Samwise Makers' News
Sunday, October 4, 2026
ESP-SDR Firmware Turns ESP32 Chips Into 2.4/5 GHz Software-Defined Radio Receivers
Open-source firmware from Florian Euchner and Zoltan Doczi of the ESPARGOS project turns ESP32 chips into software-defined radios by accessing raw I/Q baseband samples, with no additional hardware. Supported chips include the ESP32, ESP32-C3, ESP32-C5, ESP32-C6, ESP32-C61, ESP32-S2 and ESP32-S3, plus a preview for the ESP32-S31. Sample rates reach 80 MSa/s, or around 2.56 Gbps, and bandwidth runs roughly 13 to 54 MHz depending on the chip. The firmware streams raw samples to a computer over USB or UART, since getting the data off the chip is the main problem. It is released under GPL-3.0, and SoapyESPSDR is in development for Gigabit Ethernet streaming on the ESP32-S31.
Sources: CNX Software
Strata Runs a 125-Billion-Parameter LLM on a Gaming PC
A project called Strata, created by Niko1221, runs a 125-billion-parameter large language model on hardware a gaming PC may already have. The model is based on Qwen3.8 variants and uses a mixture-of-experts design with 24,576 small experts, only 10 of which are needed per token. Strata treats VRAM as a cache: frequently used experts stay on the GPU while the full collection sits in system RAM, and a roughly 29 GB lookup table lives on the SSD. It needs at least 32 GB of system RAM, 12 GB of VRAM and about 80 GB of storage. An RTX 5070 produces 50 to 90 tokens per second depending on quantization.
BlobJump Turns a Belt Into a Two-Player Game Controller
BlobJump is a two-player game in which a belt worn on the body acts as the controller. Each belt carries an ESP32-C3 microcontroller and an MPU-6050 accelerometer and gyroscope, and runs on a rechargeable battery so it can work wirelessly. A Raspberry Pi serves as the game console. Players jump and duck, and their on-screen avatars do the same. The project is described as a way to encourage physical activity in children, and it doubles as a hardware and software build. The full write-up appears on Instructables under the title Move-to-Play Belt Motion Controllers for a Two-Player Game, and Hackaday’s Al Williams covered it.
PS2 and Xbox 1 Emulators Arrive for Jailbroken PS5 Consoles
Two emulator ports are targeting jailbroken PlayStation 5 consoles. PS5X2 brings PlayStation 2 emulation based on PCSX2, with GPU acceleration through the Vulkan API via PS5Vulkan. Hackaday describes it as the most complete so far, with multiple games running at full speed and some rendered at higher resolutions than the originals. XPSemu, based on the xemu Xbox emulator, is at Alpha 1 with limited compatibility, though Halo 2 seems to run well. Neither plays directly from original discs, so disc images must be stored on the PS5’s SSD. A third effort, PP, is porting Wine to the PS5 but has no public releases yet.
Reverse-Engineered AMT630A Chip Brings Custom Graphics to Cheap Composite Monitors
Mike Ogrinz of Ogrinz Labs has reverse-engineered the AMT630A, an on-screen display chip found in inexpensive automotive reversing camera monitors with composite input. The chip combines video switching hardware, graphics capabilities and an 8052 microcontroller core. Ogrinz controls it over I2C from an ESP32 and has published an Arduino library on GitHub, allowing custom on-screen graphics beyond what the factory firmware offers. He uses it to display navigational sensor data inside his Robbie the Robot suit to help with maneuvering. In the comments, Ogrinz wrote that he could find no docs online and that picking away at the chip’s features took weeks.
Soda Can Aluminum Becomes a DIY Solder Paste Stencil
Saheen Palayi published an Instructables guide titled Turn a Soda Can Into a PCB Solder Paste Stencil. A 3D-printed tool resembling a pipe cutter gradually presses a utility knife blade into an empty can as it rotates, cleanly separating the top and bottom. The sides are then snipped open to leave a curved aluminum sheet. An xTool F1 Ultra fiber laser cuts the hole pattern directly into the thin aluminum from PCB design files. Hackaday notes that professional stencils are steel, that the wavelength of fiber lasers makes them good at marking and cutting metal, and that the approach is faster than earlier methods such as etching or machining.
Sebastian Lague Plots the Moon, Mars and Earth with a Custom Pen Plotter
Sebastian Lague built a pen plotter from scratch, driven by an Arduino and stepper motors, to draw lunar terrain. He wrote a custom algorithm that converts elevation maps into vector drawings the plotter can render, and applied it to the Moon, Mars and Earth. The design changed over time, moving from a lever arm that raises the marker to a linear method. Lague chose plotting over standard photographs because the Moon is peppered with craters and differing elevations that separate regions, which makes contour-based drawings more meaningful than color-contrasted imagery. Hackaday’s Ian Bos covered the project and noted a multi-colored delta plotter as an example of more complex plotting technology.
Vectron65 Plus Adds a Second 6502 and VGA Graphics to a Homebrew Computer
Nick Bild’s Vectron65 Plus is an entry in the 2026 Retrocomputer Challenge. It builds on his earlier Vectron65, moving the original breadboard design to PCBs with more RAM and enhanced GPIO ports. The system uses a 6502 processor, and a VGA Plus Text Mode card adds a second 6502 as a co-processor and provides 40-column text output. Two versions of the graphics card output 640×480 VGA, with the V2 card carrying double the RAM of the original. Programs can be written in BASIC, and the article mentions running a Hackaday Comment Generator that way. Project details are on Hackaday.io and GitHub.
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