
Praveen Kumar Verma
@Alacritic_Super • 10,952 subscribers
FinTech by day. At night I build DIY robots that think with their bodies. Embodied AI, microcontrollers & open-source hardware for makers. DM for collab.
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Don't let the tiny duck fool you… there's a serious robot hiding inside. Meet Microduck from Pollen Robotics. It is a compact biped robot packed with 15 motors, a camera, ToF LiDAR, IMUs, microphones, a speaker and an articulated beak. And the best part? The software is open source. You can create behaviors, train policies in simulation and bring them to the real robot. A tiny duck learning to walk, crouch, grasp objects and recover from falls? That's not just cute. That's a pretty fun robotics platform.
Praveen Kumar Verma359,150 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

You don't need an expensive 3D scanner. Your phone can be the camera. This is the idea behind photogrammetry. You simply take a bunch of pictures of an object from different angles. Then OpenScan processes those images and reconstructs the object as a 3D representation. No expensive 3D scanner needed.
Praveen Kumar Verma219,062 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

The coolest part of Microduck might not be the robot. It's how it learns to move. This repo shows the full reinforcement learning pipeline behind Microduck. The robot learns in simulation using MuJoCo, PPO and GPU-based training, then the trained policy is exported to ONNX and deployed on the real robot. But the real challenge is sim-to-real. The simulation models things like actuator behavior, battery voltage, command delays, friction and even gear backlash. That helps make the learned policy work when it moves from simulation to the physical robot. The repo includes policies for walking, fall recovery, sitting, standing, kicking, ground picking and even roller skating. Train in simulation. Test the behavior. Export the policy. Run it on a real robot.
Praveen Kumar Verma138,017 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

A desk lamp that doesn't just sit there. It has 5 motorized joints, an RGB-D camera for depth sensing, and 45 LEDs for lighting. A Raspberry Pi handles the brains, while Watti Studio lets you create and control lighting and movement scenes. And the future plans get even more interesting when we imagine the upgrades it is heading for. Hand tracking -> 3D scanning -> voice control -> MCP -> autonomous movement Imagine your lamp noticing where you are sitting and adjusting itself and the lighting around you.
Praveen Kumar Verma163,681 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

What if an ESP32-S3 could hear a drone before you could see it? Agam Rossen's VolAnti is an open-source acoustic drone detector built around an ESP32-S3, four MEMS microphones, e-paper display and LoRa radio. It analyzes the harmonic signature of spinning propellers instead of looking for radio signals, making it interesting for detecting fibre-optic FPV drones that can leave the radio spectrum silent. The concept could be useful for perimeter monitoring, wildlife & environmental monitoring, industrial site awareness, event security, search and rescue operations and early-warning sensor networks, especially where visual detection or conventional radio-based detection is difficult. The creator reports 104 m measured detection, 0.23 s alert latency in its fastest detector, and roughly 18–22 hours of battery life. What I really like is how much signal processing, embedded hardware and wireless communication has been packed into a small device. Would you build an acoustic sensor like this?
Praveen Kumar Verma92,271 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Building a robot dog? This ESP32 board was made for it. Petoi Biboard is an ESP32-based development board designed for multi-joint robots, with up to 12 PWM servo outputs built right in. It also includes an onboard IMU for balance and motion sensing, wireless connectivity, expansion interfaces and audio features. The BiBoard V1 adds features such as a voice command module, speaker and Raspberry Pi support. What makes it especially interesting is the software ecosystem. The board works with Petoi's open-source OpenCat framework, giving developers a solid starting point for building quadruped robots instead of creating everything from scratch. An ESP32, 12 servos and open-source robotics software. That's a pretty good starting point for building your own robot dog.
Praveen Kumar Verma77,546 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

