Samwise Makers' News
Friday, July 31, 2026
Using the Chimney Effect to Drop Passively Cooled PC Temperatures
Passive PC cooling hits a ceiling when warm air pools inside the case, starving components of fresh airflow. One builder exploited the chimney effect — the natural convective force that draws warm air upward through a vertical channel — to overcome that limit. By stacking 3D-printed funnel segments atop a passively cooled chassis, they extended the effective chimney height and dramatically amplified natural airflow without adding any fans. Measurements showed CPU temperatures dropping by up to 19 degrees Celsius under sustained load. The printed part files are available on GitHub, making the modification straightforward to adapt to most fanless or passively cooled PC enclosures.
Sources: Hackaday
ESPKVM: A Capable KVM Built With the ESP32
Remote control over a headless machine usually means dedicated hardware, but one open-source project has changed that equation with ESPKVM — a KVM-over-IP built around the ESP32-P4. The board uses a Toshiba TC358743 HDMI-to-CSI-2 bridge to capture video, streaming it via MJPEG or H.264 to a browser-based client. It handles keyboard and mouse emulation, connects over Ethernet or Wi-Fi, supports Wake-on-LAN, and stores configuration on SD card or onboard flash — all in a pocket-sized package. The project is fully open-source on GitHub, offering a capable, affordable alternative to expensive commercial KVM switches for remote server or PC management.
Sources: Hackaday
Open RC Spotter: RC Telemetry Board Gives Racers a Data-Driven Edge
MIT student [jwachlin] has built the Open RC Spotter, an ESP32-based telemetry platform designed to give RC racers a data-driven edge on the track. The board packs an IMU, GPS module, temperature sensor, battery monitor, and IR lap-beacon receiver into a lightweight form factor, broadcasting live telemetry via ESP-NOW to a pit-side receiver. Sessions can be downloaded over Wi-Fi for post-race analysis using an open-source web companion app hosted on GitHub Pages. One clarification from the developer: despite what the original Hackaday article states, the project is not compatible with Crew Chief software — it uses its own dedicated companion application exclusively.
Sources: Hackaday
Custom Beach Robot Handles the Hard Work So You Don't Have To
Hauling gear across sand is exhausting, so maker Ivan Miranda built a differential-steering cargo robot to handle the job. Constructed on a surplus electric cargo rack frame with two motors, a plywood deck, and an ESP32 brain, the beach bot follows instructions from a simple smartphone app over Bluetooth. A time-of-flight sensor handles basic obstacle detection, while front lights extend its usefulness to night beach runs. The chassis uses readily available hardware-store components alongside 3D-printed motor mounts, making it straightforward to replicate. The design is pragmatic and purpose-built — less a polished product than a reliable, sand-ready workhorse designed for a specific, sweaty job.
Sources: Hackaday
Wrangling Data Center GPUs Into a Desktop for Local LLM Inference
Why buy a new AI workstation when data centers are full of 2017-era Nvidia Tesla V100 accelerators at second-hand prices? One builder created a custom PCIe carrier card that houses two SXM2-interface V100 modules — each with 16 GB of HBM2 memory — inside a standard desktop chassis. The combined 32 GB of GPU VRAM is enough to run large language models like Google's Gemma 4 26B and Alibaba's Qwen3 35B locally, without quantization. The build required a custom water-cooling loop and a high-wattage power supply, but total cost was competitive with new consumer alternatives. Full build details are documented on Hackaday.
Sources: Hackaday
Rebuilding an Obsolete IC to Save a Betacam SP Tapedeck
A Sony BVW-75 Betacam SP video tape recorder developed a mystery fault: output was monochrome, except when paused, where colour appeared only in uneven stripes. Builder [ldursw] traced the fault to a failed Toshiba TA7357P video sync separator IC — a part no longer manufactured. Rather than write off the broadcast-grade machine, he engineered a drop-in replacement: a modern sync separator paired with a voltage regulator, signal inverter, and video amplifier chip, all mounted on a custom PCB that matches the original IC's pin footprint exactly. The open-source design — including schematic and board files — is published on GitHub for anyone whose Betacam SP equipment faces the same fate.
Sources: Hackaday
M5Brick Puts a Smart Microcontroller Inside a LEGO-Compatible Brick
Adding electronics to LEGO builds usually means bolting on an awkward external module that breaks the design. Maker Miso Tanaka has solved this with M5Brick — a 2×4 LEGO-compatible enclosure housing an M5Stack NanoC6 microcontroller. The NanoC6, which supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE, sits flush inside the 3D-printed brick-shaped body, keeping builds clean while enabling programmable control of LEDs, servos, motors, and Grove-compatible sensors. The design is programmed using M5Stack's UIFlow 2.0 visual environment, making it accessible to beginners. STL files and firmware are published on GitHub, letting anyone with a 3D printer build their own smart brick and integrate it into LEGO or original designs.
Sources: Hackster.io
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