
Zero Touch
Human presence detection through walls, $4 chip, no camera
What it does
Zero Touch is two open-source research projects — PRISM and AURA — that detect and track humans using radio waves and electric fields instead of cameras. PRISM uses a single $4 ESP32 to localize people across room zones through walls using Wi-Fi CSI signals. AURA controls your cursor by hovering your hand over a capacitive sensor — no contact needed. Both run real-time ML inference on commodity hardware.
Does the same job
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We just released a very excited touch sensor that finally simplifies touch sensing for robotics. Our most exciting result: Learned visuotactile policies for precise tasks like inserting USBs and credit card swiping, that work out-of-the-box when you replace skins! To the best of our knowledge, this has never been shown before with any existing tactile sensor. Why is this important? For the first time, you could now collect data and train models on one sensor and expect them to generalize to new copies of the sensor -- opening the door to the kind of large foundation models that have…
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Hi! Recently smart-glasses with cameras like the Meta Ray-bans seem to be getting more popular. As does some people's desire to remove/cover up the recording indicator LED. I wanted to see if there's a way to detect when people are recording with these types of glasses, so a little bit ago I started working this project. I've hit a little bit of a wall though so I'm very much open to ideas! I've written a bunch more on the link (+photos are there), but essentially this uses 2 fingerprinting approaches: - retro-reflectivity of the camera sensor by looking at IR reflections. mixed results…




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Launched alongside, May 2026
the whole month →

Parallel agents, diff reviewer, and multi-model comparisons
Dev tools · May 2026 · kilo.ai


- NW
Hey HN, Henry here from Cactus. We open-sourced Needle, a 26M parameter function-calling (tool use) model. It runs at 6000 tok/s prefill and 1200 tok/s decode on consumer devices. We were always frustrated by the little effort made towards building agentic models that run on budget phones, so we conducted investigations that led to an observation: agentic experiences are built upon tool calling, and massive models are overkill for it. Tool calling is fundamentally retrieval-and-assembly (match query to tool name, extract argument values, emit JSON), not reasoning. Cross-attention…
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- FM
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