Samwise Makers' News
Saturday, September 5, 2026
The Birds Outside, Drawn For You Automatically
A Raspberry Pi 5 running BirdNet-Go transforms a garden into a living wildlife art installation. Built by Norwegian developer Arne Giacomo ([arnegiacomo]), the system uses a USB microphone to capture birdsong, feeds it through BirdNet-Go's on-device AI classifier — developed by Cornell Lab of Ornithology — and identifies the species present. It then assembles a collage on a large e-paper display from scanned 19th-century natural history plates depicting those exact species. The entire pipeline runs fully locally, with no cloud dependencies. A live feed at fugleramme.arnegiacomo.dev shows the current bird mix in real time. Source code is on GitHub at arnegiacomo/fugleramme.
3D Printed Cubes Provide Passive Cooling
Researchers at Graz University of Technology have developed 3D-printed ceramic cubes capable of reducing surrounding air temperature by nearly 7°C through passive evaporative cooling. The cubes are printed from a bio-inspired clay mixture containing fungal mycelium and wood chips, fired at low temperature so the organic material burns away, leaving a dense network of thread-like capillaries throughout the ceramic. The macrostructure uses a gyroid infill pattern — familiar to FDM 3D-printing hobbyists — which has no closed sections, maximizing airflow and water exposure simultaneously. As long as the cubes stay wet, the effect is substantial — a test in a hot attic confirmed the results.
Take Tool Photo, Generate Custom Gridfinity Bin
Tracefinity is an open-source, self-hosted tool that generates custom Gridfinity storage bins from photos of tools. The workflow is straightforward: lay one or more tools on paper, photograph them, upload the image, and the system traces each tool outline and stores it in a private library. From that library, users select any combination of tools to generate a Gridfinity-compatible bin layout, complete with optional magnet holes and editable dimensions. Tracefinity uses a local, CPU-friendly object detection model for tracing by default — no external services required. An optional Google Gemini API key can assist with complex outlines. Source code lives at tracefinity/tracefinity on GitHub.
Making A Pole Balance Itself With Propellers
[Peter Ryseck] built a self-balancing pole that stays upright through a drone-like assembly of quadcopter components mounted at its top — without lifting off the ground. The hardest engineering challenge was achieving fast enough response to prevent the pole from falling: 10-inch propellers were tried and rejected due to excessive rotational inertia, while triple 5-inch blades struck the right balance between thrust and reaction time. A standard quadcopter flight controller handles the stabilization logic. One unexpected complication: the pole itself was flexible enough to introduce its own oscillations. The final trick — having the pole lean slightly into the wind — proved more stable than enforcing a strict vertical position.
Repairing Traces On A Delidded Pentium III CPU Gone Wrong
A clumsy delidding attempt — someone using a prying implement rather than proper technique — left about a dozen traces severed on the substrate of a 1.3 GHz Tualatin Pentium III CPU found by [Bits und Bolts] in an eBay lot. With the CPU confirmed dead, the repair began: soldermask was carefully removed from good traces to protect them, while the damaged ones were bridged using the thinnest available copper wire, laid under magnification with a steady hand. The repair succeeded. The project is a reminder that modern CPU substrates are far less forgiving — prevention through proper delidding tools is essential.
WildGuard: Off-Grid Edge AI Wildlife Monitoring
WildGuard is an off-grid edge AI system designed to detect poachers and monitor animal migrations in real time, without any internet connection. Built by ademosuoluwatobi, it uses a dual-brain architecture: a Qualcomm MPU handles on-device inference using a custom-trained YOLO-Pro Nano neural network, ingesting H.264 video from a smartphone camera over local Wi-Fi, while an STM32 microcontroller drives local output hardware — an SSD1306 OLED display, multi-class LED indicators, and an active piezo buzzer. The logical separation of high-latency vision computation from low-latency hardware control keeps the system responsive. Published on Hackster.io, the project targets wildlife rangers operating in connectivity-challenged terrain.
Sources: Hackster.io
OpenTrailPaper Transforms LILYGO T5 E-Paper S3 Pro Into DIY Bike Computer
OpenTrailPaper is an open-source DIY bike computer built on the LILYGO T5 E-Paper S3 Pro devkit, centred on an ESP32-S3N16R8 module running dual Tensilica LX7 cores at 240 MHz with 8MB PSRAM and 16MB flash. The 4.7-inch e-paper display (960×540 resolution, 16 shades of grey) shows ride metrics, offline maps, and turn-by-turn directions while remaining perfectly readable outdoors. GPS comes from a u-blox MIA-M10Q or Quectel L76K module; a LoRa SX1262 chip handles off-grid communication. The firmware records rides in Garmin-compatible FIT format and pairs with heart-rate and power sensors over Bluetooth 5.0. The LILYGO T5 costs around $90 on Amazon.
Sources: CNX Software
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