What if you could run ESP32 firmware without touching a physical board? Espressif's open-source ESP Emulator lets you run firmware binaries for chips including the ESP32-C3, C6, H2, P4, S3, and S31. You can even try it in your browser. Upload a merged firmware ".bin" file and watch the emulator run, with a live view of the console, CPU registers, memory and GPIO activity. For embedded developers, this opens up new ways to test firmware, debug execution and experiment before moving to hardware. Would you trust an emulator to test your next ESP32 project before flashing a real board?
Praveen Kumar Verma12,751 просмотров • 7 дней назад

Honestly, seeing vision models applied to real-world spaces like this is amazing. This rover rolls through vineyard rows, tracking every subtle environmental shift with an affordable camera setup. Every single pass updates a shared 3D record, creating a highly detailed visual history for us and AI to study. We talk a lot about digital worlds but seeing computer vision map and understand the physical world in real-time is where the real magic happens. By NormaCore
Praveen Kumar Verma11,726 просмотров • 9 дней назад

What if you could give a robot a sense of touch for around $5? That's what makes eFlesh so interesting. It is a low-cost, 3D-printed tactile sensor that uses magnets and a magnetometer to sense contact, force and slipping. Put it on a robotic gripper and it could tell when an object is starting to slip, then adjust its grip instead of relying only on cameras. Cheap tactile sensing could make it much easier to add touch to robotic hands, grippers and other parts. Would you put a $5 tactile sensor on your robot? What would you make it do? Developed by Venkatesh, Lerrel Pinto and team
Praveen Kumar Verma21,321 просмотров • 20 дней назад

What if you could program an ESP32 just by chatting with it? Espressif's ESP-Claw brings an AI agent framework to ESP32 devices. You can describe what you want your device to do, and the agent can use tools and dynamically loaded Lua code to turn that idea into hardware behaviour. It supports MCP, structured memory, event-driven actions, and messaging through platforms like Telegram. Imagine telling your device to monitor a sensor, switch on a fan when the temperature rises, or trigger an action when an event occurs. The interesting part is bringing AI agents closer to the actual hardware, on affordable embedded boards. What would you ask an ESP32 AI agent to build first?
Praveen Kumar Verma14,632 просмотров • 13 дней назад

Turn an ESP32-C3 into your own desktop flight radar. ✈️ Micro-radar is a fun open-source project that displays live nearby aircraft on a circular display using flight data from the OpenSky API. Topics Covered - ESP32-C3 firmware - Wi-Fi networking - REST API integration - JSON parsing - Embedded graphics - Circular LCD displays - Real-time data visualization - Arduino development - 3D-printed enclosure design Why It's Worth Building - Learn embedded networking with real-world APIs - Build a polished desktop gadget - Explore embedded UI design - Easy to customize with your own data sources - Fully open source It's a great example of how embedded systems, cloud APIs, and clean hardware design can come together to create a practical project.
Praveen Kumar Verma67,567 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

What If Your ESP32 Could Run Real 3D Graphics Without a GPU? 🤯 Jet is a tiny C++17 software 3D rasteriser built for constrained hardware like the ESP32 and STM32. - Runs entirely in software - Integer-only rendering - Native RGB565 - Flat, Gouraud and Phong shading - Affine and perspective-correct textures - Z-buffering and backface culling - Optional CRT, bloom and motion-blur effects - Designed for displays like ST7796 & ILI9488 On an ESP32-S3, Jet can render around 40,000 triangles/sec, with up to about 650 visible triangles at 60 FPS on a 480×320 display.
Praveen Kumar Verma54,709 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

What if your ESP32 could send messages kilometres away without Wi-Fi or a mobile network? This uses an ESP32 with an SX1278-based LoRa module to build a simple point-to-point text communication system. The LoRa link runs at 433 MHz using Chirp Spread Spectrum. The receiver displays messages on a 16×2 LCD, while the ESP32 can also send data to ThingSpeak over Wi-Fi. In urban testing, the link remained usable up to roughly 1 km. No gateway. No cellular network. Just two small nodes talking directly. Now imagine putting these nodes on robots, sensors, or remote stations. What would you build if you had a 1 km wireless link with no infrastructure?
Praveen Kumar Verma13,023 просмотров • 16 дней назад

