Building A Simple Internet Radio

October 21, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 16 Comments

Broadcast radio isn’t as popular as it once was, its popularity suffering in turn due to technologies like MP3 players and music streaming services. If you don’t fancy either of those, you might like to listen to some internet radio stations, using a rig like the one [CodersCafeTech] built.

It’s a simple desktop radio set, but instead of tuning in to AM or FM broadcast bands, it has an antenna for 2.4 GHz instead. That’s because inside this radio is an ESP32-S3 development board, which is equipped with onboard WiFi hardware that lets it connect to the internet. It’s hooked up to a 1.3-inch OLED display over I2C, which acts as a user interface in concert with a rotary encoder. Sound is handled with a MAX98357 I2S audio amplifier, hooked up to a small 3 W speaker. Once programmed appropriately, all the unit needs is a WiFi SSID and password, and the URL for the internet radio station you’d like to listen to.

We’ve featured a few internet radio builds over the years, as well as a rather fun build that saw a Macintosh SE/30 hooked up to Spotify. If you’re tinkering with something along those lines, don’t hesitate to let us know on the tipsline!

5 GHz Drone Video, With An ESP32

October 20, 2026 by Jenny List 34 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!

2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Dollhouse Arcade Cabinet Runs Remote DOS Games

October 17, 2026 by Donald Papp 5 Comments

Classic DOS games never ran from within stand-up arcade cabinets in dollhouses, but [Juha Lilja] imagines a world in which they did. His Micro DOS arcade cabinet is described as a device that “runs nothing” because the tiny unit is actually streaming the games over Wi-Fi from a nearby PC. That doesn’t mean it’s just a glorified movie player, though — the cabinet is playable, if a bit awkward to do so.

An economical development board and a 3D-printed enclosure is all it takes to put classic DOS games into dollhouse-sized arcade cabinet.

The core of the micro arcade cabinet is a M5Stack AtomS3R running as an embedded remote terminal. One tilts the whole cabinet as if it were a virtual joystick to send up, down, left, and right. Button presses are done by pushing on the physical screen; it supports single, double, and long-clicks. While in theory one could install a micro joystick and buttons instead, [Juha] aimed to keep everything self-contained and use only what was already built into the AtomS3R. In this case, that’s a motion sensor and the single button which is activated by pressing the screen.

The games themselves run on a PC, with screen contents being streamed wirelessly to the little display and inputs being sent back. The firmware on the AtomS3R doesn’t know or care what game is being played; all it does is display what it’s told, and send back input events. The back end does the rest. This makes it pretty flexible, and a tiny arcade cabinet is a handy way to demonstrate the whole system. It’s a pretty slick addition to his daughter’s dollhouse, too.

If streaming DOS games (or whatever else) to economical endpoints is giving you some ideas, the GitHub repository holds code and a fuller explanation of how it works. There’s a deeper discussion on some of the finer technical points, as well. Watch it in action in the video embedded just below the page break.

Continue reading “2026 Retrocomputing Challenge: Dollhouse Arcade Cabinet Runs Remote DOS Games” →

So You Want To Make Your SDR Work On Other Frequencies

October 15, 2026 by Jenny List 24 Comments

Perhaps the most exciting news of the past few weeks in the world of hardware hacking has been the unlocking of hidden SDR functionality in the Wi-Fi radios found on Espressif ESP32 microcontrollers. They can be used as both transmit and receive SDRs, and given that it’s early days for this hack we expect that great things are yet to come.

There’s one snag though, despite speculation that they might be dragged down to much lower frequencies, as far as we know they’re only proven to work around the Wi-Fi frequencies. Though the reality may be wider we’ll take that for a 2.4 GHz part as a 100 MHz slice from 2.4 GHz to 2.5 GHz. Plenty of possibilities there, and they might even work down to 1.8 GHz, but there would be so much more to do if it could work elsewhere in the spectrum. So it’s time to look at the converter, a tried and tested old way to make a radio work on a different frequency.

Continue reading “So You Want To Make Your SDR Work On Other Frequencies” →

Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller

October 15, 2026 by Zoe Skyforest 9 Comments

The Soonpho M7 Pan Tilt Head is a useful photography tool for remotely aiming a decently-sized camera. Only, [Kyle Housley] wanted a little more control than was available out of the box. Hence, he built a custom controller that could deliver just that.

The project is based around an ESP32-S3 paired with an NRF24L01 wireless module. The ESP32-S3 is hooked up to a computer to receive commands over serial on what movements to make. It then transmits over the NRF24L01 to another NRF24L01 module that has been hacked into the original M7’s controller. In doing so, it can command the M7 to move to a given specific pan and tilt position, or to make a smooth motion along a vector. It can also trigger shutter release in the attached camera as needed, to capture whatever is being looked at.

[Kyle] has used this rig to create a motion tracking system for aircraft photography. With a Yolo vision model running on a laptop, the pan-tilt head can be commanded to track aircraft passing by and photograph them when they’re in frame. It’s a pretty slick setup; we’d love to see similar done with the aid of ADS-B data, too—perhaps even with automatic image tagging and upload. Continue reading “Building An M7 Pan Tilt Head Controller” →

Pager Converted To Meshtastic Node

October 14, 2026 by Bryan Cockfield 10 Comments

Text messaging has been around on cellular networks en masse for around three decades now. It’s so common that it’s difficult to remember a time without it. Its two-way quick messaging is incredibly useful, but for even simpler communications there’s a one-way system that predates it. Pagers are able to receive simple messages, but outside of hospitals are rarely used nowadays. Eventually some added in two-way communications like this Motorola T900, but they’re still mostly obsolete. That’s why [zindustries87] converted it to operate on the Meshtastic network instead.

To get this pager working, a lot of reverse engineering was needed. There is essentially no documentation on the chips in these devices, so the screen and keyboard both were reverse-engineered to work with other hardware. In this case, [zindustries87] found space for a Heltec V4 with an ESP32-S3, a popular Meshtastic node with a small form factor. Some programming was needed to get everything communicating together, but from the looks of things it seems to have basic functionality.

[zindustries87] points out that this is a prototype, and didn’t know going in if the keyboard and screen could be brought back to life, or if the other hardware would fit in the case. But with it working on this level, they plan to add a number of other features in and possibly build a drop-in PCB replacement for these devices. They were once fairly popular so there are plenty around, and they’re a good form factor for a dedicated Meshtastic device that doesn’t need a smartphone to work. The only other ways of bringing pagers back to life involve bootstrapping an entire pager network, and Meshtastic is a bit more useful than that now.

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.

Continue reading “AI Controls IPhone Via ESP32” →