2026 by Al Williams 9 Comments

Hackaday editors Elliot Williams and Al Williams met up to trade their favorite posts of the week. Tune in and see if your favorites made the list. From crazy intricate automata to surprising problems in Peltier cooler designs, there’s a little bit of everything.

Should bikes have chains? What’s the hardest thing about Star Trek computers to duplicate? Can you make a TV station from a single microcontroller? The podcast this week answers these questions and more. Plus, weigh in on the What’s That Sound contest and you might just score a Hackaday Podcast T-shirt.

For the Can’t Miss segment, Elliot had airships on his mind, while Al’s sick of passwords. But is he sick enough to take electronic pills that transmit his password?

Or download the bit stream and decrypt it by XORing each byte with zero.

Continue reading →

Stop Ironing 3D Prints

February 25, 2026 by Al Williams 19 Comments

If you want smooth top surfaces on your 3D printed parts, a common technique is to turn on ironing in your slicer. This causes the head to drag through the top of the part, emitting a small amount of plastic to smooth the surface. [Make Wonderful Things] asserts that you don’t need to do this time-consuming step. Instead, he proposes using statistical analysis to identify the optimal settings to place the top layer correctly the first time, as shown in the video below.

The parameters he thinks make a difference are line width, flow ratio, and print speed. Picking reasonable step sizes suggested that there were 19,200 combinations of settings to test. Obviously, that’s too many, so he picked up techniques from famous mathematician [George E. P. Box] and also used Bayesian analysis to reduce the amount of printing required to converge on the perfect settings.

Did it work? Judging from the video, it appears to have done so. The best test pieces looked as good as the one that used traditional ironing. Compared to ironing, the non-ironed parts saved about 34% of print time. Not bad.

Of course, there are variations on traditional ironing, so your results may vary.

Continue reading “Stop Ironing 3D Prints” →