to our wonderful community, and to a FUN year ahead!Take a look back at the hits of 2025
Be party-ready with Adafruit LED Glasses and custom graphics!
This tutorial will show how to create simple animated pixel art icons (sprites) and upload them to your glasses. This is a great project for kids or folks who are interested in learning to code. We’ve done most of the heavy lifting, so you can do the fun part: making those glasses your own.
Every Wednesday is Wearable Wednesday here at Adafruit! We’re bringing you the blinkiest, most fashionable, innovative, and useful wearables from around the web and in our own original projects featuring our wearable Arduino-compatible platform, FLORA. Be sure to post up your wearables projects in the forums or send us a link and you might be featured here on Wearable Wednesday!
The work of artist Field Kallop transformed when she was challenged to consider the “relationship between the micro and the macro.” Kallop responded with a deep dive into science, religion, mathematics, and more — synthesizing her research in artwork that brings as much from science as it does from spirituality. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:
While studying art history as a Princeton undergrad, Field Kallop was tasked with an assignment that continues to shape her artistic practice today. The prompt was to consider the relationship between the micro and macro, and she thought about the atom and galaxies, two organic structures with the same design despite their vastly different scales.
This experience vaulted the young art historian-turned-painter toward an enduring line of inquiry that reaches into astronomy, physics, mathematics, philosophy, religious iconography, and much more. ….Invoking the approaches of abstract pioneers like Hilma af Klint and Agnes Martin, Kallop cultivates a deeply contemplative practice in which she produces bold, chromatic works that read like mystical color charts. Smooth gradients radiate from one edge to the other through perfectly cordoned rays, circles, and lines. Each piece begins with a precisely measured grid and continues with the artist nesting washes of pigment into the uniform geometries.
Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!
Cameron Coward at hackster.io reports on Matty Benedetto, who built these gargantuan digital calipers that are big enough to measure almost anything.
Every maker needs a set of digital calipers, even if they’re the $20 kind that real engineers and machinists scoff at. Unfortunately, all of those $20 calipers are 6” models and some things happen to be longer than 6”. To address that mismatch, Matty Benedetto of the Unnecessary Inventions YouTube channel built these gargantuan digital calipers that are big enough to measure almost anything.
An Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board measures the distance between the jaws using a ToF (Time-of-Flight) sensor.
Most of the mechanical parts were 3D-printed on ELEGOO OrangeStorm Giga and Bambu Lab H2D machines, with laser-cut acrylic panels for diffusing the display LEDs and for the scale.
Check out the video below and more here. And if you like large things, check out John Parks’ Arduino Grande.
Rob Bruce wanted to share a bit about the keyboard culture at Nuon. The team has cultivated a passionate hobbyist culture around split keyboards.
The Nuon team is heavily distributed, and from frequent communication on Slack to daily coding, there’s a constant need for a high volume of typing. For us and our needs, split keyboards are the Hokas of the typing world. Their science-fiction aesthetic is the product of their hyper-focus on ergonomics. They’re popular here because the ability to comfortably type for long periods of time perfectly aligns with Nuon’s culture of heavy experimentation and optimizing every aspect of our workflow.
Split keyboards aren’t cheap, and that’s a real barrier for curious folks who want to dip their toes in. Worse, the ecosystem is vast. There are so many flavors out there, you can burn through several before finding one that clicks (pun intended). It’s an investment of both money and time.
At Nuon, we’re fortunate to have leadership that walks the walk. Our founder and CEO, Jon Morehouse, is a devoted Kinesis Advantage2 user and has fostered an internal culture that encourages people to explore split keyboards. That encouragement is genuine. He’s even gifted a Kinesis Advantage2 to one of our engineers in India.
The result? Roughly 40% of Nuon employees are avid split keyboard users. That’s not a mandate, it’s organic adoption fueled by curiosity and peer support.
Check out the rest in the article here.
Instructables user wjeng made this rotating table lamp using their 3D printing, laser cutting and woodworking skills and shared the process:
The design is anchored by a central ring-light and crowned with a high-density panel of 684 LEDs, creating a dynamic, rotating visual experience.
Make a Floor Lamp with NeoPixels and WLED Custom Animations
We’ve got so much happening here at Adafruit that it’s not always easy to keep up! Don’t fret, we’ve got you covered. Each week we’ll be posting a handy round-up of what we’ve been up to, ranging from learn guides to blog articles, videos, and more.
