SIMD-accelerated Machine Vision On An ESP32-S3

October 27, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Recently [shraiwi] decided to have a bit of good nerdy fun and implement the FAST machine vision algorithm on an ESP32-S3 using its SIMD ISA. This involves using the assembly instructions for the ISA, making for an exciting opportunity to become familiar with this part of this Xtensa Lx7-based twin-core MCU.

The Features from Accelerated Segment Test (FAST) algorithm is a corner detection method that can determine with reasonable accuracy and in real-time whether a given input frame contains said corners which thus may correspond to objects and other characteristics worthy of note. This is essential for machine vision, with machine learning able to bump up its recognition accuracy even more.

Implementing this algorithm on the ESP32-S3 proved to be a bit of a challenge due to somewhat limited SIMD ISA. Missing instructions included things like comparisons between unsigned byte values, and there is no support for direct misaligned reads.

All of these required some creative coding to work around, but in the end the ESP32-S3 running at 240 MHz was able to process a VGA stream in real-time at 30 FPS. This means about a 2x speed-up over a naive implementation using only non-SIMD instructions.

If you want to play along at home, the Platform IO project is made available on GitHub.

ESP32 Rotary Display Makes Ideal Timer

October 27, 2026 by Tom Nardi 16 Comments

We’re big fans of pushing hardware into situations it wasn’t designed for here at Hackaday, but sometimes you’ve got to appreciate a nicely designed gadget doing more or less exactly what it was intended for — especially when it’s courtesy of code that’s freely available for you to run and hack on however you like.

That’s precisely what [mircemk] has done with their “Universal Timer” project. The 2.1 inch CrowPanel “Rotary Display” at the heart of the build combines an ESP32-S3 with a 480×480 round touch screen display and a rotary encoder.

The all-in-one device — clearly meant to be reminiscent of the Nest thermostat and similar commercial offerings — is technically all you need, but in this case it’s been joined by a PCF8574 I2C I/O expander which in turn is used to drive a buzzer that provides a bit of audio feedback at the end of the countdown.

With the code [mircemk] has provided flashed onto the board, the rotary encoder ring built into the housing makes for an exceptionally intuitive input for setting the desired time. It’s a bit like a high-tech version of the classic kitchen timer, as shown in the video below, you simply twist the ring and the graphics on the display rotate accordingly. Unlike grandma’s clockwork timer of old however, this one can change color as it nears zero, which makes it easier to estimate how much time remains from across the room.

As the popularity of smartwatches has brought the cost of these circular displays down, we’ve started to see some very slick projects utilizing them. The various efforts to turn them into desktop “radar” displays for nearby flights are a particular favorite.

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5 GHz Drone Video, With An ESP32

October 20, 2026 by Jenny List 39 Comments

With the ESP32 series of microcontrollers having had hidden software-defined radio (SDR) facility revealed, we’re now moving on from the announcement into projects making use of the finding. [Twotoz] has one using an ESP32-C5, to receive and demodulate analog FM video.

You might think that video is something which has largely gone away in 2026, with TV transmissions having made the switch more than a decade ago, and home entertainment appliances having used HDMI for longer. But it’s still very popular in the world of drones however, where it exists as 5 GHz FM transmission. There’s no digital cliff-edge to lose your picture if you fly into somewhere with bad propagation of radio waves, and perhaps more importantly, it has an extremely low latency. This receiver uses a Seeed Studio Xiao ESP32-C5 board with a simple resistor-ladder DAC to produce the video. It has a simple button channel interface, and a serial link for more in-depth options.

It’s good to see these projects appear, especially as this one’s 5 GHz and shows those chips work too with the hack. We’d be interested to know whether the latency of the SDR affects its usability though. You may be interested to know this isn’t the first time we’ve seen an SDR do video.

Thanks [Ink] for the tip!

Hackaday Podcast Episode 391: Tuned In To ESP32 SDR, New Old Pagers, And Bugs On Mars

October 16, 2026 by Tom Nardi 3 Comments

Hackaday Editors Elliot Williams and Tom Nardi start this episode off with a discussion about Philadelphia’s budding hacker conference and the imminent retirement of the EZ80. After considering the parallels between the wide world of aviation headsets and our personal projects, talk moves on to the exciting developments in the world of software-defined radio on the ESP32, a Meshtastic pager from a bygone era, and how all the wild flying machines entered into DARPA’s Lift Challenge ended up losing to a simple helicopter.

