
Modos Paper Monitor: Open-hardware E-ink with 75 Hz refresh rate
Why is e-paper still so slow E-paper has traits a regular monitor can’t match. No flicker, no glare in your eyes, the image stays after power is cut, it’s readable in direct sunlight, and viewing angles are excellent. Yet twenty years after the first readers it still hasn’t moved much beyond e-readers, shelf labels, and a handful of expensive monitors. The bottleneck is refresh speed. E-paper has come a long way in two decades – higher resolution, faster updates, more colors for the same money – but none of that has been enough for wider adoption. The fastest panels manage one refresh per second; most are slower. Writing on them feels laggy, and the cursor jumps instead of gliding. The Modos Tech team in Boston tackled both problems at once. FPGA driver board The heart of the kit is an FPGA. Instead of a fixed circuit it can be configured to behave like whatever logic you need. The advantage is speed: image processing runs in parallel hardware rather than step-by-step in code. The configuration Modos loads is called Caster and is open source. Caster drives the panel differently from conventional controllers. It splits the screen into independent regions instead of…
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PrusaSlicer 3.0 is out. No stone has been left unturned, and that’s a good thing.
People have been talking about the new version of the popular slicer PrusaSlicer for ages. Today the time has come—PrusaSlicer 3 is out. It’s still an early preview, so plenty…

This little duck has taken the world by storm. It wittily makes advanced technologies accessible to the public.
Pollen Robotics has unveiled Microduck, a 25 cm bipedal robot with a Rockchip RK3566, fifteen servos, and simulation-trained movements. What’s inside, what it can do, and why the 4–6 month…

Prusa patented a handheld multitool for 3D printing. It prints, melts, and smooths.
When a crack shows up on a print, a gap from poor layer adhesion, or an ugly support scar, you usually grab several different tools. Weld the crack with a…

Weather radar and aircraft radar on one round display
Big update to meteoPlaneRadar v0.6.0. Round 2.1″ display shows clock, planes from adsb.fi, precipitation radar from ČHMÚ or RainViewer, and weather forecast. All settings done in browser, firmware uploaded with…

Network of DIY weather stations measures smoke from Belgium’s largest fire in history
A fire in Belgium’s Hautes Fagnes reserve burned 1,600 hectares, the largest in the country’s history. Amateur sensors in the sensor.community network showed that smoke traveled over 150 km to…

University student builds 3D printer with DIY INDX. Instructions and files are open-source.
Tool changes in a second with practically no waste. That’s what YUDX promises—a toolchanger built by one student and released entirely for free on GitHub. Eight tool heads, a single…

Prusa has updated its entire printer lineup: XL+, CORE One L+, and CORE One+ (Gen 2).
Prusa announced on August 12 a refresh of its entire lineup. The XL becomes the XL+, the CORE One L becomes the CORE One L+, and the CORE One+ is…

Reviving Old Unsupported Devices with AI – AVerMedia Game Capture HD II
The old AVerMedia Game Capture HD II refused to do the one thing I asked – record 640×480 from the picogame engine. Inside it runs a small Linux, and the…

Don’t Throw Them Away! 7 Ideas for Giving Empty Prusament Spools a Second Life
Anyone who 3D prints knows the feeling: the filament runs out, leaving you with a sturdy plastic spool. What to do with it? The new generation of Prusament spools is…

Picogame: a game engine for CircuitPython
Picogame is a 2D game engine for CircuitPython by Vladimír Smitka. A native C core handles rendering, scenes and collisions, while the game logic stays in Python – no compiling,…