Reverse engineered Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5
Sparkle Motion Christmas Tree Lights
Tutorial: Build a WLED Control Button for your LED Projects #adafruit
Catch up with us on the blog, in the Adafruit Learning System, and on YouTube.
New nEw NEWs From Adafruit is an email newsletter sent out once a week to subscribers only. It features new products, special offers, exciting original content, and more. Sign-up NOW for the Adafruit weekly Newsletter here: https://www.adafruit.com/newsletter
One of the big space stories of 2025 was the opening of the Vera Rubin Observatory. It is equipped with the largest digital camera and largest lens ever created! It will capture the skies of the southern hemisphere for the next 10 years.
You can explore fun tools on the site with first looks, and interactive orbit and sky viewers.
Learn more from New Scientist on YouTube:
After decades of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is about to begin a 10-year survey of the southern sky. This enormous telescope has already produced stunning new images of the heavens and discovered thousands of new asteroids. New Scientist got a behind-the-scenes look at the telescope during the first few weeks of its operation.
What are the best science fiction movies of the 21st century? So far, anyhow? Well, Indie Wire has a list that may have some surprises. Of course on the list are some usual suspects like Minority Report, Snowpiercer, and WALL-E, but the list also sports some movies you may not have seen, like Coherence, Memoria, and Hard to Be a God. Here’s more from Indie Wire:
Hard to Be a God
Late Russian director Aleksei German put one of the better arthouse twists on the sci-fi genre with a film that dared to ask, “What would you do in God’s place?” A group of research scientists is sent on a mission to a planet nearly identical to Earth, but where the inhabitants live in an oppressive society that invokes the Middle Ages. As scientists, the men are forbidden to interfere, but when Don Rumata (played by great Leonid Yarmolnik) is recognized as a futuristic god, he’s driven by a need to save a group of local intellectuals from a murderous tyrant.
German created a bleak world (even by Russian standards), but it’s also a wandering, visually rich, and cinematically exciting journey that takes advantage of sci-fi’s ability to ask some deep questions and deliver devastating political commentary.
Blondihacks shared this video on Youtube!
This episode on Blondihacks, I’m showing you how to get started in machining as hobby from nothing! Exclusive videos, drawings, models & plans available on Patreon!
Instructables user mondal3011 runs The World State, a site that uses live data to create art showing the current state of the world, and shared the how over on Instructables:
This idea hit me when I was thinking about how much data is constantly flowing around us. Planes are taking off, markets are moving, the atmosphere is shifting, and millions of news stories are breaking every second. What if I could take all that chaotic energy and freeze it into a single image?
Read more and check out The World State
While NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has been supplanted by the James Webb Space Telescope, the good old Hubble still provides new insights into the universe. Recently, the Hubble has imaged the largest protoplanetary disk ever observed. Here’s more form NASA!
[The disk is] located roughly 1,000 light-years from Earth, IRAS 23077+6707, nicknamed “Dracula’s Chivito,” spans nearly 400 billion miles — 40 times the diameter of our solar system to the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt of cometary bodies. The disk obscures the young star within it, which scientists believe may be either a hot, massive star, or a pair of stars. And the enormous disk is not only the largest known planet-forming disk; it’s also shaping up to be one of the most unusual.
“The level of detail we’re seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging, and these new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected,” said lead author Kristina Monsch of the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA). “We’re seeing this disk nearly edge-on and its wispy upper layers and asymmetric features are especially striking. Both Hubble and NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope have glimpsed similar structures in other disks, but IRAS 23077+6707 provides us with an exceptional perspective — allowing us to trace its substructures in visible light at an unprecedented level of detail. This makes the system a unique, new laboratory for studying planet formation and the environments where it happens.”
The Time Rift Arcade brings the Stanley Narrator to life with this, game-faithful, prop bucket. They pull together a lot of wood working, printing and imported material to make it all perfect. Press the button and an ESP32 powered MP3 player will play a message from The Narrator.
If you’ve played The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe Edition, you already know how absurd (and somehow emotional) the Reassurance Bucket is. It’s just a bucket… sitting on a pillow… on a pedestal… and yet the Narrator insists it’s one of the most important things Stanley will ever experience. So naturally, we had to build one for Time Rift Arcade.