You’ll also hear about turning plastic bottles into printer filament, pushing e-ink screens to their limits, and browsing the web on the PSP in 2026. To wrap things up they’ll marvel at all the modern abstraction sitting between software and the memory it’s running on, and revisit some RF concepts that might be particularly useful now that everyone is playing with a new SDR device.

Check out the links if you want to follow along, and as always, tell us what you think about this episode in the comments!

Download in DRM-free MP3.

Continue reading “Hackaday Podcast Episode 391: Tuned In To ESP32 SDR, New Old Pagers, And Bugs On Mars” →

AI Controls IPhone Via ESP32

October 14, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 17 Comments

Do you want to get an AI agent to do something to an iPhone? You could try and jailbreak the device and do some heavy software hacking, or… you could grab a microcontroller off the shelf and have it do the hard work. [Henry Yuan] explains how to achieve this with an ESP32.

The first step is getting an AI agent access to the current state of the phone screen—which [Henry] achieves with AirPlay screen mirroring and UxPlay. A Gstreamer pipeline is then used to feed the screen as a JPEG stream to the AI agent of your choice. Then comes control, which is achieved by an ESP32-S3 acting as a USB-HID device, emulating both USB mouse and keyboard. With iOS AssistiveTouch enabled, this gives the agent control over inputs to the device. From there, it’s up to the AI agent to figure out the actions to make to achieve the desired behavior, which is obviously very use-case specific.

It might sound a little convoluted, but this approach has benefits. There’s no requirement to have an Apple Developer Account, or XCode, or a Macintosh at all. You can just get your agent tinkering away on the phone without any of that fussy overhead. We’ve featured some other great iPhone hacks of late, as well. Video after the break.

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Using An ESP32-C3’s RF Hardware For DVB-S2 Video Transmission

October 14, 2026 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Generally the DVB-S and -S2 standards require a satellite somewhere in Earth orbit to provide a signal to receive, but you can also transmit your own DVB-S2 stream with any RF transmitter if you’re so inclined. Courtesy of recent breakthroughs in using the RF hardware of the ESP32 on a raw level, [SP8ESA] has created the ESP32-DATV project using which you can broadcast a DVB-S2 signal using an ESP32-C3.

While a host PC side application handles the heavy lifting of turning the input video signal into a DVB-S(2) compliant signal, it is the ESP32-C3 that prepares the samples for transmission before sending them off to its RF block, with no external hardware needed.

If this brings to mind the idea of using an off-the-shelf DVB-S2 receiver to play back the signal, the frequency range for DVB-S2 is 10.7 – 12.7 GHz, while the ESP32-C3 is limited to roughly 2.4 GHz courtesy of it targeting only 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals.

Using the ESP32 to transmit is already heating up.

Thanks to [ftg] for the tip.

Keep That Old Radio Alive With An ESP32

October 7, 2026 by Jenny List 11 Comments

As the legacy AM broadcast bands fade away, what happens to the millions of devices built to receive them? Many of them will go into e-waste, but with a century of radios to choose from, some of them are collector’s items. Vintage tube radios like the ones [GarethDaviesLondon] has would go silent, so he’s made a small AM transmitter to keep them alive.

At its heart is an ESP32-S3, which takes an online radio stream and transmits it through RF generated with a pulse chain on a GPIO. Generating analogue signals from radio to video with a microcontroller is nothing new, but perhaps the more interesting part of this one comes in how he radiates enough from that pin. There’s a 3D printed box with stand-offs designed to take a widely spaced wire coil, which is enough for the vintage electronics to pick up. He makes the point that it may not be legal, but at that power we doubt anyone will notice.

The output on this one is 200kHz for the European long wave band, but we’re guessing a higher medium wave frequency could also be generated. Meanwhile if you are curious about AM, we’ve featured someone having a closer look at it.