Samwise Makers' News
Thursday, July 16, 2026
Open-Source AIS Transponder Fits Entire RF Section in the Antenna
The MAIANA project from peterantypas is believed to be the first fully open-source AIS transponder for maritime navigation. Built around an STM32L4 microcontroller and a Silicon Labs Si4460 RF chip, the design uses a Quectel L76L-M33 GPS module with a ceramic chip antenna for position data. Remarkably, the entire RF section fits inside the antenna housing — with a standard Ethernet cable carrying signals down to a small USB decoder box mounted inside the vessel. Published under an open licence, the project gives boatowners and electronics builders a full reference design for legal, self-built AIS transmission and reception.
Pinch Squeezes a Full Arduino-Compatible Board into a USB-C Connector
The Pinch board from Solder Party compresses a complete Arduino-compatible development board into the footprint of a female USB-C connector. Powered by a Microchip SAMD11 (ARM Cortex-M0+ running at 48 MHz with 4 KB SRAM and 16 KB flash), it exposes 15 GPIO pins plus SPI, I2C, PWM, and UART — all through a tiny 14-pin edge connector. Native USB support eliminates the need for a separate FTDI chip. Priced at $16 with a September 2026 ship date, the Pinch targets space-constrained embedded projects where even a standard Arduino Nano footprint is too large. Pre-orders are open now.
Zig Becomes a Drop-In C Compiler for Cross-Compiling a Linux 3D Printer
Developer Petabyte successfully cross-compiled busybox for a Flashforge AD5X 3D printer by using Zig as a drop-in C compiler, requiring no modifications to the build system. The printer’s MIPS32r2 little-endian processor uses the nan2008 floating-point ABI — an unusual target most toolchains do not expose directly. The compile command invokes zig cc targeting mipsel-linux-musleabihf with -mcpu=mips32r2, producing a statically linked binary. One remaining hurdle: the ELF header required a manual patch to set the nan2008 NaN flag. The experiment validates Zig’s cross-compilation toolchain as a practical option for exotic embedded Linux targets.
DOOM Runs at 0.0001 FPS Inside a 300 MB CSS Stylesheet
Developer Ahmed Amer has built CSS-DOS: a full IBM PC-compatible computer implemented as a 300-megabyte CSS stylesheet that renders inside any standards-compliant browser. The machine emulates an 8086 processor with 640 KB of RAM, a VGA display, and a floppy disk controller — entirely in CSS. DOOM boots and runs at approximately 0.0001 FPS, equivalent to two CPU instructions per second at the emulated processor level. The approach exploits the Turing-completeness of modern CSS selectors and counters. While entirely impractical, CSS-DOS is a striking demonstration of how far the language has evolved from its origins as a simple document-styling tool.
NVIDIA’s Jetson T2000 and T3000 Bring Blackwell AI to a Smaller Edge Module
NVIDIA has announced the Jetson T2000 and T3000 modules, mid-range additions to its edge AI lineup targeting robotics and industrial applications. The T3000 delivers up to 865 FP4 TFLOPS via a 1,536-core Blackwell GPU, pairs with an 8-core Neoverse-V3AE CPU and 32 GB of LPDDR5X memory at 273 GB/s, and includes a 25 GbE interface. The T2000 scales down to 400 TFLOPS with a 1,024-core GPU and 16 GB LPDDR5. Both measure approximately 50 × 87 mm — roughly half the footprint of the flagship T4000 and T5000. General availability is expected in Q1 2027, with the JetPack 7.2.1 SDK releasing later this month.
Sources: CNX Software Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
OpenStrap Edge Lets WHOOP 4.0 Owners Ditch the Subscription
OpenStrap Edge is a new open-source iOS and Android app that makes the WHOOP 4.0 fitness wearable function without an active subscription. The developer reverse-engineered the band’s Bluetooth protocol and rebuilt the analytics from scratch using published research — no WHOOP servers involved. The app pairs directly to the hardware and computes heart rate, HRV, sleep staging, recovery scores, and strain locally at one-second intervals. Health data never leaves the device. Auto-workout detection, live GPS route tracking, and heart-rate zones are also included. Licensed under MIT and tested against WHOOP 4.0 hardware, the project is available now on GitHub.
Reverse-Engineering Unlocks RK3576 NPU Support in Mainline Linux
Developer Ga Hing Woo has published patches bringing Rockchip RK3576 NPU support to the open-source Rocket driver for mainline Linux — a significant step for SBCs like the Radxa ROCK 4D. The work required reverse-engineering hidden NPU registers not documented in Rockchip’s Technical Reference Manual. Validated against Linux 7.1-rc5, the patches enable the RKNPU vendor runtime alongside the mainline kernel, yielding Llama-3.2-1B inference at around 13 tokens per second, Qwen2.5-1.5B at nine tokens per second, and MobileNet classification at 169 frames per second. Full integration into the Rocket driver is ongoing, but performance on a stock mainline kernel is clearly achievable.
Sources: CNX Software Share ↗ ✉︎ Email 💬 Text
Top Crowdfunding
Crowd Supply
1. QuadRF — 340% funded, $340K raised, 23 days left (SDR phased array)
2. PocketMage — 171% funded, $171K raised, 38 days left (e-paper PDA)
3. Open Book Touch — 60% funded, $27K raised, 37 days left (open e-reader)
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
1. OpenStrap/edge — WHOOP BT reverse-engineering (trending)
2. JustVugg/colibri — 1,600★ (744B LLM on 25GB consumer RAM, pure C)
3. OpenCut-app/OpenCut — 2,400★ (open-source CapCut alternative)
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