Open Hardware/Modding: ESP32 and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 31, 2026

• CNX Software ☛ Luxonis M8 Controller Box adds industrial I/Os, CAN Bus, and relay control to OAK4 Hey Hi (AI) vision cameras

  Luxonis has introduced a prototype of the M8 Controller Box, an industrial I/O expansion module for OAK4 Hey Hi (AI) vision edge Hey Hi (AI) cameras powered by a Qualcomm DragonWing QCS8550. Connected through the camera’s M8 interface, it adds GPIO, relay, CAN, serial, and USB connectivity, allowing OAK4-based systems to interface directly with sensors, actuators, PLCs, motors, and other industrial equipment for machine vision and automation applications.

• Linux Gizmos ☛ DFRobot seeMote Cube tracks motion and sends haptic feedback in visionOS

  The DFRobot seeMote Cube is a handheld spatial input device for Apple Vision Pro application development. The 56mm cube combines six-degree-of-freedom tracking, six programmable buttons, Bluetooth connectivity, and app-controlled haptic feedback for interacting with virtual objects and tools in visionOS.

• RTL-SDR ☛ Building a $50 BOM Software Defined Radio with a HT9201 20 MHz ADC and an FX2LP USB Controller Clone

  The RF side is a discrete Tayloe detector built around a TLV3253 analog switch, sampling the signal four times per local oscillator cycle to give downconversion and quadrature in one step. A Si5351 provides two clocks offset by 90 degrees from the same PLL, an ADA4891 op amp buffers into a HT9201 dual 20 MHz 10-bit ADC, and an FX2LP clone streams the parallel data over USB 2.0, avoiding the cost and tool chain of an FPGA. USB bandwidth forces a choice between 20 MHz at 8 bits or 10 MHz at 10 bits, and he notes that PCB design was critical in getting a flat frequency response.

• Hackaday ☛ Rebuilding An Obsolete IC To Save A Betacam SP Tapedeck

  The Sony BVW-75 VTR had an odd flaw where the output lacked colour, unless paused with dynamic tracking off. Then colour would appear, but only in odd stripes. Clearly the chroma circuit was at fault. Some sluthing found that a sync separator IC– that separates the sync pulses that keep everything moving together, if the name didn’t give it away– wasn’t behaving correctly. More sluthing found that the chip in question was no longer available. Luckily, the concept of a sync separator hasn’t quite given up the ghost, and another part was available. It just didn’t fit, used a different voltage, and had an inverted output. No biggie! [ldursw] added a voltage regulator, an inverter, and a video amplifier chip, then after breadboard testing put them on a PCB with pins that match the original IC’s form-factor, making it a plug-in replacement.

• Hackaday ☛ Pizza Eye Surgery Saves Hemispherical Projector

  The saga started long ago, back in 2017, when [Jamie] got ahold of a Gekkin WorldEye hemispherical projector. It looks like those were meant for the educational market, to show planets and the like, but [Jamie] instead put a big eye on it, thanks in part to work by [PaintYourDragon]. It looked great, as you can see from the demo video embedded below. There it sat, staring down patrons for nine long years, until the power company did what is known in the business as “an oopsie” and turned the WorldEye into an expensive paperweight.

• Hackaday ☛ RC Telemetry Board Lets Virtual Crewmember Help You Race Better

  Open RC Spotter is an ESP32-based hardware platform for high performance RC car racing that reads from various sensors (including IMU, GPS, temperature, battery, and IR receiver for IR lap beacons) to create a filtered stream of readings that include position, velocity, lap time, battery voltage, and more. Got RC car telemetry? Feed it to a virtual race engineer for real-time voice feedback.

  This data gets logged to an SD card, but can also be broadcast wirelessly via ESP-NOW to a receiver that can in turn send it over serial USB, or do whatever else one wishes. There’s also a neat feature that fires up a temporary WiFi access point on demand so log files can be downloaded with a web browser, no need to hook up a cable.

• Hackaday ☛ Use Your Head While Trimming Trees

  Since he’s riding down the bike path anyway, the original thought was to add a trimmer to the front of the bicycle. This has a notable downside of being dangerous to others, so instead he added a string trimmer to his helmet. The electric trimmer was scavenged from an old handheld landscaping tool, with a 3D printed mount designed in CAD to cleanly mount to his bicycle helmet. It’s wired to a control on the handlebar, so when a branch is coming up it can be activated by hand and then pruned without much thought other than properly aiming one’s head.

• Hackaday ☛ A Capable KVM Built With The ESP32

  The concept is straightforward. Named the ESPKVM, the device is designed to hook up to a computer’s HDMI and USB ports. It captures the video output, while presenting itself as a standard keyboard and mouse device. In this way, it allows remote control of the machine over IP. It achieves this feat with the aid of the Toshiba TC358743 HDMI-to-CSI bridge, which is essentially the video capture hardware of the build.

• Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Fixing a super 8 projector from the 70s

  My dad started using a super 8 film camera as early as 1967 (the system was launched in 1965). He stopped doing it in the 1980s as it became pretty much impossible to buy film. Ever since then the films have been stored in multiple cardboard boxes in his basement. Recently he moved to a smaller apartment so all the films and related hardware had to go somewhere else. Namely, to me. Here is a representative sample.

• Marcin Juszkiewicz ☛ New keyboard: Alicja v2

  I loaded files created by KLE NG and it turned out that making a PCB for a new keyboard is quite simple: [...]

• CNX Software ☛ ESP-KVM – An open-source IP KVM solution based on ESP32-P4 RISC-V MCU

  Earlier this month, the P4 KVM project was brought to my attention. It provides IP KVM functionality to a Waveshare ESP32-P4-WIFI6-POE-ETH board when paired with a Toshiba TC358743 HDMI-to-CSI adapter. However, it doesn’t work with the new ESP32-P4 V3.x variants featuring a proper H.264 video encoding implementation, and the developer (Jonathan Rowny) says it’s just a proof-of-concept with many bugs and no security, so I decided to skip it. The good news is that he also encouraged others to fork the project, and Evgenij Spitsyn did just that with the release of the ESP-KVM project, which supports both MJPEG and H.264 encoding and a range of other features.

• CNX Software ☛ NightRun UEFI application boots a local LLM on Raspberry Pi 5 and x86 PCs without an OS

  Running LLMs locally on an SBC or mini PC is a good way to keep your data private, but they typically require a conventional operating system, which uses a good portion of system memory. NightRun is an experimental open-source project that addresses this issue by booting a machine directly into a local LLM from a USB drive or microSD card, without loading a conventional OS. By removing the operating system, NightRun makes more RAM and memory bandwidth available for Hey Hi (AI) inference. The runtime is written in Rust, and during boot it loads a quantized model (1.3 GB to 2.4 GB) directly into RAM while verifying its CRC-32 checksums. After the model is loaded, storage is “sealed,” meaning any later attempt to read from the disk will trigger a hard fault.