Samwise Makers' News
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
Open-Source Humanoid Arm OpenArm Launches for Physical AI Research
Enactic has published OpenArm on GitHub, a fully open-source 7-DOF humanoid arm designed for physical AI research in contact-rich environments. The arm emphasizes high backdrivability and compliance, allowing it to give way when meeting a person or obstacle while still handling useful payloads. A complete bimanual system costs $6,500. The project targets teleoperation, imitation learning, simulation, and data collection for tasks requiring direct physical contact. Enactic also released OpenArm Cell, a standardized test environment with fixed background, lighting, and camera placement to ensure reproducible results across labs. Arms can be purchased assembled or built from a verified manufacturer list.
Sources: Adafruit Industries
DIY SAR Imaging Drone Gains Interferometric Imaging and RTK GPS
Henrik Forstén has released a major update to his DIY synthetic aperture radar imaging drone, adding interferometric imaging capability and a new autofocus algorithm. The original system was limited by GPS accuracy of about one meter, so Forstén added an RTK-capable GPS receiver linked to a fixed ground station, achieving centimeter-level positional accuracy. The new interferometric mode flies the same path twice at two different altitudes, comparing phase information to generate detailed terrain elevation maps rather than assuming flat ground. Additional hardware changes include a stabilized phase-locked loop for the radar sweep and a fast compression algorithm for real-time data recording to the controller FPGA.
Hackaday Launches FPGA Tutorial Series Around Affordable Tang Nano 20K
Hackaday contributor Al Williams has launched a new FPGA tutorial series using the Sipeed Tang Nano 20K as its learning platform. The board is built around GOWIN’s GW2AR-LV18QN88C8/I7 FPGA, which contains 20,736 four-input look-up tables, 15,552 flip-flops, and 48 18×18 multipliers — considerable logic for an affordable hobbyist-friendly device. Williams notes FPGAs once required professional-level budgets and expensive development tools, but inexpensive boards like the Tang Nano 20K have opened programmable logic to hobbyists and students. Future installments in the series will cover open-source toolchains and explore other FPGA platforms beyond GOWIN.
CFD Study Finds Conventional Propellers Beat Toroidal Designs on Efficiency
A maker known as Neuronautics ran computational fluid dynamics simulations comparing a custom-optimized toroidal propeller against a conventional propeller also optimized through CFD, finding the conventional design outperformed on efficiency. The conventional propeller achieved roughly 73% efficiency in simulation. Toroidal propellers — whose blades loop back to rejoin the hub — have gained interest mainly for noise reduction rather than raw efficiency. The test reinforces that toroidal geometry trades some aerodynamic efficiency for quieter operation and reduced tip vortex noise. Neuronautics published full simulation parameters and results, giving the community concrete data for comparing propeller architectures in drone applications.
Megatexture Mipmapping Demo Runs on ESP32-S3 Using Jet Rendering Engine
Developer James Lambert has demonstrated a megatexture rendering system on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller using the Jet rendering engine, implementing mipmapping level-of-detail techniques previously shown on Nintendo 64 hardware. Mipmapping displays progressively lower-resolution textures as surfaces recede from the viewer, reducing rendering load without visible quality loss. To fit the demo on an ESP32-S3 with 16 MB of PSRAM, Lambert compressed textures to 8-bit indexing, reducing total texture data to 5.01 MB versus 40 MB in the N64 version. The project shows how rendering techniques once needing dedicated console hardware can now run on inexpensive microcontroller chips costing under a dollar.
New Manufacturing Process Makes MXene 2D Materials Easier to Produce
Researchers have developed a more efficient manufacturing process for MXenes, a class of two-dimensional materials synthesized about a decade ago and studied for applications in energy storage, electromagnetic shielding, and electronics. The existing method required combining precursor materials with an etchant, washing the product, then repeatedly centrifuging the mixture to remove unwanted byproducts — an expensive and slow sequence. The new process simplifies and shortens this workflow, lowering the barrier to producing MXenes at practical scales. The Hackaday writeup observes that material science breakthroughs are often delayed not by the discovery itself but by the lack of a scalable production method.
Metal Gear Solid Ported to ESP32-S3 Using Open Decompilation Project
Developer David Montero Crespo has ported the original Metal Gear Solid to the ESP32-S3 microcontroller, recompiling it from the open FoxdieTeam MGS Reversing decompilation project. The port uses custom FreeRTOS scheduling and PSRAM-based rendering to run the 1998 PlayStation game on Espressif hardware. Metal Gear Solid originally required a PlayStation with a 33 MHz MIPS CPU and 2 MB of RAM; the ESP32-S3 runs at up to 240 MHz with up to 8 MB of PSRAM, making a recompile feasible. The project joins a growing catalogue of retro game ports to ESP32 hardware, illustrating how far microcontroller performance has advanced in the years since.
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