Print-in-Place Gripper Does It With a Single Motor

https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=8F8gctNCGyE

[XYZAiden]’s concept for a flexible robotic gripper might be a few years old, but if anything it’s even more accessible now than when he first prototyped it. It uses only a single motor and requires no complex mechanical assembly, and nowadays 3D printing with flexible filament has only gotten easier and more reliable.

The four-armed gripper you see here prints as a single piece, and is cable-driven with a single metal-geared servo powering the assembly. Each arm has a nylon string threaded through it so when the servo turns, it pulls each string which in turn makes each arm curl inward,...

A Higher-End Pico-Based Oscilloscope

Hackers have been building their own basic oscilloscopes out of inexpensive MCUs and cheap LCD screens for some years now, but microcontrollers have recently become fast enough to actually make such ‘scopes useful. [NJJ], for example, used a pair of Raspberry Pi Picos to build Picotronix, an extensible combined oscilloscope and logic analyzer.

This isn’t an open-source project, but it is quite well-documented, and the general design logic and workings of the device are freely available. The main board holds two Picos, one for data sampling and one to handle control, display, and external communication. The control unit is made out...

TrustTunnel is an open-source, high-performance VPN protocol that’s harder to detect and block

Adguard VPN is a commercial VPN solution, but the company has decided to open-source the VPN protocol and named it TrustTunnel. It’s described as a modern, secure, mobile-optimized VPN protocol. Since there are plenty of VPN protocols, including WireGuard and OpenVPN, it felt redundant at first. But AdGuard explains that those are easy to detect and block at the network level, and methods to conceal VPN traffic, such as wrapping VPN data in a TCP connection, often reduce speed. TrustTunnel relies on a different method and blends in with regular HTTPS traffic through TLS-based encryption, and HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 transport....

PicoIDE – An open-source hardware IDE/ATAPI drive emulator for vintage computers (Crowdfunding)

PicoIDE is an open-source hardware IDE/ATAPI drive emulator based on a Raspberry Pi RP2350 board and designed to replace hard drives and CD-ROM drives in vintage computers with microSD card storage. Users don’t need to burn optical discs or deal with old IDE hard drives with bad blocks, and instead, they can simply put their disk images on a microSD card and swap between them as needed. Two versions are offered, namely the PicoIDE Base featuring full IDE/ATAPI emulation in a standard 3.5-inch enclosure with a microSD card slot, and CD audio output, and the PicoIDE Deluxe, adding an ESP32-C3-based...

Compact SMARC module combines Linux, AI, and vision on i.MX 8M Plus

Variscite has introduced its first SMARC compatible SoM family with the VAR-SMARC-MX8M-PLUS, built around NXP’s i.MX 8M Plus processor. The module is designed for compact embedded and industrial systems that combine AI and vision processing with extended connectivity and integrated security. The module is built around the NXP i.MX 8M Plus processor, featuring a quad-core […]

Tria launches Linux-ready OSM-LF-IMX95 45 × 45 mm module

Tria Technologies has launched the OSM-LF-IMX95, a compact Open Standard Module based on the NXP i.MX 95 applications processor. The module targets low-power edge and industrial systems that require high compute density, advanced security features, and flexible I/O in a small, solder-down form factor. The OSM-LF-IMX95 follows the OSM 1.2 specification in a Size-L form […]

DietPi January 2026 Update Introduces Uptime Kuma, ownCloud Infinite Scale, and Debian 12 Baseline

The January 25, 2026 release of DietPi v10.0 introduces new self-hosted services, drops legacy platform support, and raises the minimum supported Debian version to Bookworm. The update adds Uptime Kuma and ownCloud Infinite Scale to the DietPi software catalog, with a focus on long-term maintainability and SBC compatibility.   DietPi: DietPi is a lightweight, Debian-based […]

DSTIKE AI Home Security Sidekick – ESP32-S3 hacking tool with Wi-Fi, display, camera, and voice interaction

DSTIKE AI Home Security Sidekick, nicknamed “Eve,” is an ESP32-S3-based AI-powered hacking tool with a display, camera, audio interaction, USB, and a built-in battery for portable use. The device is designed by Travis Lin, well known for his deauther watches like the Deauther Watch V4S and the Deauther Watch X, but now they have designed a Home Security Sidekick with a 2.0-inch LCD, a 2MP camera for basic computer-vision tasks, and an onboard microphone and speaker for voice interaction. It supports real-time Wi-Fi deauthentication attack detection through 802.11 management frame analysis, includes a USB Type-C port for charging and firmware...

Fusion HAT+ Review – Adding AI voice and servo/motor control to Raspberry Pi for robotics, Smart Home, or education

SunFounder has sent me a review sample of the Fusion HAT+ Raspberry Pi expansion board designed for motor and servo control using audio interactions with its built-in microphone and speaker, as well as LLM models. It can be used as an AI-enabled robot controller, a smart home hub, a voice assistant, or an interactive learning platform. In this review, after an unboxing and going through the installation of the Fusion HAT+ on a Raspberry Pi 5 2GB, I’ll mainly focus on the voice interaction part using text-to-speech (TTS), speech-to-text (STT), and local and cloud-based LLMs and VLMs, and also quickly...

Name that Ware, January 2026

The Ware for January 2026 is shown below:

Enjoy!

[update: added photo of top side, since the ware was already guessed – just for more enjoyment]