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3D-printed parts might bend, flex, or twist, but if you want to know exactly how they're moving, you'll need to attach some type of sensor. That adds cost, increases assembly time, and may interfere with the function of the printed parts. Researchers have now demonstrated a different approach with X-Hinges, a fabrication technique that allows flexible 3D-printed mechanisms to continuously sense their own movement without requiring separate sensors.

BeyondMimic uses AI to teach humanoid robots natural, versatile movements — from running to dancing — using a single training framework. A new method taught this robot to move more naturally (📷: Q. Liao et al.) Humanoid robots are getting steadily better at interacting with the world, but their movements still tend to be fairly clumsy. Teaching one to run, jump, or dance requires considerable work, often relying on controllers tuned for specific motions.

Running a large language model (LLM) on a microcontroller is hard enough. Since these models must be quite small, finding something useful for it to do once it gets there is also a challenge. Strato Doumanis managed to do both with Pocket Tank, a tiny virtual aquarium where a 14-million-parameter language model decides how each fish behaves. The entire system runs locally on an ESP32-S3, without an internet connection or a more powerful computer hiding somewhere in the background.

Throaty Mumbo gave the original NES the CD drive it never actually needed (and probably shouldn't have). 3 seconds ago • Gaming / Retro Tech / FPGAs Video game cartridges were awesome. They gave consoles direct access to ROMs, which meant the consoles didn’t need to load assets into RAM and could execute from the cartridge without the middleman. But optical storage offered far greater capacity at a much, much lower cost, andalmost everyone made the switch.

Flashforge is bringing us full-color full-3D UV printing. Consumer UV printing has been massively impactful over the last 18 months or so, starting with the release of the eufyMake E1. That could produce 3D texture on surfaces and it raised an obvious question: why can’t we 3D print entire parts in full-color using the same basic technology? The short answer is that we can and Flashforge is giving us that option with the release of the new CJ270 — the “world’s first” desktop full-color 3D printer.

PolyMO is a virtual pet that gets sick and dies if you spend too much time doomscrolling on your phone. C'mon, do it for your virtual pet! (πŸ“·: Brenpoly) Smartphones have plenty of tools designed to keep us from spending too much time on them. Screen-time reports show exactly how many hours we have wasted, and app timers can lock us out after reaching a predetermined limit. But those restrictions are easy to ignore or disable.

Most electric motors rely on coils made from copper wire wrapped around a stator to spin. That approach has served us well for more than a century, but there are other ways to create the electromagnetic fields needed to spin a motor. Salim from Salim's Workshop recently experimented with one of them by building an axial flux motor that replaces conventional windings with copper traces printed directly onto a circuit board.

Electromagnetic fault injection (EMFI) is a powerful technique for testing the security of electronic devices, but doing it properly can require some fairly specialized equipment. GlitchCaster, an open source hardware project developed by Diffused Tactics, aims to make the process more accessible with a relatively inexpensive EMFI tool that can be mounted to equipment you may already have sitting around the workshop.

Partnership comes with both TinyGo-compatible hardware and a set of tutorials from core TinyGo member Patricio Whittingslow. Seeed Studio has launched an official starter kit for those looking to experiment with the Go programming language on microcontrollers, created in partnership with the TinyGo project — and built around the company's XIAO ESP32C3 thumbnail-sized development board.

James Bruton has already achieved everything else related to robotics, so he decided to figure out inverse kinematics for a tentacle robot. The difficulty of implementing inverse kinematics correlates directly to the number of joints and the way those joints move. Knowing that, a “tentacle robot” presents about as big of a challenge as one can imagine.