Want to Actually See How an ESP32 LoRa Network Works? I built an interactive explainer that lets you follow a sensor reading through the whole network. You can watch the packet move from ESP32 → SPI → radio → chirps over the air → mesh relays → gateway → Wi-Fi/MQTT → ACK. You can also drag nodes around, change the spreading factor and see what happens when packets collide. Instead of just reading about LoRa, you can actually see what is happening at every step. Great way to understand LoRa, mesh networking and wireless communication.
Praveen Kumar Verma18,428 просмотров • 26 дней назад

This tiny ESP32-S3 packs an impressive amount of hardware into 24mm. The M5Stack ATOMS3R is a tiny IoT controller built around a dual-core ESP32-S3 running at up to 240MHz, with 8MB Flash and 8MB PSRAM. It also has a 128×128 color display, BMI270 6-axis IMU, BMM150 magnetometer, programmable button and IR transmitter, plus USB-C and expansion GPIO. At just 24 × 24 × 12.9mm and 6.8g, this is small enough to disappear inside the project you are building. You can program it with Arduino, ESP-IDF, PlatformIO or UiFlow2, so it is a pretty capable little platform for embedded and IoT experiments. At $17.50, it is the kind of board you can throw into a project just to see what you can build. Tiny board. Full ESP32-S3. Lots of possibilities.
Praveen Kumar Verma30,315 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Every embedded engineer should learn how to solder. Soldering is the skill that turns a box of components into a working circuit. It might feel difficult at first, but once you learn the basics, you will be able to repair electronics, assemble PCBs, replace components & build your own hardware from scratch. As you practice, you will naturally gain experience on through-hole and SMD soldering, flux, solder wire, solder paste, desoldering, hot air rework, and proper solder joint inspection. Don't worry if your first solder joints aren't perfect. Every experienced hardware engineer started with shaky hands and too much solder. Keep practicing. It gets easier with every board you build.
Praveen Kumar Verma42,440 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

What If Your ESP32 Could Listen to Satellites? I found TinyGS and this is such a cool way to get into satellite communications. TinyGS turns low-cost ESP32 and LoRa hardware into a ground station that can receive packets from LoRa satellites, weather probes and other compatible flying objects. You can build a station with boards like Heltec LoRa, TTGO LoRa32, T-Beam or even an ESP32 with an SX126x or SX127x module. ESP32-S3 boards are supported too. Once running, your station can automatically tune for satellite passes and send received data to the TinyGS network, where you can see stations, satellites and received packets from the community. It is a great way to learn ESP32, LoRa, RF, satellite tracking and ground-station technology with relatively inexpensive hardware. Would you build a tiny satellite ground station? Follow along for more ESP32, robotics and embedded projects.
Praveen Kumar Verma18,154 просмотров • 1 месяц назад

Everyone wants to put chatbot on a smart speaker. But if you are building hardware, offline voice AI on $6 range microcontrollers like ESP32 or STM32 is where the real money is made. Why? 1. Zero latency (<100ms response) 2. 100% private 3. Zero Wi-Fi setup needed 4. $0 monthly server costs The best product opportunities are high-frequency, offline physical actions: 1. Hotel room controls (No privacy fears, no Wi-Fi pairing) 2. Industrial tools & workshops (Glove-friendly, dirty hands) 3. Smart appliances out-of-the-box (Zero setup required) 4. Assistive devices & remotes (Works 100% of the time offline) Stop forcing cloud subscriptions onto simple physical hardware. Offline voice is the move.
Praveen Kumar Verma36,221 просмотров • 2 месяцев назад

What if you could pick up an ESP32-S3 and play with it without touching the hardware? I made an interactive 3D ESP32-S3 simulator that runs directly in the browser. You can click GPIO pins to toggle them, lift the shield can, watch the board boot, switch camera angles and even export screenshots. Try it.
Praveen Kumar Verma19,213 просмотров • 1 месяц назад