news
Open Hardware/Modding/3D Printing Leftovers
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The Register UK ☛ An old parking meter and a Pi make beautiful music together
An enterprising engineer has turned an old parking meter into a jukebox using a Pi Zero 2 and some open source code.
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Hackaday ☛ The Shelly 2.5 Smart Relay Design Flaw Killing Capacitors
As noted in the Shelly documentation for the device, it’s a very compact form factor device, with screw terminals, two relays, and three fairly large electrolytic capacitors sharing very little space with the rest of the components. The apparent flaw comes in the form of these capacitors failing, with the video showing that one 100 µF capacitor has a massively increased ESR, likely due to electrolyte venting. This results in the observed symptoms, such as WiFi connectivity issues and audible hissing, the latter of which is demonstrated in the video.
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Hackaday ☛ The Cutest Weather Forecast On E-Ink And ESP32
Aside from the parts that are obviously on Google servers, this is all integrated in [Jesse]’s Home Assistant server. That server stores the generated image until the ESP32 fetches it. He’s using a reTerminal board from SeedStudio that includes an ESP32-S3 and a Spectrum6 coloor e-ink display. That display leaves something to be desired in coloration, so on top of dithering the image to match the palette of the display, he’s also got a bit of color-correction in place to make it really pop.
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John Calhoun ☛ 3D Printing (2025)
I’ve had an Ender 3D filament printer for some time now. The results have not been spectacular, so I sort of shelved the thing, not too enthusiastic about pulling it out. As I recall it was a trick to get it level—maybe the spring/wheel thing for adjusting the bed were broken or something.
In any event, I definitely caught wind of all the hype surrounding the Bambu Labs printers that were getting accolades. The price was surprisingly reasonable and so I decided to pull the trigger on one to see if they were all that. It turns out that I didn’t hate 3D printing, I just hated my Ender.
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Linux Gizmos ☛ Axiomtek Previews Jetson Thor T5000/T4000 Developer Kit for Robotics Systems
The platform is shown with Jetson Thor T5000 or T4000 modules, offering up to 2070 TFLOPS of compute performance. Axiomtek notes support for software frameworks such as NVIDIA Isaac, Holoscan, and Metropolis, with capabilities aligned with sensor fusion, autonomous systems, and edge inference use cases.