Samwise Makers' News
Friday, May 8, 2026
Hackaday 2026 Green Powered Challenge Winners Announced
The 2026 Hackaday Green Powered Challenge has concluded, with winners each receiving a $150 DigiKey shopping spree. The competition called for electronics projects powered entirely by harvested or renewable energy. Standout winner LightInk, designed by Daniel Ansorregui, is an open-source solar-powered e-ink wristwatch built around an ESP32 with a 100 mAh backup battery. The key innovation packed the display refresh routine into the RTC wakeup stub, allowing the processor to skip SPI flash access on each cycle and cutting average power draw in half. The result delivers nine to ten months of real-world operation supplemented by a wrist-mounted solar panel.
Sources: Hackaday
3D-Printed Az-El Mount Targets DIY Satellite Tracking
Amateur radio operator Ham Radio Passion is developing a 3D-printed azimuth-elevation antenna mount designed for satellite tracking and software-defined radio applications. The work-in-progress design clamps the antenna to a 2020 aluminium extrusion frame and uses 3D-printed gears driven by a 360-degree servo with a worm gear reduction. Unlike stepper-motor rotators, the worm drive approach simplifies control while maintaining the precise positioning needed to track low-Earth-orbit satellites during a pass. The mount targets compatibility with popular satellite tracking software including Gpredict and Hamlib. Az-el mounts provide the two-axis steering required when a satellite's orbit differs from a stationary antenna's fixed-beam direction.
Sources: Hackaday
Beyond GPS: A Maker's Guide to Global Navigation Satellite Systems
Global Positioning System navigation is ubiquitous, but GPS is only one of several global navigation satellite systems in operational use. A Hackaday feature published May 7 surveys the broader ecosystem: Russia's GLONASS, the European Union's Galileo, China's BeiDou, Japan's regional QZSS, and India's NavIC each provide independent positioning infrastructure. Many modern GNSS chipsets, including those in consumer smartphones, decode signals from two or more constellations simultaneously to improve fix accuracy and resilience. The article examines the history, orbital structure, signal frequencies, and civilian accuracy characteristics of each system, offering context for why multi-constellation receivers have become standard in GPS-equipped maker projects and embedded IoT hardware.
Sources: Hackaday
University of Utah's TRIGA Reactor to Generate Electricity for First Time
The University of Utah's TRIGA nuclear research reactor, installed in 1975, is set to generate electricity for the first time in its 51-year operational history. A collaboration between Elemental Nuclear Energy Corp. and the University's Nuclear Engineering Program will connect a closed Brayton-cycle helium turbine to the reactor's cooling loop. Engineering targets call for approximately 50 kW of thermal input, a turbine output of roughly 13 kW, and 2 to 3 kWe of net electrical generation. The generated power will drive GPU racks for AI workload testing. A successful demonstration could establish a proof-of-concept pathway for TRIGA-based microreactors powering small off-grid data centers.
Sources: Hackaday
CARA 2.0: $1,450 Quadruped Robot Dog Proves Capstan Drives Can Compete
Purdue mechanical engineering graduate Aaed Musa has released CARA 2.0, a refined version of his viral rope-driven quadrupedal robot built as a senior design project with teammates Jack Heyman, Pranava Mudigonda, Megan Prange, and Derek Babby. CARA 2.0 costs approximately $1,450, half the original build price, by replacing expensive actuators with rewound brushless drone motors. The team reconfigured motor windings from delta to star topology and increased turns per slot from 22 to 40 using 24 AWG magnet wire, reducing KV to roughly 90 and tripling stall torque to 1.274 Nm. The 18.2-pound quadruped walks at 1.8 feet per second, carries a 15-pound payload, and jumps 4.5 inches.
Sources: Hackster.io
OSHWA Adds 18 New Open Hardware Certifications in April 2026
The Open Source Hardware Association added 18 new certifications in April 2026, growing its global database to 3,310 verified open-source hardware designs. Notable among April's additions is Great Scott Gadgets' HackRF Pro, a software-defined radio peripheral supporting transmission and reception across 100 kHz to 6 GHz and targeted at next-generation radio protocol development and testing. Additional certified projects include TrunkCAM, a compact articulated nature observation camera, and Kaze, an environmental sensor module built around an Espressif ESP32-C6 microcontroller. OSHWA's free certification program requires hardware designers to publish design files, documentation, and licensing terms that comply with the community's open-source hardware definition.
Sources: Make:
Maker Faire Delft 2026 Opens Today on TU Delft Campus
Maker Faire Delft 2026 takes place today, May 8, on the TU Delft campus in the Netherlands from 12:00 to 20:00 under the theme Making for a Better Society. More than 100 makers are presenting across the campus, with projects spanning sustainable electronics, assistive technology, DIY fabrication, and robotics demonstrations. Hosted by TU Delft's Science Centre, the event connects students, researchers, engineers, and independent makers to explore how hands-on technology creation addresses societal challenges. Maker Faire Delft is one of several European events on the May maker calendar that also includes Maker Faire Trieste, running May 9 to 10, and Hackaday Europe in Lecco, Italy, on May 16 and 17.
Sources: Make:
Open-Source Workshop Lets Makers Train Their Own LLM in One Hour
Developer Angelos Perivolaropoulos has published a hands-on workshop that walks participants through building a functional large language model from scratch on any Mac, Linux, or Windows machine. Taking inspiration from Andrej Karpathy's nanoGPT but scaled down further, the six-part workshop covers tokenizer construction, transformer architecture, training loop implementation, and text generation, finishing with training the model to compose poetry. The entire training run completes in roughly one hour on a standard laptop, with optional acceleration via Apple Silicon GPU or NVIDIA CUDA. Dependencies are limited to NumPy and PyTorch. Complete source code is published on GitHub under an open license, enabling reproducible offline experimentation without cloud infrastructure.
Sources: Hackaday
Top Crowdfunding
Crowd Supply / Kickstarter
1. Zerowriter Ink — E-ink typewriter (Crowd Supply, live)
2. OpenUPS2 — 5-ch 100W USB-PD open supply (Crowd Supply, live)
3. None this week — no third confirmed campaign
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
1. angelos-p/llm-from-scratch — Train a local LLM in 1 hr
2. davidmonterocrespo24/velxio — Browser Arduino/ESP32/RPi emulator
3. RightNow-AI/picolm — 1B-param LLM on $10 Pi board
Upcoming Events
Maker Faire Trieste — May 9–10, Trieste, Italy
Hackaday Europe 2026 — May 16–17, Lecco, Italy
Open Hardware Summit 2026 — May 23–24, Berlin, Germany
Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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