Artist’s Concept of NASA’s PRIMA Spacecraft, image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A couple of weeks ago, NASA announced the development of PRIMA (PRobe far-Infrared Mission for Astrophysics, the first space telescope in a new class of missions called Probe Explorers. Launch is set for 2033, which is actually a pretty quick turnaround for NASA. Design work for the James Webb Space Telescope began in 1996 and wasn’t launched until 2021. Teams are hard at work designing and planning PRIMA, you can see the image above for an artists concept.
With a 5.9-foot telescope, PRIMA will conduct deep, sensitive surveys of the universe in far-infrared light, helping bridge the gap between existing infrared observatories, such as NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope, and radio telescopes. By studying radiant energy that only emerges in the far-infrared, PRIMA will address a wide range of questions about the universe. This includes the origins of planets outside our solar system, how galaxies and their black holes have grown and evolved over cosmic history, and how dust and heavy elements have built up in the universe over time – all helping paint a better picture of why the universe looks the way it does today.
Bob Hammell made a visualization for PyPortal that shows aerial imagery capture between two locations:
The view out the window of an airplane will always be captivating. Over the course of a long flight, the landscape below can shift from cities, to mountains, to farmlands and coastlines.
Each glance out the window shows a different scene from the one before, offering a quiet, endless opportunity to catch unique landmarks or casually watch the changing terrain.
The PyPortal Flyover Viewer was designed to bring this viewing experience from the sky down to the desktop.
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We once had a Trinket M0 build fail because the firmware was eight bytes too big. A lot of our CircuitPython build optimization is handling all the error strings and their translations. That is the scale we work at now folks, and now we have a way to keep getting more bytes.
OpenAI released 722 math manuscripts, so we wanted to see whether any of that work could give us a little more room on a board. The company hasn’t disclosed that collection’s dollar cost. We do have some numbers from its earlier work.
One afternoon of agents: the OpenAI papers on one side, Adafruit’s own repos on the other.
Those output tokens would cost about $6.5 million at GPT-6 Astra’s current base rate of $50 per million output tokens. That’s a retail-price comparison though, and OpenAI used a different, unreleased model, and its internal costs likely differ. Inputs, training and other expenses are excluded. That comparison describes September’s effort; the October collection’s cost is still undisclosed. But does the math have any uses?
Good question! We found a connection with overlap packing. The equation is simple: STRAWBERRY + BERRYPIE = STRAWBERRYPIE. When possible, store shared bytes once. Across 51 GFX fonts, our packer saved 3,865 bytes, about 2.1% of bitmap data, with identical rendering. Ordinary greedy packing delivered those savings, soooo the new mathematical bound added nothing in our initial examples. Ah well – BUT WAIT!
The one OpenAI math idea we used: store shared bytes once.
The paper“A Polynomial-Time 2-Approximation for Shortest Common Superstring”, sent us looking in a useful direction, even though the savings came from an existing technique.
Mikey’s roundup covers 17 flash-related pull requests merged from September 10 through October 10, 2026:
Mikey Sklar: 3 merged PRs. Stronger ESP32-C5/C6 message compression and smaller printf and USB-name code on tiny boards. Sources: #11528, #11543, #11546.
Dan Halbert: 7 merged PRs. Storing qstr strings in one blob, smaller ulab operators, tighter translations, and SAMD code savings, with Dan directing, measuring and reviewing Claude’s work. Sources: #11369, #11373, #11403, #11404, #11407, #11410, #11537.
Vladimír Smitka: 7 merged PRs. Smaller mDNS and AES code, removing RP2040 time-zone code, recovering a Pico W linker gap, and trimming float helpers, fonts and property objects. Sources: #11365, #11371, #11379, #11533, #11534, #11535, #11536.
Who freed what, September 10 to October 10, 2026.
Reported savings, board by board
Chart research and original graphic by Mikey Sklar. Redrawn from the PR-reported figures for this article.
These bars add the before-and-after numbers reported in individual PRs. They are not a fresh build measuring the whole month’s combined gain. Revisions and configurations differ: the ESP32-C6 total combines TinyC6 and Feather C6 results, and the Trinket M0 total includes a 204-byte measurement from the related Feather M0 Basic. The ESP32-C5 bar uses the measured Russian-language firmware result, 2,928 bytes, rather than the 3,672-byte translation-generator estimate. Here, 1 KB means 1,000 bytes.
