Samwise Makers' News
Thursday, August 13, 2026
Apollo Automation's $40 ESPHome Starter Kit Makes Smart Home Building Accessible
Apollo Automation has launched the first official ESPHome Starter Kit, developed in partnership with the Open Home Foundation and priced at $40. The kit centers on the ESPHome C6 board, which uses an Espressif ESP32-C6-MINI-1 wireless module with Wi-Fi 6, Bluetooth LE, and Thread connectivity. Two FPC expansion connectors support four bundled modules covering PIR motion detection, temperature, humidity sensing, a button, buzzer, and ten RGB LEDs. No soldering, breadboarding, or coding is required—the new ESPHome Desktop app handles configuration through a visual interface. All processing runs locally without cloud dependency, and hardware files are open source on GitHub.
Sources: CNX Software
Hackaday Supercon 2026 Extends Call for Participation Deadline to August 26
Hackaday has extended the call-for-participation deadline for its 2026 Superconference by two weeks, pushing the submission cutoff to August 26. The event—Hackaday's tenth in-person Supercon—will take place November 6 through 8 in Pasadena, California, in a larger venue than previous years to accommodate more attendees for live talks. Organizers are seeking presentations, workshops, and hardware badge projects from makers, engineers, and researchers. This marks a decade of the annual gathering, which has become a flagship event in the open hardware community. Proposals should be submitted via the official Hackaday.io conference portal before the new deadline.
Chernobyl's Nuclear Legacy: Forty Years of Radiation-Hardened Robots
A Hackaday deep-dive examines four decades of robot development for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant's destroyed Reactor 4, tracing machines engineered to survive lethal ionizing radiation. Early Soviet robots faced catastrophic electronics failures from gamma rays corrupting digital circuits, leading engineers toward shielded analog control systems. Later generations incorporated improved radiation-hardening techniques and remote telepresence. The feature documents hardware ranging from improvised STR-1 tracked vehicles deployed in 1986 through modern purpose-built inspection and sampling platforms still operating in and around the New Safe Confinement structure. It is a compelling technical history of how extreme environments push robotic engineering toward novel solutions.
Total Solar Eclipse August 12: Hackaday Rounds Up Webcam Feeds for Makers at Home
Wednesday's total solar eclipse tracked from Siberia across the North Atlantic, over Iceland, and through northern Spain, with Hackaday publishing a roundup of live webcam feeds for makers unable to reach the path of totality. ESA broadcast from Javalambre, Spain, while NASA provided its own live stream. Hackaday noted that many feeds captured the environmental effects of totality—the sudden drop in light and ambient temperature—rather than the solar disc itself. The article also pointed readers to resources for telescope-equipped observers and reminded viewers to use ISO-certified solar filters outside full totality. The August 12 event marks a rare eclipse over populated European latitudes.
Texas Instruments Ships Industry's First Commercially Available CAN XL Transceiver
Texas Instruments has released what it calls the industry's first commercially available CAN XL transceiver, the TCAN6062, conforming to the ISO 11898-2:2024 Annex A specification. The device supports payloads up to 2,048 bytes per frame and data rates up to 20Mbps—significantly faster than the 8Mbps ceiling of CAN FD. TI states the component is backward-compatible with CAN FD and CAN SIC, enabling network upgrades without replacing existing infrastructure. The TCAN6062's built-in signal improvement capability reduces ringing by up to 80 percent in complex networks. Target applications include humanoid robots, industrial automation equipment, and human-machine interface panels requiring higher-bandwidth real-time data exchange.
Sources: Electronics Weekly
MIKROE's NECTO Studio Now Covers Half the World's MCU Variants at 10,000-Plus Count
MikroElektronika's multi-architecture development environment NECTO Studio now supports more than 10,000 microcontroller variants from twelve silicon vendors, including Microchip, Renesas, STMicroelectronics, NXP, and Toshiba, with six additional suppliers in the pipeline. CEO Neb Matic noted that approximately 20,000 MCU variants are commercially available worldwide, meaning NECTO covers roughly half the global embedded market. The IDE ships with over 5,000 ready-to-use libraries, a Planet Debug remote board farm for testing without waiting for physical hardware, and a built-in AI assistant that generates working code. A subscription-based licensing model applies; existing NECTO Studio users receive the expanded MCU support through their current installations.
Sources: Electronics Weekly
Forlinx AM62L32 Local EVM Brings TI's Low-Power Cortex-A53/M4F SoC to Developers
Forlinx Embedded has introduced the AM62L32 Local EVM, a low-power industrial single-board computer built around Texas Instruments' AM62L32 SoC, which pairs an Arm Cortex-A53 application processor with a Cortex-M4F real-time core. Unlike typical module-plus-carrier-board designs, the AM62L32 Local EVM uses a consolidated four-layer integrated PCB, reducing system footprint. The board includes 512MB of LPDDR4 memory, 8GB eMMC flash, OSPI Flash, a MicroSD card slot with SD 3.0 support, and a four-lane MIPI-DSI interface capable of 1080p60 output. Software support covers Linux 6.12 with pre-compiled images and BSPs. Target applications include industrial control, IoT gateways, edge computing, and embedded HMI panels.
Sources: CNX Software
Top Crowdfunding
Kickstarter / Indiegogo
1. HeyGears G1 Series — $10M+ raised (Kickstarter)
2. Inkplate 13SPECTRA — Active, ships Aug 21 (Crowd Supply)
3. None this week
GitHub Trending
Makers & Hardware
1. ApolloAutomation/ESPHome-Starter-Kit — new today★
2. probe-rs/probe-rs — 2.8k★ (ARM embedded debugger)
3. rtic-rs/rtic — 2.4k★ (Cortex-M concurrency)
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