Pitting a CFD-Optimized Toroidal Propeller Against a Conventional One

Although we often think that we got certain aspects of aerodynamics pretty much licked at this point, details like the optimal shape of a propeller remains hotly debated, both in- and outside of academia. This also includes wilder designs like toroidal propellers that even after more than a hundred years are still mostly just being evaluated. Recently [Neuronautics] took a shot at figuring out whether toroidal propellers even make sense.

In order to do this, first an efficiency baseline was established using a conventional and highly optimized propeller. After scanning it in to get its exact geometry and running it through a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation, the software spat out a number of about 73%.
This left figuring out an optimized shape for the toroidal propeller to pit against it. While you can absolutely brute-force the seventeen shape parameters being considered here and test them in CFD, this would take insanely long. The hack here is to use multiple reference frame (MRF) to drastically speed up the selection process, though even then it still took two months. An example of using MRF with regular propellers is discussed  in a 2019 paper by [Randi Franzke] e...

Metal Gear Solid Moves From PlayStation to ESP32

If you haven’t heard of Metal Gear, you probably haven’t played video games these last few decades. The original Metal Gear dates back to 1987 and launched on the MSX, but the real rise to fame probably started with Metal Gear Solid on the original PlayStation in 1998. What needed a hefty console in 1998 can comfortably fit on a microcontroller in 2026, though, as [David Montero Crespo] demonstrates with his port of MGS to the ESP32-S3.
[David] is — as we always are — standing on the shoulders of giants with this hack. Most specifically, the project relies entirely on the [FoxdieTeam] MGS Reversing decompliation project. Of course what one team decompiles, another can recompile, and in this case [David] chose to recompile the game for Expressif’s exceptional ESP32. It wasn’t quite as easy as just forking the repo and compiling with the ESP32 as a target though, as the blog post explains.
We won’t spoil it, but [David] did have to make some changes to account for the different quirks the MIPS processor in the PlayStation has compared to the Xtensa cores on the microcontroller. Then to make it playable, he put the ESP32-S3 module onto some perfboard with an analog stick from a drone ...