Duke University's 20-Legged Argus Robot Bounces Like a Tumbleweed on DARPA Funding

The robotics team at Duke University's General Robotics Lab has unveiled Argus, a 20-limbed symmetric robot named for the many-eyed giant of Greek mythology. Rather than relying on traditional bipedal or quadrupedal locomotion, Argus extends and retracts its limbs to exert forces in any direction, bouncing and rolling across terrain like a beach ball on a windy day. The DARPA-funded project demonstrates that redundant multi-limb architectures can achieve robust locomotion even with only a dozen active effectors. The team has released an open-source simulator on GitHub at generalroboticslab/Argus, letting researchers test designs with varying limb counts. A demo video shows the robot performing dynamic parkour-like maneuvers.

Sources: Hackaday

FDM Printer Becomes Low-Temperature Cookie Oven in All-3D-Printed Kitchen Build

Maker Startup Chuck has demonstrated a complete cookie-baking workflow using nothing but a 3D printer and 3D-printed utensils. The build includes a custom mixing bowl and beater attachment for a KitchenAid mixer, scoops, and a flexible TPU blade spatula — plus a nylon cookie sheet replacing the standard baking pan. The enclosed FDM printer functions as a low-temperature oven, with the heated bed acting as the heating element. The experiment produced recognizable cookies though they lacked browning, limited by typical FDM bed temperatures. Hackaday notes the moisture and food residue risks to the print head and extruder, recommending the build as entertainment rather than culinary practice.

Sources: Hackaday

Raspberry Pi Pico W Powers Bilingual E-Paper News Feed for Language Learning

Builder Bob has completed LanguageLearner, a low-power desktop device built around a Raspberry Pi Pico W microcontroller and a 4.2-inch E-paper display mounted in a 3D-printed stand. Every few hours, the device wakes from deep sleep, connects via WiFi, and fetches Italian-language news from an RSS feed. A translation API call generates an English rendering, displayed below the original Italian on the E-paper screen. E-paper retains its image without power between updates, making the device highly efficient for passive display tasks. RAM constraints on the Pico W require careful data handling to avoid memory overflows during web requests. Source code is available on GitHub at 0300962/LanguageLearner.

Sources: Hackaday

University of Chicago's PopTuber Machine Bends Pop Tubes Into Arbitrary 3D Shapes

Researchers at the Actuated Experience Lab, University of Chicago, have developed PopTuber, a robotic bending machine for corrugated pop tubes — the flexible toy segments resembling a bendy straw. Five motors and specialized gears form pop tubes into arbitrary complex 3D shapes on demand, with shape designs specified via software. Critically, the machine fully resets and reuses the same tube. Potential applications include novel user interfaces, physical prototyping, and experimental programmable displays. The team is also exploring whether five actuators in a compact package constitute a practical form of programmable matter. Motor control firmware and a GUI are open-source on GitHub at AxLab-UofC/PopTuber.

Sources: Hackaday

Building Your Own Gigabit Router in 2026: OpenWrt on ARM and x86 Hardware Compared

Hackaday's Maya Posch has published a follow-up guide to building a custom home router with OpenWrt in 2026, responding to reader feedback on an earlier article. The piece surveys hardware options from junk-pile x86 machines with dual Gigabit NICs to ARM boards including the Raspberry Pi 4 and the purpose-built OpenWrt One board at around $100, plus the Banana Pi BPI-R4 with 10Gbps support. Posch's own test system — a 2012-era Intel D2500CC dual-Gbit mainboard — successfully booted OpenWrt from SD card but failed to negotiate Ethernet links, leaving further debugging ahead. The article also recommends OPNSense as an alternative for more capable x86 hardware.

Sources: Hackaday

Pebble Is Now Open Source — Here's How to Build Your First Watch App

The Pebble smartwatch platform is experiencing a revival following Google's open-sourcing of the firmware in late 2025. Developer duo Coconauts has published a practical guide to building apps for both original and remanufactured Pebble watches, covering the C programming workflow and platform-specific memory management considerations that differ from higher-level languages like Python and Rust. Their two demo apps — one notifying users when the watch reaches 80 percent charge and another displaying an animated kitten watchface — are available in the Pebble app repository with source code on GitHub. Repebble.com now sells new hardware, and the open-source SDK lets hobbyists develop and share custom watch applications.

Sources: Hackaday

Restoring Apple's First Tangerine iBook: A 300MHz PowerPC Nostalgia Trip

Retrocomputing creator This Does Not Compute has documented the restoration of an original Apple iBook — the 300MHz PowerPC G3-powered clamshell in tangerine orange from 1999, notorious in repair circles for its extremely difficult disassembly. The project encountered several obstacles: MacOS 9.0 threw a cache memory error on first boot, the optical drive caused system lockups, and the machine required the power adapter to be connected in order to restart reliably. After purchasing a parts unit from Japan, combining components from both machines eventually yielded a working system. The iBook's distinctive translucent fruity design is celebrated as an Apple industrial design milestone that prefigured the colorful modern Mac lineup.

Sources: Hackaday

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