pymergetic on GitHub has created Metal, an experimental UEFI/BIOS freestanding async runtime.
It is not a conventional OS and it is very far from production-ready, but it now boots directly into a persistent interactive MicroPython REPL.
The repository is at https://github.com/pymergetic/metal.
See more in the MicroPython forums.
Bring the productive bustle of ambient coffee shop sounds with you anywhere by building a white noise machine in a cup! This project uses the Adafruit Audio FX Board to play a 30 minute audio file on repeat. The circuit is battery powered with the help of a lipoly backpack, which also allows for convenient recharging over USB and the easy addition of a power switch. A speaker rests inside the lip of the cup, driven by a class D audio amplifier using a 10K potentiometer for volume control.
The Cup o’ Sound requires no programming and is excellent for practicing your through-hole and free-wire soldering skills. The result is a satisfyingly compact handful of portable sound that can be reused in many contexts or rewired to act as a speaker alone.
Musician filmmaker John D. Boswell, or MELODYSHEEP, published this absolutely stunning tribute back in April using images of NASA’s Artemis II mission:
I dropped everything to put together a tribute to the mission, piecing together the best, highest resolution footage and mission photography with a custom 8 minute score.
Let NASA do all the work filling your digital PyPortal picture frame with images from space!
EMF Camp has recently taken place in the UK. This, every two year, festival/hacker camp sees around 4000 people descend on the grounds of Eastnor Castle UK. It’s an amazing event with all manner of talks, art installations, workshops and indeed partying in Null Sector.
Amongst all this the fabulous Chia, Kliment and Carston pulled together an amazing E‑Sport style FreeCAD speed run challenge in the hardware hacking tent.
This event saw a group of people get together and compete in 3 ten minute rounds each having a unique small FreeCAD project challenge. The idea was that people had to replicate a FreeCAD project from a technical drawing. Round one was a small box with radial fillets on all external and internal edges, round two was a “hexpansion” which is the term for a hexagonal add on for the official EMF badge and the final round was to replicate a Club Mate bottle!
See details in the post here.
Espressif Systems (SSE: 688018) announces that its ESP32-S31 has entered mass production and is now available for purchase.
Designed for next-generation AIoT applications, ESP32-S31 is a high-performance dual-core RISC-V SoC with comprehensive wireless connectivity, making it ideal for smart home hubs, smart speakers, edge AI devices, industrial automation, and more.
ESP32-S31 features a dual-core 32-bit RISC-V CPU running at up to 320 MHz, with one core supporting a 128-bit data path and SIMD instruction set for accelerated computing performance. The chip also integrates a 40 MHz low-power coprocessor, 512 KB of on-chip SRAM, support for high-speed 250 MHz DDR PSRAM expansion, and up to 60 GPIOs.
ESP32-S31 integrates WiFi 6 (2.4 GHz), Bluetooth 5.4 (including LE Audio and Classic BR/EDR), IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee and Thread), and a Gigabit Ethernet MAC. It also supports Matter over both WiFi and Thread.
To support rich human-machine interaction, ESP32-S31 provides interfaces for DVP cameras, multiple LCD display types, and up to 14 capacitive touch channels. Dedicated hardware accelerators (including a JPEG encoder/decoder and a 2D graphics accelerator) help improve multimedia performance, while dual I2S controllers enable hardware-level Bluetooth audio synchronization.
Read more in the release announcement and product page.
A simple 3 button macro pad shared by Arnov Sharma on Instructables:
We’re utilizing PICO as an HID device, adding three mechanical switches to it and an OLED screen to perform COPY PASTE and erase commands.
The idea here was to create a super small macropad that I could use while using Fusion360 and other software that required frequent use of the COPY, PASTE, and DELETE commands. We have also incorporated an OLED screen to provide feedback on which command has been selected
Daniel Lawrence Lu bought an NVIDIA DGX Spark.
It’s actually quite a competent general purpose computer while being super tiny and power efficient. It basically just has an ARM CPU, a decent NVIDIA GPU (with the same number of CUDA cores as the RTX 5070), 128 GB of unified memory, and a 4 TB SSD.
The DGX Spark runs “DGX OS” but it is in fact just plain old Ubuntu 24.04 with some additions. The CPU has a Geekbench 6 score roughly on par with an M3 Pro 14 core and an AMD Ryzen 9 7950X: 2983 single core and 18183 multi core.
Can it run Crysis? It turns out, it can totally run Crysis. The DGX Spark is quite decent at gaming in fact.
So anyway the whole thing is great (price tag notwithstanding):
- it handles my “main PC” use cases, such as light occasional gaming, CAD needs (Rhino 3D), and photography workflow
- generates LLM tokens decently for simple coding tasks and automation
- power-efficient and quiet
- looks nice
- whatever doesn’t run out of the box, I can just get AI agents to get it working
See the details in the evaluation here.
pymergetic on GitHub has created Metal, an experimental UEFI/BIOS freestanding async runtime. It is not a conventional OS and it is very f...