Tinker News

AI is the new screwdriver. A weekly email about people using it to hack, mod and rewire the stuff they own: smart TVs, e-readers, toys, coffee machines.

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AI is the new screwdriver. Tinker is a weekly email about people using it to hack, mod and rewire the stuff they own: old smart TVs, e-readers, toys, coffee machines. Real builds, with links to how they did it. Get it in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy3pce

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@pika_chooo All credit to @pika_chooo. There's no repo or write-up, so start with an old Kindle and a NAS and expect to work out the rest: https://t.co/qQwJ5z6KSS

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy3pce

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An old Kindle that had been sitting unused in a drawer now works as a dashboard, fed by data from @pika_chooo's NAS. The whole write-up is one line in Japanese and a photo, and it says Claude did the setup. Sometimes the spec sheet is a single sentence.

#Kindle #HomeLab

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All credit to u/JMS1717 on Reddit. You'll need a 16GB+ Radeon card (RX 6800 or newer), Linux or Windows with WSL2 and about 30GB of disk: https://t.co/b43O4S8ogz

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy3pce

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Someone built a fully local voice assistant for Home Assistant that runs on their own Radeon graphics card. You can interrupt it mid-sentence and say "now turn it off", and it takes about 230ms from the end of your speech to the first audio.

#HomeAssistant #SelfHosted

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All credit to ahn4jang27 (credited by Hackaday as Bookmari). You'll need Android 10 or later, Bun and a signed-in Claude Code, and it's MIT licensed: https://t.co/cxMKQeBPwK

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy3pce

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

A parcel delivery driver wanted to keep coding between drops, when their hands and eyes were busy but their mouth wasn't. So they built an Android app that turns Bluetooth earbuds into a walkie-talkie for a Claude Code session on their PC. No relay server.

#Android #AI

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@awkward_andyy All credit to awkward andy. No code link yet, but the original post shows it running as a native Android TV screensaver: https://t.co/cWkCVp14pA

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy2RmG

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

A painting on the TV that lives through the day. Codex turns the weather forecast into a story split into hours, and each new hourly scene is made from the original and the last one, so the characters stay the same. Built by @awkward_andyy.

#AndroidTV #AIart

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Juan swapped his Alexa for an ESP32 that talks to Claude, then fed it the household manuals and bills so you can just ask how the dishwasher works. Clever stuff from @arquiguru.

[Juan Pessolani @arquiguru]

Cambié a Alexa por un ESP32 y Claude

Hace todo lo que le pedía a Alexa y más

Controla la música, las luces, el aire, los purificadores, las cámaras y el lavavajillas. Pone temporizadores, anota en la lista de compras y avisa por los parlantes cuando está la comida

Tiene todos los manuales de las boludeces que hay en casa, facturas y los documentos importantes asi que le preguntas sobre algo y sabe

Tambien creé un controlador mas chico para manejarlo touch en vez de hablar y si no lo tengo a mano uso el Home Assistant o un bot de Telegram

Jeff Bezos no existís

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@mr_mr122497 Doing wake word detection on the chip and only then streaming to the Pi is a sensible split. What sort of latency do you get from end of speech to the first spoken word back?

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@itsbiccs A 4 GB Pi 4 running that many services is brave. How much memory is left once Pi-hole, Uptime Kuma and the agent are all awake?

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@icegamingdev Four colours is a neat vocabulary for it. Does the amber light catch the permission prompt reliably, or do the hooks ever miss one?

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@vlady_nyz All credit to vlady. No parts list or code yet, but a Pi 5 and a local model runner are the obvious place to start: https://t.co/sLdewRUStr

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy3pce

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

Meet Hans, a small AI beaver you type to. He answers on a screen and runs entirely offline: Gemma 4 on a Raspberry Pi 5, no internet, no cloud. Built by @vlady_nyz, who says they had no idea about hardware and made the whole thing with Claude Code.

#RaspberryPi #LocalAI

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All credit to Andris Gauračs. You'll need ESP-IDF, a 2.4 GHz network and about an hour of setup. Code and write-up: https://t.co/60idYk6HVp

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy2RmG

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

Three ESP32-S3 boards around a room can tell sitting, squatting, walking and jumping apart from Wi-Fi signal changes alone. A webcam teaches them for about nine minutes, then you can cover it. 79.5% across eight movements, though waving manages 13%. #ESP32 #HomeAutomation

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All credit to jumacabo, who built it in about two weeks. The code isn't public yet, so this one's for studying rather than copying: https://t.co/5pbskZ6sLq

Tinker rounds up builds like this every week. Get the next one in your inbox: https://t.co/kmRMCy3pce

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

A four-floor house now has a live 3D copy of itself as its Home Assistant dashboard. Lights, awnings and the garage door show their real state, and clicking a lamp switches it on. Python scripts built the model from the PDF floor plans. #HomeAssistant #SmartHome

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

@lukebateman_ Nice choice to use live ADS-B rather than a web feed. How far out does the FlightAware stick and antenna pick up aircraft from where you are?

[Tinker News @tinkerdotnews]

@K4KHOMetroATL Thirty minutes is a quick lesson in thermals. Did you try a heatsink or fan on the Pi, or is a cooler spot the plan?