Samwise Makers' News
Thursday, June 25, 2026
A Look At A Gaggle Of Transputer Boards
Before supercomputer clusters and multi-core CPUs dominated, the transputer explored distributed task-level parallelism in the 1980s. [Lance Harvie] dusted off his university-era collection and recently expanded it with an eBay find, walking through boards including the single-processor T400 and a T425 quad-processor card bearing late-1990s ST Microelectronics date codes. Designed by UK firm Inmos and programmed in the concurrent Occam language, transputers communicated via high-speed serial links to form parallel computing clusters. Getting them running today requires adapters bridging the ISA bus to modern USB interfaces, but the effort reveals a fascinating and largely forgotten chapter of European semiconductor history.
Laser Scanning a Cave With Homebrew Gear
Mapping a cave with homebrew lidar is already a niche pursuit; [9nl] pushed it further by building the entire scanning rig from the ground up. The core sensor is a surplus Ouster VLP-16 lidar unit, but its 40-degree vertical field of view proved too narrow for capturing real cavern geometry. The fix: mount the unit sideways on a custom rotating belt-drive shaft, sweeping a full 360-degree plane on a second axis and stitching together complete spherical point clouds. Everything — mounting hardware, rotation control, data capture pipeline — was hand-built, yielding dense 3D scans of underground spaces no commercial scanner could practically reach.
VFD Clock Runs on a Single AA
Running a vacuum fluorescent display from a single AA cell is a deceptively tricky power challenge. VFDs need tens of volts to illuminate their phosphor segments, making them an odd match for a 1.2 V NiMH cell — but that is exactly what [Sciter_] built. The design pairs an ATmega328P microcontroller with a 32.768 kHz timing crystal, a salvaged calculator VFD, and an HV5812 shift-register driver chip. A custom transformer-based boost converter steps the cell up to high voltage, while an LM2576-ADJ buck converter handles USB charging separately. Addressable RGB LEDs under the PCB add color underglow, turning a genuine power engineering puzzle into an elegant, compact clock.
Raspberry Pi Locator Website to Shut Down in July
Andre's rpilocator.com — once the definitive stock tracker for finding Raspberry Pi boards at retailers worldwide — is shutting down in July. The site served around 11,000 monthly users during and after the chip shortage, helping makers track down boards that vanished from shelves for years. The problem: most online retailers have now blocked the monitoring bot that powers the service, likely caught in the same anti-scraper defenses deployed against AI crawlers. With data feeds drying up, reliable stock tracking has become impossible. Andre has not ruled out a future return if technical conditions change, but for now, Pi hunters are without their most trusted radar.
A T9 Keyboard for Your Smartphone
[Jarrett] missed the speed and feel of T9 texting enough to build a dedicated Bluetooth keyboard for his modern smartphone. The build salvages a Nokia E52 keypad, fitting the keys over a custom PCB using Alps SKRK tactile switches wired through a diode matrix to prevent ghosting. An ESP32-C6 handles Bluetooth HID pairing; a TP4200 charger IC and LiPo battery keep the device self-contained. First tests with 0.98 N actuation switches felt mushy; swapping to 1.57 N units nailed the right tactile response. The completed device pairs wirelessly with any modern phone and revives a text-entry style many found faster than touchscreen keyboards.
A BIOS for Your ESP32-C6
[Rompass] built what amounts to a BIOS for the RISC-V ESP32-C6 microcontroller. The project, openc6-bios (github.com/Rompass/openc6-bios), sits between the hardware and user applications, providing a bootloader, a system call API, and the ability to load executables dynamically from RAM — eliminating the need to reflash the chip for every code update. Network loading is supported too, meaning new programs can be pushed wirelessly without a cable. The work pushes the ESP32-C6 beyond its usual role as a fixed firmware target toward something closer to a general-purpose computing environment, with runtime extensibility that opens the door to dynamic application stacks on small embedded hardware.
OSHWA's Open Hardware Summit 2026: Hottest Hardware Event of the Year?
The annual Open Hardware Summit touched down at Technische Universitat Berlin last weekend for a packed day of talks followed by a full Sunday of workshops. Highlights included a proposal for standardized Maker Resilience Kits (MaRK) for community emergency preparedness, a flow battery research project aiming to let makers fabricate their own stationary energy storage, and a frank talk from Mitch Altman on open hardware's future now that Qualcomm owns Arduino. A CircuitPython butterfly-PCB workshop let attendees take their code home. Seeed Studio demoed the reBot arm and the expanding XIAO microcontroller line. All talks are on the OHS YouTube channel.
Source: Hackster.io Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
1. Revopoint POP 4 — 3D scanner, Kickstarter trending
2. CardputerZero — RPi CM0 pocket computer
3. xTool WonderPress — laser + heat press combo
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
1. embedded-os/rust-rpi — 14.7k★
2. firmata/johnny-five — 13.2k★
3. davidmonterocrespo24/velxio — browser hardware sim
Upcoming Events
Maker Faire Wuppertal — Jun 26, Germany
Maker Faire Hamamatsu — Jul 4, Japan
Maker Faire Edmonton — Jul 17-19, Canada
Curated by JD · samwise.agency