The hatched 4,096 bytes on Pico W are reclaimed linker capacity, not a smaller firmware image. These are space savings; some changes trade speed for size, including #11403‘s ulab operators. Open PRs #11527 (certificate bundle) and #11548 (UARTLogger II) are excluded as of October 10.
We thought the big wins were used up. Then Smitka found Daniel Engel’s hand-written Thumb-1 math routines, first proposed in 2018 and still unmerged. With Smitka’s float helpers already merged, our five-board report shows Engel’s routines freeing about 1.8 KB more per board. Tested float multiply/divide loops took 18% less time on Feather M0; one conversion got slower. We emailed Engel offering help getting it upstream.
Count the extra space once
Engel comparison adapted from Mikey Sklar’s original graphic, with the overlapping savings separated.
For Trinket M0, the report gives 2,972 bytes saved by Engel’s routines. The shared helpers in #11536 had already saved 1,172 bytes. Replacing them gives an additional 1,800 bytes by comparison, rather than adding another 2,972 on top. This compares reported measurements with different baselines; it is not a new combined-build measurement.
We went off looking in some AI mathematics data dumps, and ended up helping get a human’s eight-year-old assembly code into use. I’ll take it.
Think of this like CERN’s particle collider… an enormous instrument for discovering how the universe works, with findings shared beyond the laboratory. Mathematics are in undiscovered territory, we don’t make it, we discover it. These systems help explore it, once the results are checked and shared, people far from the original project can use them.
Credit the discovery (who cares who found it, it was always there)…how to do more is where it’s at. Then let’s compete over who makes it useful to the most people. Pair mathematicians with engineers on the front like of bytes squeezing or whatever. Share the paper, the code, the failed experiment.
And if some of that work helps the firmware fit, we’ll use it to make CircuitPython better and better.
The idea of an exoskeleton, a worn mechanical device that augments human ability, isn’t new. Patents dating back to the 1800’s demonstrate concerted effort to meld man and machine. Sci-fi is littered with them, but until recently, they were mostly the stuff of imagination. Slowly, real, practical exoskeletons have been called into use in manufacturing, warehouses, search and rescue, and even the battlefield. Are we entering the age of the exoskeleton? Ildar Farkhatdinov writing for the conversation thinks so:
Devices like these are called human exoskeletons. They attach to parts of the body to create an external – or “exo” – mechanical structure. This powered frame enhances the wearer’s physical capabilities.
In physically demanding fields, workers are increasingly using these devices during strenuous tasks. IKEA has used SuitX exoskeletons for several years now. These assist warehouse workers with handling heavy materials. Ford, Boeing and Mazda Toyota have also all adopted the tech on some of their assembly lines.
Do you ever feel like someone or something is watching you? In the case of this project, it is! You can use a Fruit Jam running CircuitPython with a USB webcam to display monster eyes that gaze in the direction of motion captured by the webcam. The CircuitPython code utilizes Turbo helper modules to speed up tasks like drawing the monster eyes and checking for new motion in the camera frames.
If you missed this week’s livestream of John Park’s Product Pick of the Week, not to worry, here’s the video. This week’s pick is the DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing! Watch the video to find out about the DC Motor + Stepper FeatherWing, how to use it, a live demo, and more.
Three different spooky tombstone tea-light holders, with an alternative version available without crosses. Accommodates round tea lights up to 40mm diameter. Two-piece construction with fuzzy skin texture. Stones print at 45° angle for optimal surface quality. Base plates use 150% flowrate with Hilbert curve pattern for the fuzzy top layer; lower stone portions must print without fuzzy skin for proper assembly fit. Pre-configured profiles with custom fuzzy skin settings and manual supports provided. Commercial license available via Patreon. By Maxx Design
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!
