Samwise Makers' News
Thursday, July 23, 2026
Voice Control Toolkit Comes To A Pico Near You
The Pico 2 W just got conversational. The Moonshine AI toolkit, ported by [Spritetm], runs a complete speech pipeline directly on the RP2350 microcontroller—no cloud required. Voice activity detection listens passively, then routes incoming audio through SpellingCNN, a trained speech-to-text model, before a neural text-to-speech engine speaks replies aloud. The entire stack fits within 3.6 MiB of the chip’s 4 MiB FLASH and 468 KiB of SRAM. The toolkit supports up to 50 tokens per response and includes an offline re-trainable speech model, making the Pico 2 W a fully self-contained voice interface without any cloud dependency.
60 FPS NES Emulator On ESP32
Full-speed NES gaming on a microcontroller is now real. The Anemoia-ESP32 project delivers a complete Nintendo Entertainment System emulator running at a locked 60 frames per second on an ESP32 chip, with cycle-accurate audio emulation and save state support. The project ships as a WebSerial-flashable firmware image, letting builders program the hardware directly from a browser with no software installation required. Beyond the microcontroller, a display and controller are needed; both hardware wiring and software configuration are documented in the project repository. The emulator demonstrates how capable the ESP32 platform has become for real-time media workloads.
Industrial GPU Adapted For The Desktop
A maker has adapted a Tesla V100 SXM2 graphics card from a decommissioned data centre for use in a desktop workstation. The enterprise GPU—whose SXM2 form factor normally connects to proprietary server backplanes—required a custom PCIe adapter board to interface with a standard motherboard. The unit’s 82-decibel default fans also required electrical modification to run at tolerable noise levels. The result is 16 GB of HBM2 memory paired with an RTX 4080, providing 32 GB total VRAM for local large-language-model inference under NixOS. The V100 and adapter board cost approximately £200 combined.
NVIDIA Increases Jetson Module Prices by Up to 101%
NVIDIA has raised prices across its Jetson embedded AI module line by up to 101%. The Jetson Nano—a staple for hobbyist robotics and AI edge projects—jumped from $99 to $199. The Jetson Orin Nano Super Developer Kit rose from $249 to $399 (60%), while the Jetson AGX Orin 32GB module climbed from $899 to $1,799 (100%). Revised prices are live on the NVIDIA store and Amazon; SparkFun still lists old pricing but shows the product as backordered. NVIDIA has not offered an official explanation for the increases, according to CNX Software.
Sources: CNX Software Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
An LLM In The Kitchen: Recipe Lanes Turns Recipes Into Flow Charts
Recipe Lanes is an open-source tool that parses recipe text into visual flow charts using a large language model. Developed by GitHub user bohemian-miser, the project sends a recipe to an LLM, which breaks it into discrete preparation steps and ingredient dependencies, then renders the output as a movable canvas of connected nodes. Each node is decorated with an 8-bit style ingredient icon. The layout lets cooks follow branching preparation paths at a glance rather than scanning linear instructions. The tool is live at recipelanes.com and the source code is publicly available on GitHub.
Compile Here, Run Everywhere: Crosstool-NG
Cross-compilation for non-standard embedded targets remains difficult, but Crosstool-NG makes it more manageable. Hackaday columnist Al Williams documented using the tool to produce MIPS binaries for a 3D printer running a stripped-down Linux system. Crosstool-NG automates the download, patching, and configuration of a complete toolchain—GCC, binutils, C library, and kernel headers—for a chosen target architecture. Williams’s printer CPU uses MIPS r2 instructions with the nan2008 floating-point convention normally associated with r6, requiring manual additions to CFLAGS, LDFLAGS, and C compiler settings. After several build attempts, the toolchain produced working BusyBox and text editor binaries on the printer.
Old TV Vacuum Tube Turned DIY X-Ray Machine
Maker mircemk has built a miniature X-ray machine using a DY86 vacuum tube salvaged from old CRT televisions. The tube, originally used for high-voltage rectification in TVs, emits X-ray radiation when driven at extremely high voltages. A staged power chain—a DC supply feeding an AC inverter, then a transformer, then a Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier—provides the necessary potential. Three DY86 tubes were lost to over-voltage before the circuit was stabilised. Images are captured on standard dental X-ray film placed 10–15 cm from the subject, with exposures from 15 minutes to an hour depending on material density. The full build is documented on Hackaday.io with safety guidance.
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
1. RootBoard — open-hardware cyberdeck handheld Linux PC (Kickstarter, live)
2. None confirmed this week
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Makers & Hardware
1. jetpax/PiZZa — Arduino IDE sketches on Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W (Jul 2026)
2. crosstool-ng/crosstool-ng — cross-compilation toolchain builder
3. pimoroni/pimoroni-pico — libraries for Pimoroni Pico add-ons ★1.5k
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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