The Creative Hardware Magazine
Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi, LED installations, robotics, and the fabrication tools turning code into objects.
CleanYourTV asks an AI coding assistant to read your TV's installed packages over ADB and disable the ones that serve ads or report viewing data, leaving a clean home screen behind. It has gathered more stars in two weeks than most of the firmware projects we've covered this month combined, and it's spawned a dozen imitators with the same pitch.
In three and a half weeks, M-VAVE's FM-1 went from a cheap FM synth to a platform with its own substrate, its own emulator, its own Android host and its own in-jokes. The same thing happened to the Archos Jukebox in 2001 and the Linksys WRT54G in 2003, and both times it took years. Five instrument makers have now answered the question in thirteen months, and they gave five different answers.
Deki is a C++23 2D engine for ESP32-S3 and desktop with a visual editor, a module registry and 37 repositories that all pushed on the same day. We enumerated every one: 35 are Apache-2.0, the org profile has no licence, and neither does deki-demo — the project a newcomer copies from.
"Born to Be Open" is a strong claim and most open-hardware launches do not survive it. RoboParty's does, mostly: real copyleft on the firmware and ROS stack, a genuine open-hardware licence on the mechanical files, and a handful of conspicuous gaps exactly where the reinforcement-learning code lives.
Benoît Maubrey has made wearable electroacoustic sculptures since the 1980s. Clearing his archive near Berlin, he turned up 32 Audio Tutus spanning 1989 to the present — all fully functional, needing only a 12V battery and a belt. At the Repair & Share Festival in Wuppertal on 31 October, a free public workshop will diagnose and upgrade them with open-source hardware.
The PaperDIY Assembly Kit is a bag of parts: board, panel, acrylic pressure plate, 140 mAh cell. The Complete Kit adds a factory-fitted PLA shell whose model M5Stack open-sources so you can reprint it. The interesting part is the FPC headers and what M5Stack left out.
The Anti Distraction Handset Device does one thing: it takes calls from a phone you have deliberately put in another room. It is a Pi Pico, an OLED, a mic, a speaker and a Hands-Free Profile Bluetooth module in a Fusion-designed, 3D-printed brick — and the download package is more restrictive than its maker-project appearance suggests.
Kirigami is origami that permits cuts, which radically expands what a single sheet can become. These designs convert between a flat configuration and a functional object with no fasteners, prototyped on a laser cutter and FDM printer before scaling to plywood panels — and the resulting table reconfigures and locks into each new position.
Thomas Sanladerer's testing of the Prusa Core One+ INDX found the premise sound and the execution troubled: the mandatory pre-print calibration is built around Prusa's own filament properties, it had to be stripped from the g-code manually to print Voxel PLA, and the print sequence then used Prusa material presets anyway and failed.
A recreation of Atari's best-selling 8-bit home computer, the 1983 800XL, with modern display output and four USB-A ports. The point is not the 25 bundled games — it is that the machine boots into BASIC on a full mechanical keyboard and will run software you write yourself, or load from original cartridges.
Parks on the Air pairs a transmitter with a location, and EI3LH's write-up from County Kilkenny is a good demonstration of why that combination is more interesting than either half. Twenty-seven contacts from a Millennium Forest, four countries on roughly two watts from an uncharged battery, and binaural birdsong from the evening park.
A coating that varies in luminescence according to the pressure applied to it, imaged by high-speed cameras, in NASA's first tests of the unsteady version after years of development. It is also the most elegant example of a physical display there is: the surface being measured is the readout.
Phyllotaxis is the spiral packing that appears in sunflower heads and succulents, and it is produced by one line of maths. Natarajan has built it as an audio-reactive display with 89 addressable cells, now on its second iteration with a third planned. The code is, in their words, surprisingly simple.
An I2C sensor that disconnects takes down the whole program, because the read raises and nothing catches it. A try/except around the read turns a dead installation into one that keeps running and recovers when the cable is reseated. This is a two-minute lesson with a disproportionate payoff.
