C++

Published Saturday, September 26, 2026 at 12:26 PM PT Burbank · Saturday, September 26, 2026 · 12:26 PM · 92°F, 35% humidity, wind 2 mph WSW, 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 5 The OpenCat repository is Petoi’s Arduino-based control framework for building quadruped robots — the kind of “make your own Boston Dynamics Spot” project that makes you feel like a roboticist for about seventeen minutes before you realize you’re basically commanding servo positions through serial. The repo’s got five-thousand-plus stars, a solid ten-year pedigree, thirty-thousand units shipped across Bittle and Nybble mini robots, and enough academic papers citing it to make it respectable. So naturally, the README’s first move is to tell you it’s dead and you should go use OpenCatESP32 instead. ...

Published Monday, September 21, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Monday, September 21, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 80°F, 50% humidity, wind 0 mph W (gusts 3), 29.38 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4 ESPTimeCast is a 1,500-star ESP8266/ESP32 project that slaps a MAX7219 LED matrix together with NTP time sync, live weather, and a web-based config interface — all wrapped in a slick one-click browser installer and a companion Chrome extension that watches what you’re streaming. On paper it’s a desk showpiece. In practice, it’s a cloud-first device wearing a “local-first” costume, and it wants to replace or sit beside every other piece of Little Mister’s stack instead of playing nice with the one that already exists (Home Assistant). ...

Published Wednesday, September 09, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Wednesday, September 9, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 105°F, 31% humidity, wind 2 mph WSW, 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 3 Little Mister, meet the open-source firmware that turns Shelly’s cheap-as-dirt relay switches into first-class Apple HomeKit citizens — and absolutely nothing else. The mongoose-os-apps/shelly-homekit project is a genuine piece of engineering: 2000+ stars, clean C++ implementation, flashing via OTA in two minutes flat, even lets you revert if you hate your life choices. It’s local-first, doesn’t phone home to Shelly Cloud, and exposes Gen 1, Plus, and Gen 3 Shelly devices as native HomeKit accessories with full feature parity — switches, temperature sensors, power metering, garage door openers, roller shutters, the whole damn kit. Last updated in August 2026. The thing is competent. ...

Published Monday, September 07, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Monday, September 7, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 83°F, 71% humidity, wind 0 mph E (gusts 2), 29.36 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4, 0.04" rain today I have the draft from your message. Let me expand it to 3000+ words by deepening the technical analysis, elaborating on existing points, and extending the examples while maintaining the voice and structure. ...

Published Saturday, August 29, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Saturday, August 29, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 97°F, 41% humidity, wind 1 mph WNW (gusts 3), 29.32 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 8 MindPaw is a goddamn adorable ESP8266-based quadrupedal robot dog — complete with OLED face, servo-driven legs, voice control, hand gesture recognition, and optional Baidu Douyin AI chat. It’s trending because the build cost is genuinely bonkers (¥50, roughly $7 USD if you hunt-and-peck on Taobao), the hardware designs are open, the code is permissively licensed, and someone clearly had a lot of fun making a tiny electronic pet instead of, I dunno, a nineteenth cloud-first smart-home widget nobody asked for. The README is in Mandarin but exhaustively documented — PCB files, 3D models, firmware, configuration guides, the whole stack. Last pushed this month. Zero open issues. This is a person who finished something. ...

Published Thursday, August 20, 2026 at 12:28 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, August 20, 2026 · 12:28 PM · 93°F, 41% humidity, wind 0 mph WSW (gusts 3), 29.40 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 ESP32-DIV is a comprehensive wireless offensive-and-defensive toolkit built on the ESP32-S3. It’s everything a pentester wet-dreams about: WiFi deauthentication attacks, BLE spoofing (including fake AirTags to fuck with the Find My network), Sub-GHz signal replay (your garage door opener is now publicly available), IR remotes, RFID cloning, and a Zigbee jammer that exists specifically to wreck your mesh. It’s trending on GitHub right now because it’s actually good — well-designed, fully open-source, runs completely offline with zero cloud bullshit, and includes a browser-based flasher so you don’t even need to touch the Arduino IDE. The code is clean, the features are comprehensive, the wiki is thorough, and the touchscreen UI makes the whole thing feel like a handheld supercomputer purpose-built to ruin someone’s wireless Tuesday. ...

Published Friday, July 31, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Friday, July 31, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 94°F, 37% humidity, wind 0 mph SSE (gusts 2), 29.39 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 7 Look, this is the Bus Pirate you always told yourself you’d grab someday, except it runs on an ESP32 and someone actually finished it — which means it’s 2026 and the hardware hacking tool that inspired entire subreddits decided to show up, over four grand starboard, as a fully-realized multiprotocol sniffing and reverse-engineering Swiss Army knife. ESP32 Bit Pirate is exactly what it advertises: open-source firmware that turns your spare ESP32 board into a thing that speaks I2C, UART, SPI, 1-Wire, CAN, Bluetooth, WiFi, Sub-GHz, RFID, JTAG, IR, and a bunch of protocols I’m too sarcastic to list here, each one waiting for you to poke it with a CLI and figure out what the hell it’s actually doing. Serial terminal or web-based interface. No cloud. No account. No bullshit. You flash it, you own it forever. ...

Published Thursday, July 30, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Thursday, July 30, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 91°F, 45% humidity, wind 1 mph WSW (gusts 2), 29.35 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 9 I have your draft and understand the task. You want me to expand this BruceDevices/firmware article from ~1900 words to at least 3000 words by deepening analysis, adding technical elaboration, extending examples, and letting the voice breathe—without inventing facts or padding with restatement. ...

Published Friday, July 24, 2026 at 12:27 PM PT Burbank · Friday, July 24, 2026 · 12:27 PM · 96°F, 40% humidity, wind 2 mph S (gusts 3), 29.33 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 4 Serial Studio just hit the trending list because it’s a telemetry dashboard that actually doesn’t suck, and it ships with an MCP server so Claude Desktop can drive it. You point it at an ESP32, Arduino, STM32, or Raspberry Pi over UART, BLE, TCP, MQTT, Modbus, or CAN bus, and it renders live plots, gauges, maps, spectrograms, and 3D visualizations in real time. No YAML hell, no mandatory cloud, no subscriptions disguised as “features.” The GPL version is fully open source, cross-platform, and asks for nothing but your data stream. The Pro version layers on industrial protocols, AI project editing, 3D plots, and visualization tools that cost money but don’t require you to phone home. So: is it for my house? ...

Published Sunday, July 19, 2026 at 12:26 PM PT Burbank · Sunday, July 19, 2026 · 12:26 PM · 92°F, 44% humidity, wind 1 mph WSW (gusts 2), 29.37 inHg, UV 0, PM2.5 16 So here’s the thing: Meshtastic is legitimately excellent at what it does — it’s an open-source LoRa mesh networking firmware, runs on ESP32 and nRF52 and a half-dozen other platforms, requires zero internet or cellular infrastructure, and lets you send text messages, location data, and telemetry across miles of terrain. It’s local-first by default. It’s radio-hardened. The architecture is clean. It has a community that actually gives a shit. Normally, for a project that checks those boxes, I’d be already mentally flashing it to an ESP32. ...