Alternatives
Products that do what Instant-on tiny ESP32 PC with an editor, compiler, and apps installer does
This started as a "cyberdeck" style crafts project using ESP32-S3, for some retro coding. Then I got carried away and wrote a self-hosted mini C compiler for it. Now I published the whole system that runs it. The core reusable parts are also packaged in Espressif Components Registry as "BreezyBox". So far, this platform lives up to my dreams: instant on, snappy when optimized, flexible with resource allocation. I upgraded to a bigger screeen: Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-7B, 7", 1024x600. It takes some effort to drive it with good speed on the S3, but this sort of challenge is exactly why I…
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- 2IB
Hi HN, After watching a lot of Show HN's here, it's finally my turn to show something. This is the first real project I have shipped, so it is extra special to me. For those who will inevitably ask why I made yet another mockup editor I covered it on our blog (http://blog.mocktailsapp.in/why-build-yet-another-mockup-editor-tm). Not all the features mentioned in that post have been implemented yet. As such Mocktails is pre-beta software and very minimal. It does not even have user accounts or any actual server side component at all for that matter (yet)! Our intention is to build Mocktails…
2012
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Hello all - Inspired by many who build/assemble for their daughters/sons, I took cue and assembled a two-way communication between my son and his friends. Nothing spectacular. Just basic stuff to talk. He is eleven and doesn't have a phone. I wanted him to talk to his friends without an account, a feed, or an algorithm in between, so I built five ESP32-S3 touchscreen units, one per kid. Tap a friend's name, their unit rings. Tap Everyone, they all ring. Each unit dials outbound to a relay I run, so no house opens a port. Audio is uncompressed 16 kHz PCM in 20 ms frames, AES-256-GCM…
Aug 2026 · sundaradnus.ca
- 4CA
CJIT started as a hobby project around Fabrice Bellard’s tinyCC and slowly grew into something much more practical. It is now a small portable C compiler and runner that works across Linux, macOS, and Windows, can self host, and is packaged as a single executable. What mattered most to me was keeping the barrier to entry low. You can take one small binary, drop it onto a system, and compile or run C code using the libraries already available there, without setting up a full toolchain or installing a large stack of dependencies. I find that useful for quick prototyping, testing, auditing,…
Apr 2026 · dyne.org
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A personal website served from six ESP32-S3 microcontrollers: elected load balancer, virtual-MAC failover, OTA with rollback. No cloud, no CDN, no Pi. - Novotarskyi/ivan-bohun
22d ago · github.com
- 6CL
Hi everyone. I've recently released control-components, a C++ library I've been using for most of my embedded projects. It is written in C++17 (with some features from C++20) and uses STL and FreeRTOS under the hood. It contains a lot of building blocks that is commonly used in embedded and IoT projects: finite state machines (FSM), various counters, synchronisation primitives, system loops, sensors, schedulers, HTTP, WiFi, Web GUI, and much more. It also provides GitHub CI workflows for build automation (ccache, various checks). In general, it's a good starting point for an ESP32 project.…
2025 · github.com
- 7IB
I built over 3-4 weeks to solve my own pain point, picking up rust along the way. It has a browser version that works online/offline and cross platform desktop as well. It was a pretty intense sprint. About TreeSnap, well it simplifies this preparation of sharing code with Chat LLMs. In my use case, making o3 via ChatGPT a lot more cost-effective to use for these tasks compared to Cursor: How it works: Select files/folders → generates a single text bundle + ASCII tree Instantly shows per-file and total token counts (list & treemap views) Quickly trim unnecessary files or folders to…
2025 · treesnap.app
- 8WC
I wrote this a few months ago over Winter break. It's the fastest/highest fidelity browser cloth sim I've found, but this codepen (1) is close. I'd love to hear any insights about cloth simulators / spring constraint solvers 1: https://codepen.io/dissimulate/pen/nYQrNP GitHub: https://github.com/mkhan45/clothsim
2023 · cloth.mikail-khan.com
- 9A1
This toy retro synth installs and runs on esp32-s3 or p4 as an ELF file under BreezyBox firmware. It uses my work-in-progress immediate mode TUI library in C. Web-based version via emscripten: https://mini000.itch.io/beeper Source code: https://github.com/valdanylchuk/beeper Demo video running on Tanmatsu (esp32-p4): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCH9XYZ7QB0 The main challenge I was going for was actually to find a nice minimal set of controls for a subtractive synth. Usually there are 40-50 of them in "simple" synths; I ended up with 16.…
Jul 2026 · mini000.itch.io
- 10AS
Hi HN! This is my first game — something I’ve always wanted to do. It’s a small browser game built with Phaser 3, React, and the phaser template (https://github.com/phaserjs/template-react-ts/). I made it in 2 days (like 8 hours in total real time) using gemini-cli. About 90% of the code was generated with AI, but I learned a lot by making fine tweaks. It only works on PC since it’s a typical WASD + R (reload) shooter. I’d love feedback on: - Gameplay (is it fun, too hard?) - Ideas for new features Thanks in advance! ps: I used cubes as a prototype, but now I kind of…
2025 · cubic-zombies.pages.dev
- 11WR
I've been working on a C-based open source sound engine as part of a book project and wanted an approachable way for people to try it out without having to build anything. Through the magic of emscripten (which I'm totally amazed by) and miniaudio (which has given me new life late in my development career), and a smidge of vibe-coded HTML/JS (web-dev is not my jam), this page will let you try out the tooling. I gave a lightning talk on the ASCII notation at ElixirConf EU last month here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnJ0osgiqWM There's a work-in-progress tutorial for…
May 2026 · octetta.github.io
- 12WM
Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai
- 13E
Hello everyone, A couple of months ago I was introduced to Excalidraw and fell in love with it instantly. The only thing I didn't like was that I couldn't easily save my whiteboards and had to put everything in one whiteboard which started to lag my PC after a while. So I made ExcaliHub. It's exactly as it sounds: a hub for Excalidraw. It's free, open source, and I aim to keep it that way. Thanks in advance for any feedback!