Zed (@M-Abozaid) published a DNS ad-blocker on GitHub that runs on a $2 ESP32-C3 with no PSRAM. Most ESP32 DNS sinkholes load blocklist domain strings into RAM, which is why they need PSRAM. This one stores each domain as a sorted 40-bit FNV-1a hash in flash and binary-searches it. Over 140,000 domains fit in about 0.7 MB of flash, match in roughly 10 ms, and use about 50 KB of RAM.
The 40-bit width is a deliberate pick. At 141k domains collisions are near zero, and at 537k there is about one over-blocked domain. A 32-bit hash would save 20% of the flash but produce around seven collisions at 250k domains.
There is a UDP DNS sinkhole, a web dashboard at c3adblock.local, WiFi captive portal setup, and OTA updates for both firmware and blocklist. On a 4 MB board, firmware OTA needs two app slots, leaving about 1.3 MB for the list, so roughly 250k domains. The 537k “ultimate” list requires the single-app partition table. A printable case for the C3 SuperMini is included.
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A followup to last year’s Soul Cage vishalsoniindia has another entry in the spooky wearable category.
The Eye Pendant is a wearable electronic pendant with a small round display that shows an animated eye. The eye moves around the screen, looking in different directions and creating the illusion of a realistic eye watching you. It gives the pendant a creepy personality that is perfect for Halloween
EI3LH wrote up two days of Parks on the Air activations in County Kilkenny, Ireland, on ei3lh.eu. Both parks were ATNOs, or all time new ones, meaning nobody had activated them before.
The first was Coill an Fhailtaigh National Forest, IE-0056, one of Ireland’s 16 Millennium Forests. With the park close to closing, the setup was a Yaesu FT-891 and an ATAS antenna at 100 watts on CW. Ten contacts came in 16 minutes, and the session finished with 27 QSOs in an hour and nine minutes, including Tennessee, Washington state and New York.
The next day brought a lunch break test of an Elecraft KH-1 with a battery that had not been charged. Output was around 2 watts. That was enough for four SOTA contacts in Spain, Slovenia, Switzerland and Germany in 20 minutes.
The evening park was Jenkinstown, IE-0057, activated in 11 minutes and finishing at 37 QSOs. EI3LH also made a binaural field recording of the forest birdsong using a Tascam recorder and Roland CS-EM10 earphones, best heard on headphones.
Since 1994 World Teachers Day is honored every October 5. This is a time to celebrate teachers on the anniversiary of a 1966 UNESCO Reccomendation on teachers. Teachers are doing transformative work and they need support! 2026 marks the 60th anniversary!
Under the theme “Standing with teachers: 60 years of protecting the profession, advancing its status and shaping our futures,” the 2026 edition will centre on reviewing the current challenges related to teacher status and the strategies to address them, calling on society and policy-makers to protect, promote and elevate that status.
Every day Adafruit has resources to help Teachers:
We have a special channel on our forums where teachers and academics trade notes: Forum For Educators.
Our Learn Guides make great resources for designing projects or curriculum.
Check out the Adafruit blog for stories and links for teachers.
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.
A phyllotaxis describes a distinct arrangement of leaves some plants form. It is one of nature’s mesmerizing patterns and one that maker Jagi Natarajan is particularly interested in. In this project they created spiraling audio-reactive LED display. It has 89 individual cells each lit by an addressable LED. The project has already gone through two iterations with a third planned sometime in the future.
I’ve been fascinated by understanding patterns that appear in nature, through code. Communing with the inherent emergent patterns that exist in the universe.
The phyllotaxis is one such pattern, the expanding double-spiral shape that appears in the center of sunflowers, succulents, other plants. It’s surprisingly simple code
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!
Hubble has photographed the “Ghost Nebula,” which has eerie, semitransparent flowing veils of gas and dust. The nebula is being blasted by a torrent of radiation from a nearby, blue-giant star. This animation flips between two views from Hubble. The more colorful image is taken in visible light where the glow of hydrogen gas looks pinkish. By contrast, the green-grayish view is in near-infrared light (IR) which only records light reflected off of dust. The nebula becomes more transparent and ethereal when looking at it in the IR, allowing for background stars to become more visible. NASA, ESA, and J. DePasquale (STScI) via NASA
Although this was published by NASA back in 2018, their lists, tips, photos and more pairing the mysteries of our universe with Halloween is still pretty awesome.
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