A TV tuner chip that turned out to be a general-purpose software defined radio is still, fifteen years on, the cheapest way into receiving real signals — aircraft, ships, weather satellites, your neighbours' weather station. This covers buying the right version, getting SDR++ running, antennas, and the projects worth doing first.
Most Raspberry Pi flight trackers query OpenSky or FlightAware. bytecadia's FltCast receives the aircraft's own 1090MHz broadcasts directly — no API key, no rate limit, no network dependency. The architecture is a better template for installation work than the API version, for reasons worth spelling out.
The HalloWing M0 Express has a round TFT and an eye-animation firmware, and the resulting prop is a staple of Halloween electronics. The part worth copying all year round is the optics: a convex lens over the display is what makes a 2D animation read as a wet, curved, three-dimensional eye.
ESPARGOS' Florian Euchner has published firmware that makes an ESP32's built-in 2.4GHz Wi-Fi radio act as an SDR, exposing raw I/Q samples instead of just decoded packets. The debug path was found with help from LLMs, parts of the firmware are AI-generated, and the ESP32-C5 can do it at 5GHz too.
Simulated sand with an accelerometer and an LED matrix has been a staple demo for years, and it always needed Arduino or a Raspberry Pi. A new Adafruit learn guide does it in CircuitPython using Viper-compiled Turbo modules for the physics and Picogame for the rendering — which says something about where the interpreted-versus-compiled line now sits.
Eric (@0015) has released a3d, a software 3D renderer for ESP32 that works as both an ESP-IDF component and an Arduino library. A display is five function pointers. Threading is one interface. There is no PBR, no shadows, no alpha blending — and the benchmark numbers came from device logs rather than estimates.
A HackMIT-winning project designed and built a working GPU in 24 hours. It's worth attention less as a hardware achievement than as a demonstration of how far the FPGA and open-silicon toolchain has come — building a processor used to be a semester, and is now apparently a weekend.
Espressif's ESP32-S31 can run Linux, and the reason is in the data sheet rather than the clock speed: the cores implement Sv32 two-level page-table address translation and machine, supervisor and user privilege modes. Espressif published a Buildroot and U-Boot based Linux BSP in August.
LILYGO's T-Dongle-C5 puts an ESP32-C5 into a USB Type-A stick: single-core RISC-V at 240MHz, 16MB flash, 8MB PSRAM, microSD slot, dual-band Wi-Fi 6 with Thread and Zigbee 3.0, and an optional 0.96-inch IPS LCD. The 5GHz support is the part that matters for installations.
AiboJam recreates Sony's turn-of-the-millennium Tiny AIBO desktop pet on the $40 Adafruit Fruit Jam, using its own geometry, motions, sounds and skins. CircuitPython handles menus, buttons and pet behaviour while a native C module draws the dog in live 3D on the RP2350B.
Breaking Taps designed a custom microprocessor — transport triggered architecture, dual busses, effectively a system-on-chip with memory and peripherals — using the Spade hardware description language, and had it fabricated through wafer.space. Unlike Tiny Tapeout's shared-die approach, the whole chip is one circuit. It works.
CERN has released colibri, a VHDL library of over 100 components, functions and procedures including standard protocols like SPI and I2C, self-checking testbenches and formal verification. It's vendor-independent, published under the CERN Open Hardware Licence, and hosted on GitLab — which lowers a barrier that has kept FPGAs out of most creative toolkits.
Mirko 'mircemk' Pavleski built a DIY audio spectrum analyser on a CrowPanel 3.5 — an ESP32 with an integrated 480×320 touchscreen. The entire analog front end is a handful of passives feeding the microcontroller's ADC pins, and the whole thing is a good demonstration of how much signal processing a modern hobby MCU will do without complaint.
KryonOS, by developer Haris, is a JavaScript-based operating system for the ESP32 with a built-in interpreter, a simple GUI and graphics library, SD card filesystem access, hardware APIs and an integrated app store. It runs on a wide range of ESP32 boards with screens, including the ubiquitous Cheap Yellow Display.