Have more prop fun building a Mystery Box: Crypto Countdown Case with Jon Park and the Adafruit Learning System – This Cold War-era mystery box’s disarm code must be toggled in before the timer reaches zero!
Jim Henson Creature Shop is building a new Fraggle Rock baby Gorg puppet – Adam Savage’s Tested shared this video on Youtube!
For the recently released holiday special The First Snow of Fraggle Rock, the artists and puppeteers at Jim Henson’s Creature Shop were tasked with designing and building a new character to the Fraggle world: a baby Gorg! Adam visits the Creature Shop to learn how this character was brought to life and how Fraggle Rock’s existing Gorg puppets were updated!
Researchers at the University of Arizona Gutruf Lab have developed a wearable device that incorporates artificial intelligence to detect subtle warning signs of frailty in the elderly.
The sleeve simultaneously records and analyzes motion of the wearer and produces an AI analysis. With the device sending just the results, not the actual hundreds of hours of recorded data, transmission is reduced by 99% and the need for high-speed internet is eliminated. Results are transferred via Bluetooth to a smart device. And long-range wireless charging capabilities free the user from plugging in the device or swapping out a battery.
Shared by jabbanman on Printables:
This set includes 1X1, 2X1, and 3X1 LEGO‑compatible ring bodies, provided in US sizes 3–13.5 (0.5 increments).
The studs are printed separately on a sprue and come in multiple diameters so users can fine‑tune the fit. The goal of this design is to let you dial in the printed stud size for a secure connection with LEGO bricks, since tolerances vary by filament and printer.
Press‑fit assembly is intended, but adding a small drop of super glue in each hole is recommended for long‑term stability.
Download the files and learn more
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
SimonSenecky_781731 shares:
Can be used to start growing basil and chili and other plants which need a lot of water at the start.
When reloading a bottle make sure you are quick – it will be sealed quickly (a solution will be added soon – check out Update 1)
download the files on: https://www.printables.com/model/1523306-seedlings-pot-continuous-self-watering-system-pet
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord
Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit
Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting
3D Printing Projects Playlist:
3D Hangout Show Playlist:
Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:
Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:
Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:
Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken
Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil
Ladies and Gentlemen,
As the year winds down … I wanted to thank Lady Ada and her staff (“minions”?) for the
service they provide to the Techno-Geek community. By spreading and
facilitating the fun of electronics, programming, building, and occasionally
exploding things, you guys have provided me (a 70-year “Old F**t”) tons of
learning and enjoyment. And probably more importantly, thanks to you, I
have been able to spread this enjoyment and experience to many young people
in my life (including our robotics Girl Scout Troop (The “Technomancers”).The lesson and “how to use this product” guides are particularly important
for my learning and teaching. And the Forum has been very helpful.Thanks again,
Gary
YFStudio shares:
Vernier caliper hook, with top and bottom snaps, not easy to loosen when taking and placing Compatible with IKEA SKÅDIS pegboard
download the files on: https://makerworld.com/en/models/2139889-vernier-caliper-hook-top-and-bottom-snap-secure-an
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
LIVE CHAT IS HERE! http://adafru.it/discord
Adafruit on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adafruit
Shop for parts to build your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting
3D Printing Projects Playlist:
3D Hangout Show Playlist:
Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:
Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:
Connect with Noe and Pedro on Social Media:
Noe’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/ecken
Pedro’s Twitter / Instagram: http://instagram.com/videopixil
Create your own “mad-eyed” Cybernetic Santa Claus eye patch! The eye code with robot/terminator style eye animation runs on the Adafruit TFT Gizmo and Circuit Playground Bluefruit or Express.
Some simple crafting with EVA foam sheets make for a stylish, comfortable eye holder.
“Ho-ho-ho. Get to da reindeer!”
Check out the full guide from John Park!
Projects like this are why we champion open-source. A fully analog tachometer relay built by supunmsw and shared instructables shows how you can be efficient without going digital.
As an Engineering Executive in a graphite mining and processing company, I’m constantly surrounded by rotating equipment—fans, pumps, and conveyors. I’ve seen multiple incidents and inefficiencies caused by these machines running below their required Rotations Per Minute (RPM).
