Embedded Systems

🛸 Drone With Only One Motor This open-source drone uses a single motor and a hinged propeller to control pitch and roll, reducing mechanical complexity while relying on sophisticated software. Features of the project: ➡️Single-motor flight control ➡️Custom flight controller firmware ➡️Encoder-based motor control ➡️Infrared heading estimation The project combines 3D-printed mechanical components, real-time control systems, and custom electronics to demonstrate a compact, unconventional drone d…

📺 Creating the invisible earphones from scratch The author built a pair of custom invisible wireless earphones by completely modifying a pair of wireless earbuds. One earphone was molded to fit inside the ear using silicone and clear resin, while the second was miniaturized and built into a pen as a tiny wireless microphone. The original electronics, touch controls, and charging case were modified to fit the new designs. The project combines reverse engineering, electronics miniaturization, sol…

📱📱 Samsung Firmware Update Bricks Smart Refrigerators Samsung’s Bespoke AI smart refrigerators experienced failures after the latest software update. Affected units, reportedly including many four-door models from 2024 or later, suddenly lost power or stopped functioning after the update. Some displays became stuck on an update-related message, while SmartThings showed the refrigerators as offline. Samsung said the incident was caused by an error during internal testing of a refrigerator softwa…

🤖 Influencer Takes on Six-Foot Humanoid Robot The 📺 video billed as the first human-versus-robot MMA fight shows influencer Frankie LaPenna facing a six-foot T800 humanoid robot developed by Chinese company. The event took place in 🇺🇸 San Francisco on 18th of September. The dramatic footage quickly spread online, though questions were raised about how authentic the fight was. Developed by China-based EngineAI, the robot stands about 1.73 meters tall, weighs up to 85 kg and has 29 degrees of fr…

🧠 Robots Get a Sense of Touch Robots are getting better at complex tasks with vision-language-action (VLA) models, but they still struggle with precise manipulation such as inserting cables, turning keys, or handling deformable objects. Tactile sensing can provide information about force, grip, and slipping, but progress has been limited by the lack of large, diverse datasets. Recent research is addressing this gap by combining touch with vision and robot-action data. Berkeley researchers crea…

🧠 AI Image Generation on an RP2350 Microcontroller This project brings generative AI image generation to a $1 RP2350 microcontroller, as used in the 🍓 Raspberry Pi Pico 2. Its compact model and inference code fit within 4 MB and run using 520 KB of RAM, generating 128×128 RGB face images in roughly 10–20 seconds. Features of the project: ➡️Latent flow diffusion transformer ➡️Five-class conditional generation ➡️Int8 post-training quantization ➡️VGA and USB output The project demonstrates how f…

📊 Report: Inside the $585 billion embedded systems market The embedded systems market was worth an estimated $585 billion in 2025 and is forecast to reach about $857 billion by 2032. Automotive, mobility, industrial, and robotics applications account for more than half of demand, while embedded systems also support billions of connected IoT devices. Development is becoming faster and more flexible through unified toolchains, coding agents, and virtual hardware that allows software to be tested…

🚦 Open-Source UV Protection Amulet The UV Protection Amulet is a hardware/firmware project built around a compact electronic pendant that detects and warns about ultraviolet radiation. The project combines custom PCB design, embedded electronics, and precision-machined metalwork in a highly compact device. Features of the project: ➡️Ultraviolet radiation detection ➡️Custom PCB hardware design ➡️Precision-machined metal enclosure ➡️Open-source firmware and CAD The project is a compelling examp…