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Remember when the whole OceanGate thing happened and everyone was flabbergasted that the Titan sub had an off-the-shelf Logitech F710 gamepad for control? One group that didn’t find that weird was the robotics engineering community, because they use gamepads to control robots all the time. That said, nobody wants to be constrained by proprietary hardware or firmware, which is why The Open Gadget's ESP32-based Smart Joystick Controller is ideal.

A good microscope allows us to view an entire world that is otherwise invisible to us. But to the untrained eye, this microscopic world can be difficult to understand. What looks like a blur of shapes and colors may actually be a highly organized ecosystem. Without knowing what to look for, a beginner might easily mistake something interesting for a dust particle. Of course, these skills can be learned, but that takes time.

Just taken delivery of a Seeed XIAO board and looking for inspiration? The company's new project hub offers just that. 2 minutes ago • HW101 / Productivity Seeed Studio has announced the launch of a new platform for those building projects around its XIAO family of ultra-compact microcontroller development boards: the XIAO Project Hub.

When your electronics project needs to see the world around it, OpenCV is the go-to solution for hobbyists. Installing this library and inserting a few lines into your code can make an extremely complex computer vision workflow quite simple. And now, with the release of OpenCV 5, there is more reason than ever to use this popular software package.

Payload is a tiny DIY model rocket flight recorder that tracks altitude, thrust, G-forces, and more for about $30 in parts. Payload collects flight data from model rockets (📷: Bud Bennett) Model rocketry certainly doesn’t carry the massive costs of the multi-billion-dollar government programs or commercial aerospace ventures. However, higher-end model rockets and telemetry systems are still quite pricey.

Dan King’s Veltoc Model 01 is an ESP32-powered environmental monitor that looks like vintage instrumentation. The Veltoc Model 01 environmental monitor (📷: Dan King) If you own a soldering iron and a drawer full of development boards, there is a good chance you’ve already built an environmental monitor. This is an incredibly popular project, not only because these devices are fairly easy to build, but also because they are quite useful.

Raspberry Pi RP2040-powered gadget provides play/pause and volume control in a footprint barely bigger than a quarter. 2 seconds ago • HW101 / 3D Printing / Python on Hardware KEY, the pseudonymous maker behind Keep Everything Yours, has released everything you need to build a 3D-printable media playback and volume controller that'll squeeze anywhere on your desk — no matter how small a gap you've got free: the Might Mini Media Controller.

Maker and musician Michel Morin has released a second-generation incarnation of Sneaky Gestures, a microcontroller-powered glove which acts as a MIDI instrument — turning finger movements into music. "The original wired Sneaky Gestures V1 was first developed in 2012 and based on the ACSensorizer/MIDIbox platform," Morin explains of the first-generation wearable. "I performed live on tour with V1 for a year for my Sneak-Thief project.

Can a 3D printer that costs more than a Cybertruck be a good value? The Formlabs target market has never been hobbyists, or even prosumers. They’ve always had professional and industrial buyers in mind, and their prices reflect that. If you have any doubt about their business model, consider the just-launched Fuse X1 that costs a whopping $84,999. The Formlabs Fuse X1 is an SLS (selective laser sintering) 3D printer.

Is this how Hans Niemann did it? 2 seconds ago • Robotics / Games / 3D Printing We’ve seen robotics applied to chess many times and the projects always fall into one of two categories: a robot arm that picks up and moves pieces, or an under-table motion system that grabs pieces with magnets. So, I was really excited when I saw a completely new approach. 3DPrintedLife made each and every chess piece a tiny robot.