I needed some extra holiday spirit in the workshop, so here’s a quick Sparkle Motion NeoPixel strand Christmas Tree! Here’s the Learn Guide to make your own (in case you’ve got some spare NeoPixels and a Sparkle Motion on hand).
The Sparkle Motion board running WLED makes it easy to set up great looking lighting and animation, plus, there’s no soldering involved, just plug and play your way into the holidays.
Read more at Sparkle Motion Christmas Tree Lights
Shawn Hymel takes a look at real time operating systems for hardware focusing on Zephyr and FreeRTOS.
Every time I mention Zephyr, I inevitably get a few responses along the lines of “just use FreeRTOS.” I admit, FreeRTOS is amazing, but it might not be the right tool for the job. In the rest of the post, I’ll analyze each to hopefully help give you a better idea of what kinds of jobs each is better suited for.
The first question you should be asking is if you even need a real-time operating system (RTOS). I covered this in a previous post, but the basic answer is that if your embedded project is complex enough, it might be worth looking at using an RTOS.
At a basic level, an RTOS gives you deterministic scheduling, task isolation, synchronization primitives, and timing guarantees. Many modern embedded systems demand more than just a scheduler, especially once connectivity, security, portability, and long-term maintenance enter the picture. Connectivity, security, portability, and long-term maintenance often end up mattering just as much as real-time performance.
See the analysis in the post here.
A fun Christmas coding project using the Sense HAT from Raspberry Pi:
Count down to Christmas with your Sense HAT! Your digital advent calendar will display a new image each day between 1 and 24 December.
Christmas sounds different across the globe. While some may be singing carols, somewhere else may be crooning to jazz, and elsewhere may be enjoying a parranda. NPR shares what musicians from NoLa listen to this time of year.
When you think about music in New Orleans — you probably think of jazz or blues, or maybe funk and bounce.
Christmas carols? Not so much.But many musicians in New Orleans have deep roots in the church.
Since it’s that time of year, Rosemary Westwood from member station WWNO asked a few of the city’s favorite musicians about the songs they like to listen to around Christmas.
Michael Klements has built a low-power SSD NAS around a Raspberry Pi 5. The Pi 5 NAS offers flexible storage options, a stats display, and custom carbon fiber panels. It uses both 2.5-inch SATA SSDs and NVMe storage drives.
I’ve used OpenMediaVault (OMV) as the NAS operating system, and I’ll run some real-world tests on the NAS to evaluate real-world performance across different drive options.
Two carbon fibre side panels support the 2.5-inch drives and the acrylic base for the Pi stack. A clear acrylic top panel holds a fan above the Pi’s heatsink, with a carbon fibre accent piece tying it into the side panels. A black acrylic front panel houses the OLED display. The layout is designed around easy of assembly and providing airflow to the drives and Pi.
See the video below and more in the post here.
Bruce Vaughn, President and Chief Creative Officer of Walt Disney Imagineering, and Natacha Rafalski, Présidente of Disneyland Paris, introduced at Disneyland Paris a next-generation robotic character representing Olaf, the beloved snowman from Walt Disney Animation Studios’ Frozen.
From the way he moves to the way he looks, every gesture and detail is crafted to reflect the Olaf audiences have seen in the film — alive, curious, and unmistakably himself.
Details from an arXiv paper show Olaf having at least three computers including a Jetson and a Raspberry Pi.
Read more in the article here.
Did you ever want to feel like one of The Littles assembling a LEGO Christmas Tree? Ruth Amos and Ellis Ware on YouTube achieved this specific goal and nabbed an equally specific Guinness World Record along the way. I love the concept of taking lego instructions and just sizing up.
See more an YouTube:
Once upon a time, science fiction writer Harlan Ellison wrote a story called Phoenix Without Ashes, based on a TV show he created with Ben Bova. The story starts when Devon is exiled from the Amish community he has called home for his entire life. Once exiled, Devon discovers a metal passage that leads him to a shocking discovery: he’s been on a spaceship the entire time. Specifically he’s on a generation ship, adrift in space so long that many don’t even know the nature of their reality. Here’s more on generation ships from Centauri Dreams:
If you want to explore the history of generation ships in science fiction, you might start with a story by Don Wilcox. Writing in 1940 for Amazing Stories, Wilcox conceived a slick plot device in his “The Voyage that Lasted 600 Years,” a single individual who comes out of hibernation once every century to see how the rest of the initial crew of 33 is handling their job of keeping the species going. Only room for one hibernation chamber, and this means our man becomes a window into social change aboard the craft. The breakdown he witnesses forces him into drastic action to save the mission.
