Samwise Makers' News
Tuesday, October 13, 2026
DARPA Lift Challenge Won by Conventional Electric Helicopter
The DARPA Lift Challenge, which asked teams to build a vertical take-off and landing vehicle able to carry a payload four times its own weight, has been won by AVIDrone, Inc., Hackaday reported Monday. The winning entry was a conventional electric helicopter with one large lift rotor and a small tail rotor, using solid-state batteries and carbon-fiber construction. It lifted 3.84 times its dry weight, or 112 lb of payload. A battery-powered hexrotor drone took second place with a 3.64:1 lift ratio, while a turbine-powered helicopter placed third. Some less conventional entries received prizes to continue development ahead of a 2028 edition.
Meta Releases Open-Source Muse Gadgets SDK for ESP32 and Raspberry Pi
Meta has released the open-source Muse Gadgets SDK, letting ESP32 boards and Linux single-board computers such as the Raspberry Pi work with its Muse personal AI agent, CNX Software reported. The code is on GitHub, mostly under an Apache 2.0 license. The ESP32 Device SDK handles images, audio input and output, sensors, actuators and buttons, while the Linux Device SDK targets Raspberry Pi and other boxes. Meta recommends the Raspberry Pi 5, the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-AMOLED-1.75C devkit, or the Seeed reTerminal E1002 e-ink display. It also built 5,000 ESP32-C5-based Muse Home Link devices for free distribution to US subscribers.
Sources: CNX Software
OSIRIS Open Firmware Brings Silent Onkyo AV Receivers Back to Life
Developer Jokūbas has published OSIRIS, open-source firmware for Onkyo AV receivers such as the TX-NR717, Hackaday reported Tuesday. Certain Onkyo models built around the Texas Instruments D830 can fail by powering on normally while producing no audio, caused either by a dead D830 or by a failed 64 MiB NAND flash chip holding its firmware. Repairs are difficult because stock firmware will not boot on pin-compatible replacement chips and can only address 512-byte flash pages, while modern NAND uses 2 KiB or 4 KiB pages. OSIRIS supports D830-compatible chips such as the OMAP-L137 and modern NAND, though many listed features remain untested or unimplemented.
Microchip Launches MTCH3380P and MTCH3240P Turnkey Capacitive Touch Controllers
Microchip Technology has introduced the MTCH3380P and MTCH3240P, turnkey capacitive touch controllers for buttons, sliders and wheels on display-free interfaces, CNX Software reported Tuesday. The MTCH3380P supports up to 38 self-capacitance or 64 mutual-capacitance keys, while the MTCH3240P handles 24 or 32. Both use parallel sensing with 12 on-chip ADCs, work through glass up to 6 mm or plastic up to 3 mm and with gloved hands, and are UL/IEC 60730 Class B ready. They connect over I2C at up to 1 MHz and are configured in mTouch Studio. Pricing is $1.10 and $0.84 respectively in 5,000-unit quantities.
Sources: CNX Software
Bambu Lab Teases S1 Handheld 3D Scanner for November Launch
Bambu Lab has teased the S1, marking its entry into 3D scanning and confirming the device is coming in November 2026, All3DP reported Monday. The company shared an image of a black handheld scanner with a pistol-style grip and the tagline “Easy in Hand. Pro in Every Scan.” Bambu Lab described the move into scanning, following its 3D printers and laser cutter, as part of building a personal manufacturing hub with accessible professional-grade tools. A second tagline, “Create from your world. Start with a scan,” points to digitizing real objects. No specifications, scanning technology, pricing or software features have been revealed, and more details are expected in November.
Prusa Core One+ INDX Multi-Extruder Upgrade Struggles in Hands-On Testing
Thomas Sanladerer’s hands-on testing of the Prusa Core One+ INDX, an upgrade adding eight independent extruders for multi-material printing, uncovered numerous problems, Hackaday reported Monday. Prusa claims just 0.013 grams of purge waste per color or material change using dual-gear Bondtech extruders. However, a mandatory calibration sequence at the start of each print is designed only for Prusa filament, blocking Voxel PLA until Sanladerer removed it from the g-code manually. Calibration results were not saved despite the display saying otherwise. The INDX hardware also blocks the camera and obscures the print chamber. In his comparison, Prusa’s XL toolchanger simply worked.
Hexa-Bouncer Uses Six Steppers, Two Cameras and a Teensy to Bounce a Ball
Maker Tobias, known as T-Kuhn, has built the Hexa-Bouncer, a heavily machined Stewart platform that bounces a ping-pong ball, Hackaday reported Monday. Six stepper motors connected to planetary gearboxes each drive an arm, and linkages move a paddle in every axis of rotation and translation. A Teensy 4.0 coordinates the steppers, while a Unity application on a PC performs inverse kinematics, using two cameras to track the ball in 3D. The application is available on GitHub. Most parts were milled from aluminum on his CNC machine, with 27 pieces for each arm and more than 300 in total. The vision workflow came from his earlier octo-bounce robot.
1551-rePico Recreates Rare Commodore 1551 Floppy Drive with a Pi Pico
Maciej Witkowiak has built 1551-rePico, an emulator for the Commodore 1551 floppy drive made for the Commodore 16 and Plus/4, Hackaday reported. Unlike the common 1541 drive for the Commodore 64, the 1551 is particularly rare in 2026. Rather than emulating the drive at a high level, the design keeps the same 6510 processor and ROM found in the original, talking to a Raspberry Pi Pico that emulates the drive hardware. The Pico even generates the clock and IRQ timing for the CPU. A CPLD handles glue logic, an OLED selects disk images, and the 64k ROM fits original and enhanced community firmware. Files are on GitHub.
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Sipeed SLogic32U3 — HK$1.3M pledged, 2,600% of goal, Kickstarter
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