2024 · excalihub.dev
- 14LF
Hi HN, I just wanted to share what I have been working on for the past few months: A firmware analyzer for embedded Linux systems that helps uncovering security issues running entirely in the browser. This is a very early Alpha. It is going to be rough around the edges. But I think it provides quite a lot of value already. So please go ahead and drop a firmware (only .tar rootfs archives for now) and try to break it :)
Mar 2026 · xray.boldwark.com
- 15SH
This is my hobby C compiler project. Decided to publish the code today, as it finally compiled itself. The readme on the linked GitHub page has a bit of information on how it works. I wrote the thing for fun, but if anyone gets a better understanding of the dark corners of C because of it, I am happy.
2022 · github.com
- 16IM
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com
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- 18TS
Merry Christmas HN! Tinykit is a self-hosted, self-contained alternative to Lovable/Replit/v0 designed for building small personal utility and CRUD apps (basically a "tiny app studio”). It includes realtime/auth/files (via PocketBase), an embedded dev environment, content and design fields, automated backups, and an AI agent that can work across all of them. You can connect multiple domain names (or better, a wildcard subdomain) to build and deploy 100+ apps on the same server, each hosted at its own domain name. The builder/studio runs on the same Pocketbase…
Dec 2025 · tinykit.studio
- 19IB
Hey HN! Last week I was working on a website and needed a way to synchronise visuals with live music. I've used MIDI controllers for this before, but I am travelling right now and don't have mine with me. So I had the crazy idea to build a browser extension that uses the keyboard as input and includes a sequencer. I gave myself 24 to work on it. It ended up taking longer (of course), specially since I ended up creating a demo, a small landing, docs, and an intro video. Took me one week from idea to launch (pushed quite a bit tbh). Features: - Works as a browser extension. Atm distributed…
2024 · minitap.io
- 20LS
Earlier this year, I took a month to reexamine my coding habits and rethink some past design choices. I hope to rewrite and improve my FOSS libraries this year, and I needed answers to a few questions first. Perhaps some of these questions will resonate with others in the community, too. - Are coroutines viable for high-performance work? - Should I use SIMD intrinsics for clarity or drop to assembly for easier library distribution? - Has hardware caught up with vectorized scatter/gather in AVX-512 & SVE? - How do secure enclaves & pointer tagging differ on Intel, Arm, & AMD? - What's…
2025 · github.com
- 21IV
It took me about a week to vibe code this 3D game engine with Opus 4.6 that I intend to use as a replacement for Three.js and React Three Fiber in my browser MMORPG, Mana Blade. I was not expecting to be able to reach that point so easily, but pretty much every feature took somewhere between 30 minutes and 1 hour - 1 to 3 prompts on average. It is vibe-coded in the sense that I haven't looked at the code, but I am very careful with my prompts and constantly have Claude reviewing the codebase, looking for performance and code quality improvements. It can reach 2000 draw calls on recent…
Feb 2026 · github.com
- 22VB
Hi HN! A month ago, I realized I was wasting ~40 minutes every day staring at “Generating…” bars on v0, Lovable, and Bolt—enough time to completely lose track of what I was building. That's why I built Vibesuite! Features: Instant desktop + sound notifications (no more manual checking!) Dynamic tab titles – "Generating..." in tab bar Metrics — see how long code generating took Auto-switch – immediately brings you back to the right tab when code is ready Today it supports v0.dev and lovable.dev, and support for bolt.new is coming very soon. Try it out here:…
2025 · chromewebstore.google.com
- 23EC
I participated in the Nvidia + Vercel 2 hour hackathon in SF tonight, and built something I've wanted, but hadn't tried building. I implemented an MCP Server and VS Code extension to allow Claude Desktop to place breakpoints, step through code, and execute expressions (assuming language support). So you can ask it a question that requires actually stepping through the code and now it can actually do that - check values for you, etc. It's _definitely_ not perfect. Have improvements? Please make a PR!
2025 · github.com
- 24LR
Hi HN, Wanted to share something I'm excited about. I’ve been fascinated by AlphaEvolve and its results for more than a year now, but using open source frameworks seems overwhelming because of the high costs. I can’t really afford hundreds of Claude Opus calls every time I want to run it. I want to be able to try it out many times and all sorts of unique domains. What if it was possible for AlphaEvolve to be much more affordable while getting a better performance? . Over the last six months or so, I’ve been working on LEVI, an open source AlphaEvolve-like system that can outperform existing…
Jun 2026 · ttanv.github.io
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