In a plot twist that anticipates A. E. van Vogt’s far superior “Far Centaurus,” Wilcox has his ragged band finally arrive after many generations at destination, only to find that a faster technology has long ago planted a colony there. Granted, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had written about generation ships before Wilcox, and in a far more learned way. Fictional precedents like Laurence Manning’s “The Living Galaxy” (Wonder Stories, 1934) and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) imagined entire worlds as stellar wanderers, but we can give Wilcox a nod for getting the concept of generations living and dying aboard a constructed craft in front of the public. Heinlein’s “Universe” wouldn’t appear until 1941, and the generation ship was soon to become a science fiction trope.
Hollywood has produced many great science fiction movies written for families: E.T., WALL-E, Star Wars, that sort of thing. These are movies designed to appeal to the whole family. But science fiction movies that are made specifically for younger children are few and far between. So how do you go about writing science fiction for children? Here’s more from Sci-Fi Bloggers:
WondLa is what a children’s television series should aspire to be. It’s kid-friendly but doesn’t disrespect its audience. It uses tropes but doesn’t fall into them completely. Despite having a very fleshed-out world to build, it doesn’t stop and shove exposition. At every point in the first three episodes, you are expected to pay attention to small details and look for answers to its many mysteries.
…
And if that wasn’t good enough, WondLa also has a great premise—at least from what I currently know is going on. It’s a classic Rapunzel situation with a sci-fi twist. Our main character—a girl named Eva, who we see grow up until she’s 16—is isolated to a small underground chamber where she’s raised by A.I.s and told she’ll eventually get to meet with other humans. But it’s implied (though not confirmed) that the system is faulty and won’t actually let her out. She may be trained in survival, science, math, and so much more in preparation, but has no understanding of how to interact with people and doesn’t quite know to distrust anything that’s presented to her. Until—as you can obviously guess—stuff goes wrong, and she has to leave the shelter to a new world.
Instructables user ylin63 made ARCANA capsule to “bridge the physical and digital worlds”, making a digital Tarot deck that maintains your personal touch:
It sits on your desk like a magical artifact. To use it, you simply press the little wing on the side. The device lights up with a pixel symbol, and simultaneously, the full card reading appears on your phone’s web browser.
Use the Circuit Playground Snow Globe Kit and Make Code to whip up a magical snowscape this winter season! Follow along with Liz Clark on the Adafruit Learning System.
Although people may have mixed feelings about snow, I think we can all agree that snow globes are pretty sweet. You can make one that’s even sweeter than the average globe using a Circuit Playground Express board and MakeCode to have a musical NeoPixel orb of holiday fun!
While you can find Adafruit on TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, X, Threads, Mastodon, Bluesky and LinkedIn, most of you are following along on Facebook, Instagram and X. Thanks, we like sharing all the things with ya! Let’s take a walk down memory lane and dig up what we experienced together this past year on Facebook, Instagram and X:
10: Sounds like something cool is coming along… more soon
9: We shared a blog post about how to turn off Slack AI settings and a couple weeks later in early July the converstation continued over on Facebook and Instagram. Here’s the guide we published in the Adafruit Learning System
8: UPDATED GUIDE: Adafruit 2.9″ eInk Display Breakouts and FeatherWings Here’s the guide we updated. Did not realize y’all were so into eInk display breakouts and featherwings!
HI ALL! Did not plan to posting today, but can help some folks out and suggest they check out the about page for info about Adafruit because of something they saw on Twitter and had questions about where we are located, etc. (USA) (Tariff related, probably -pt)
5: Back in October we dug up some photos of our visit to the White House and it was a hit on Facebook, Instagram and X
4: We also spoke about Qualcomm’s Latest AI Play which got your attention on X and Facebook
3: Instagram has been LOVING our USB MIDI Keyset Controller guide
2: Over on X we talked about Arduino’s post reframes the backlash as a misunderstanding, but it skips every issue raised 
1: Tariffs ruled across Instagram, X and Facebook. Tariffs just got real: our first $36K bill with 125% + 20% + 25% markup hits hard 
Here’s the post on the blog.
