Samwise Makers' News
Thursday, June 11, 2026
16-Camera DIY Motion-Capture Rig Processes 4 Billion Pixels Per Second
[Dennis] built a 16-camera optical motion-capture system capable of processing 4 billion pixels per second, rivalling professional rigs at a fraction of the cost. Custom PCBs carry AR0234 MIPI image sensors with M12 lenses and IR filters, while Raspberry Pi CM4 and CM5 compute modules handle local capture per camera. Near-infrared LED ring lights pulse at 160 W for marker illumination. A custom image-processing pipeline runs 300× faster than OpenCV for real-time tracking. The complete system—hardware schematics, firmware, and software—is open source on GitHub (dennisss/dacha), putting professional-grade VTubing and motion capture within reach of any determined maker.
Source: Hackaday
Safely Repurposing Old EV Battery Packs for Home Solar Storage
[Ed] demonstrates how salvaged Nissan Leaf high-voltage battery packs can feed a home photovoltaic system using the open-source Battery Emulator project (GitHub: dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator). The emulator translates the EV pack’s battery management system into a language standard solar inverters understand. [Ed] notes the BMS must restart daily and warns of real complexity in bridging a Leaf’s high-voltage pack with typical 12–48 V DC home solar gear. Safety and careful integration are paramount, but the payoff is significant: cheap second-life EV cells repurposed for home energy storage, backed by a fully open-source toolchain anyone can audit and adapt.
Source: Hackaday
240-MP: A Raspberry Pi Media Player That Bridges VCR Nostalgia and 4K HDMI
[Anthony Caccese] released 240-MP, a GPLv3-licensed Raspberry Pi media player wrapped in a charming VCR-style blue-and-white interface. Under the hood it’s an MPV wrapper handling local files, playlists, and Plex streaming equally well. The clever design outputs composite video to vintage CRTs and HDMI 4K to modern displays, making it equally at home on a retro television or a contemporary monitor. It runs on any Raspberry Pi model—from the original to the Pi 5—and the VHS-aesthetic UI makes navigating your media library genuinely delightful. Source code is available on GitHub under the GPLv3 licence.
Source: Hackaday
Hand-Cranked Raspberry Pi 5 Runs a Local LLM on Zero Grid Power
[Squeezlabs] tackled AI’s energy-hunger problem with characteristic maker ingenuity: a Raspberry Pi 5 running llama.cpp and speech conversion, powered entirely by a USB hand-crank charger. The challenge is that processing spikes cause voltage brownouts that crash the machine. The fix is a custom capacitor board that absorbs those transient peaks, smoothing power delivery to the Pi. Handle resistance also varies with computational load, giving the operator direct physical feedback about inference intensity. While impractical as a daily driver, the project—documented at squeezlabs.github.io/handcrank—raises compelling questions about sustainable compute and embodied AI interaction.
Source: Hackaday
Hacker Builds a DIY CO2 Scrubber for His Homemade Diesel-Electric Submarine
[Hank Pronk] is building a diesel-electric submarine for lake diving and is DIYing every subsystem, including life support. His CO2 scrubber follows the same chemical-adsorbent approach used in Apollo missions and commercial dive equipment, replacing a bulky rectangular commercial unit with a compact round DIY design suited to shorter dives. Since the sub runs diesel and spends most time at snorkel depth, extended submerged duration is rare. [Hank] carries spare adsorbent for overnight situations and has a detailed bailout plan. The complete build—every system a hacker can be proud of—is documented on YouTube for the bravest among us.
Source: Hackaday
Free USB 2.0 Unlock for the Power Mac G4, Courtesy of Apple’s Own ROM
[Pierre Dandumont] uncovered a piece of computing history: Apple shipped the Power Mac G4 with a NEC USB 2.0 controller but locked it to USB 1.1 speeds, favouring FireWire 800 instead. Linux already runs the controller at full USB 2.0 throughput; Mac OS did not. The fix is free: replace the machine’s BIOS ROM with an image from a G4 model that shipped without FireWire 800, and the NEC controller’s full capabilities are unlocked under Mac OS too. The modification is irreversible but costs nothing beyond a ROM programmer. A satisfying deep-dive into Apple’s early-2000s port politics.
Source: Hackaday
Amply: Build a $10 Hi-Fi Class AB Bluetooth Amplifier from Scratch
Marco Tabini’s Amply is a $10 Class AB Bluetooth amplifier that punches well above its price. Built around the venerable NE5532 op-amp, it delivers 2×10 W into 8-ohm speakers with total harmonic distortion below 0.015%. Unlike cheap Class D modules, Amply uses a traditional topology with discrete Sziklai-pair output transistors for genuinely clean audio. Bluetooth comes from an MH-M18 receiver module (free of irritating voice prompts), and power arrives via USB-C PD at 9–30 V. PCB files, a 3D-printable enclosure, and full documentation are on GitHub (T76-org/amply); wired-only operation is also supported.
Source: Hackster
Top Crowdfunding
Crowd Supply
1. MiciMike Home Mini Drop-In PCB — 1,274% funded, 15 hrs left
2. Modos Flow (e-ink monitor) — 54% funded, 28 days left
3. wafer.space GF180MCU Run 2 — Funded, 19 days left
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware — featured today
1. dennisss/dacha — 16-cam mocap system
2. dalathegreat/Battery-Emulator — EV battery BMS for solar
3. T76-org/amply — $10 Class AB BT amplifier
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Curated by JD · samwise.agency
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