Samwise Makers' News
Sunday, September 27, 2026
A Pocket-Sized Digital Fish Tank
Maker StratoBuilds has built a pocket-sized digital aquarium running entirely on a Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.8 development board, which pairs a 1.8-inch round AMOLED touchscreen with an ESP32-S3 processor and integrated touch controls. Each simulated fish is governed by an on-device large language model that determines its AI behaviour — how it responds to tapping, feeding events, and proximity to other fish — with animation running at a reported 25 to 30 frames per second. Because the LLM runs entirely on-chip, no cloud connection is required. The project, called pocket-tank, is open source and available on GitHub under the mediacutlet/pocket-tank repository. Hackaday’s Zoe Skyforest reported on the build.
Easy Ways To Sink A Hardware Startup
Hackaday contributor Donald Papp has published a community-sourced survey of the failure modes that most reliably sink hardware startups, drawing on candid accounts from makers who have taken products from prototype to market — or attempted to. The piece identifies recurring traps: underestimating manufacturing costs and minimum order quantities, building for a market the founder assumes rather than verifies, and treating a first working prototype as close to production-ready. The lessons arrive at a moment when low-cost development boards and small-batch PCB services have made hardware projects more accessible than ever, raising both the number of attempts and the number of failures.
Self-Repairing Conductive Material From Liquid Metal
Researchers at Virginia Tech’s MADE Lab have developed a conductive composite material that heals itself after damage without requiring heat or human intervention. The material embeds microdroplets of a gallium-indium liquid metal alloy inside a polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) polymer matrix. When the composite is cut or punctured, the liquid metal droplets rupture and merge, restoring electrical conductivity across the break. The team reports the material is 3D printable and well-suited to flexible electronics, wearable devices, and soft robotics applications where rigid circuit traces would fail under repeated bending. Ian Bos reported on the research for Hackaday.
Cheap Yellow Display Dreams Of PDA
A maker going by the handle sau412 has released custom PDA firmware for the ESP32 Cheap Yellow Display (CYD), a widely available dual-core ESP32 development board with a built-in 2.8-inch resistive touchscreen. The firmware, published on GitHub as esp32_cyd_pda, converts the board into a handheld personal digital assistant capable of browsing Gopher-protocol sites, reading RSS feeds, searching Wikipedia, running a BASIC interpreter, managing calendar entries, and playing games, all without an active internet connection. A web-based flashing tool makes installation straightforward with no development toolchain required. Tyler August covered the project for Hackaday.
A Modular Macro Keypad
Maker Squalius has published suutari20, a modular macro keypad built around a Raspberry Pi Pico (RP2040) running QMK firmware. The design uses standard 3.5mm audio jacks as the inter-module bus, with each jack supporting up to three key switches, allowing the keypad to scale up to 18 keys by chaining additional modules. The same jacks accept analog input devices such as volume potentiometers and jog wheels, adding multimedia-controller capability to the programmable macro functions. The enclosure is 3D printed, and all source files and schematics are published on GitHub under the Squalius-cephalus account. Bryan Cockfield reported for Hackaday.
You Can Make A Microprocessor That’s All Your Own
YouTuber Breaking Taps has fabricated a working microprocessor using the wafer.space community chip fabrication service, which allows individuals to submit designs for production on shared wafers. The chip uses a transport-triggered architecture — a minimal instruction set where all operations are expressed as data moves between functional units — and was written in Spade, an open-source hardware description language. The resulting device is a complete system-on-chip including on-die memory and peripherals, produced on an older fabrication process with feature sizes large enough to make individual transistors visible under a carrier. Jenny List reported on the project for Hackaday.
Basically, Galvanizing Metal Without Acid
An Instructables project, covered by Hackaday, demonstrates an alkaline electroplating process for depositing zinc on metal parts that avoids the acid baths used in conventional galvanizing. The process uses a solution of sodium hydroxide, metallic zinc, sugar, liquid soap, and distilled water, with a graphite rod as the anode and the workpiece as the cathode. The alkaline chemistry is reported to produce more even zinc coverage on complex shapes than acid-based methods, and a citric acid rinse applied after plating brightens the finish. Bryan Cockfield wrote about the technique for Hackaday, noting its accessibility for makers without acid-handling equipment.
Maker Faire Bay Area 2026
Maker Faire Bay Area 2026 is taking place this weekend at the former Mare Island Naval Shipyard in Vallejo, California, marking the 20th anniversary of the event that launched the modern maker movement in 2006. The faire runs September 25 through 27, with gates open 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., at 560 Nimitz Avenue. This year’s exhibits include humanoid robots, autonomous drones, AI-integrated builds, Arduino and Raspberry Pi projects, wearable electronics, and Tesla coil demonstrations. The event is the flagship annual gathering of the Make: community and draws exhibitors and attendees from across North America and beyond.
Sources: Maker Faire
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
MNT Station — open hardware desktop/homelab computer (Crowd Supply, launched Aug 2026)
USBridge-KVM 2.0 — professional KVM infrastructure management (Crowd Supply)
Openprinter — open source 3D printer, beta complete (Crowd Supply, near launch)
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
BruceDevices/firmware — 6.3k★ (ESP32 multi-tool: radio, NFC, M5Stack, LilyGo)
21cncstudio/project_aura — 712★ (ESP32-S3 air quality station, LVGL, Home Assistant)
OpenGammaProject/Open-Gamma-Detector — 357★ (DIY gamma-ray spectrometer, Pi Pico)
Upcoming Events
Maker Faire Bay Area (Final Day!) — Sept 27, Vallejo CA
Maker Faire Malta (inaugural) — Oct 2-4, Esplora Science Centre, Kalkara
Maker Faire Rome — Oct 23-25, Rome Italy
Every newsletter preserved and searchable
Curated by JD · samwise.agency