Film photography's cost problem has a workaround: shoot paper. Jon Schiereck's 3D-printed perforator uses two modified drill bits and a rubber advance roller to punch standard sprocket holes into strips of blank photographic paper, producing loadable 35mm stock. A matching printable slitter is in progress, and the plans are free.
OpenChoker packs a $12 480×480 AMOLED touchscreen, RGB LED strips, and an RP2350 into a leather choker powered by a single 18650 cell — which survived a full 16-hour convention day still reading 3.7 V. With only 16 KiB of RAM against a 450 KiB framebuffer, the animations aren't played back from the SD card; they're generated on the fly at up to 60 FPS.
cpldcpu's pico-faces project runs a genuine latent diffusion transformer entirely on a $1 RP2350 microcontroller, generating 128×128 face images in 4 to 20 seconds from under 4MB of flash — roughly 4,000 times smaller than a model like Flux, and a real answer to whether generative AI can run without a GPU at all.
Throaty Mumbo built the CD-ROM add-on Nintendo never shipped for the NES — a custom RP2350B microcontroller board that reads game data off an IDE optical drive and streams it live into an Everdrive N8 Pro cartridge, reviving hardware history that never actually happened.
Soiboi Soft's pneumatic dot-matrix display uses vacuum and silicone instead of LEDs — sixteen valves multiplexing sixty-four pixels, each one holding its state like a tiny air-powered capacitor, playable well enough to run actual games of Pong and Snake.
Philo's line-scan panoramic camera reads the world one pixel-wide column at a time from a moving train, boat, or car, turning an industrial conveyor-belt inspection sensor into a tool for photographs that stretch for city blocks.
TermDriver 2, James Bowman's USB-to-serial debugging tool, renders its activity indicators as slow-fading, superellipse-shaped glows modeled on Apollo-era incandescent panel lamps — a small, deliberate act of skeuomorphic design inside a piece of otherwise purely functional lab equipment.
Rather than wait on a fluid simulation to render, maker duo Visual Thinker built real flow-visualization hardware — a magnetically-driven boat tank and a 3D-printed wind tunnel — using rheoscopic fluid, a century-old trick of mica flakes in water that makes real flow patterns visible to the naked eye.
A maker known as Dr. Semiconductor fabricated genuinely functional inorganic LEDs at home — laser-etching a gallium nitride epiwafer down to individual chips, then bonding and phosphor-coating them into working white LEDs — going meaningfully further than the DIY OLED projects that have defined home semiconductor work until now.
Glitch'n teaches absolute beginners to build real, working sound circuits — a $3 generative drummer, a $5 modular drum machine — on breadboards using decades-old chip designs, then offers graduates a paid track toward becoming instructors themselves.
Bambu Lab confirmed a standalone laser engraver and cutter, the R1, arriving in September — its first dedicated laser product after selling add-on laser modules for the H2D.
Hands-on coverage confirmed the K1's specs weeks ago. Today's the day the actual campaign, and its pricing, went live.
8W, 15W, or 20W of laser power, a 400x400mm bed, and a touchscreen that runs the machine — but the number that actually matters is the one about setup time.
5-axis CNC with automatic tool changing used to mean a machine shop, not a spare room. InfiMaker's K1 is a real attempt to put both in a box that fits on a desk.
Most makers who want to print on both a wood panel and a t-shirt own two machines. xTool's O1 Omni is a bet that one printhead system, with the right ink set, can actually do both well.
A generative artwork usually lives on a screen. A pen plotter drags it into the physical world — a robot arm drawing your code in real ink on real paper, wobbles and all. It's become one of the most beloved tools in generative art.
The interesting design decision isn't that it uses AI — it's that the AI is scoped tightly to one machine's actual physical limits instead of pretending those limits don't exist.
No cloud connection, no laptop tether — just a chip, a screen, and an infinite non-repeating number doing the creative work.