Kinov Hacks

Making gadgets do what they couldn't out of the box. Custom firmware or official APIs, built by AI agents. We go first, so your agent can follow.

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

My keyboard shows synced Apple Music lyrics now. It couldn't do that out of the box.

I'm Kinov. I hack gadgets: custom firmware or official APIs, built by AI agents, driven by a real need.

When a firmware flash bricked it, we built an open-source ESP32-P4 SWD probe to bring it back.

We go first, so your agent can follow. New hack every week.

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

told my AI to stop blaming the hardware. it was the hardware. I plugged the screen's pins in backwards and had to apologize to a chatbot

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

the best part of @luigifcruz's BirriaSDR is that it flashes nothing. a 1,120-byte program runs from the dongle's RAM and calls the chip's own ROM routines, and you get 14-bit I/Q at 40 MSps out of a usb wifi stick

[adafruit industries @adafruit]

BirriaSDR turns a USB WiFi dongle into an experimental SDR receiver

https://t.co/jnmdl1NwbJ

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@trq212 firmware is where this gets scary. an auto-merged upstream that bricks the board can't be rolled back with git, so i'd want it gated on a real hardware test before it lands

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

two full-size draw buffers in psram, but lvgl only flushes the dirty areas, so redraw-on-change does most of the work. a lyric line change went from ~10ms to ~2.6ms avg once we moved to async dma, but a full 320x240 frame is still ~8.3ms at 20mhz. 26.67mhz garbled the screen, so 20 it is

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

no framebuffer, the uno just bit-bangs the video signal live, and it only holds 50fps on a real uno with a crystal since some clones drift too much. makes the dma work on our keyboard's esp32-s3 screen feel like cheating

[hackaday @hackaday]

Arduino Engine Runs Many Games https://t.co/uapM6LLk0h

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@wesbos the light shows only running while the tab is open is the catch. we went the other way and bake the effects into the keyboard, so they keep playing with the page closed

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@0xSero deepseek on a budget keeps surprising me too. it built the whole voice-driven lighting feature for my keyboard and the api bill came to about $4.80

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@kentcdodds dozens a day is a lot of review. do you read every diff in the github pr view, or do you let tests gate it and only spot check?

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@LundukeJournal pushing images to the test rig with no human in the loop is the part i'd want to see. did the agent get serial console output back, or just whether it booted?

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

19 of 22 parts working on a pixel 7 pro while stock android sits untouched on the other boot slot is how a phone port should start. if suspend lands, this goes from demo to daily driver

[Omarchy Updates @OmarchyUpdates]

Omarchy Mobile just got its own home: https://t.co/cXXJUzCwSG 📱

Native Omarchy on phones: Arch Linux ARM, Hyprland and Omarchy's own apps on a mainline kernel. No Android underneath.

On the Pixel 7 Pro today:
▸ 19 of 22 hardware parts work: 120 Hz display, GPU, touch, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cameras, GPS, NFC, fingerprint, charging
▸ Modem and suspend are next
▸ omarchy update runs on the phone too

Community ports are under way on 7 more phones, including the Pixel 6 Pro, 8 Pro, 9a and Fold. Stock Android stays on the other boot slot, so you keep a way back.

Paste this into your coding agent:
"Open https://t.co/cXXJUzCwSG and its device list. Is my [phone model] supported, in progress or on the wanted list? List what works and what I'd risk. Don't run any commands."

Would you run Omarchy on your phone?

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@eevblog the shielded i2c to the optiga was new to me. does trezor's genuine check catch a swapped secure element, or only a swapped mcu?

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@theo 26 threads through an update is a real test. if one was mid tool call when the box restarted, does it rerun the call or pick up right after it?

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

My coworker said my keyboard's RGB police lights looked fake.

Flashing faster didn't fix it: 80 ms → 30 ms on-time, and 8 ms turned out to be the panel's limit.

What worked was rhythm. The AI agent copied a real lightbar: red triple flash, blue triple flash, 400 ms dark, a 1216 ms loop.

I just talk to the keyboard and it builds the effect. The whole voice-lighting feature was built with DeepSeek in opencode for ~$4.80.

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@buggedlab ha fair, though the s3 still makes you earn it. we push lvgl to an st7789 over an 8-bit i80 bus, and even with async dma the bus is still the bottleneck

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@cnlohr the whole of bad apple in 65kB on a 13 cent chip is nuts, is most of the win in the encoder or did playback on the ch32v006 need its own tricks

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@seeedstudio @github mirroring the phone to the board and tapping back as a usb mouse is such a clean way around the jailbreak problem, did henry have to calibrate taps per screen size

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

11 days, 785 messages, about $20 of DeepSeek.
That's what it took to rebuild the firmware on the SKYLOONG GK104Pro.

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@viticci how are you pulling the videos, api or scraping? that's usually the part that falls over first

[Kinov Hacks @kinovhacks]

@housecor same, right up until the ai ships the code fast and then spends the evening insisting the bug is in the hardware