Wedged between the Mar Dyke Valley and Lakeside Retail Park, the former Arena Essex Raceway is not your usual wildlife haven. Where once stock cars and speedway bikes lined up to cross the fini...

In my quest to expand the MeshCore network around Jönköping, I ran into a very human problem. Some of my friends have a highly developed sense of interior design, and they absolutely refused to put a bright yellow, purely functional antenna mount on their windowsills. I had a few terrible ideas initially. I really wanted to model a Statue of Liberty where the flame was replaced by an SMA connector, but my 3D modelling skills just are not up to scratch yet. So I pivoted to hiding the units entirely inside decorative objects.The elephant and its innards I started with a smooth, abstract elephant figurine. I designed a holder for the microcontroller and antenna, created a buffer zone, and hollowed out a model I found online. After adding some magnets to keep it together, I printed it on my FDM printer. The elephant only fits a tiny standard antenna, so I needed another option for my more powerful antennas. I ended up designing a classic rustic chamberstick, hiding a large twenty centimetre antenna completely inside a tall white wax candle.The chamberstick, turned 180° so the USB-port is visible. Then came the post processing. * Sanded everything down * Applied multiple layers of spray putty * Painted the elephant with layers of black, green, blue, red, and gold * Finished the elephant with a high gloss clear coat for a ceramic look * Painted the chamberstick with copper and an aged patina * Finished the chamberstick with a matte clear coat Both builds are powered by the Seeed Studio XIAO ESP32 S3 Lora32 SX1262. I picked up a handful of them on AliExpress this spring for around $10 each. It is definitely not perfect yet. The chamberstick still has a visible power cable sticking out, which somewhat ruins the illusion, so hiding that cable more elegantly is at the top of the list for version two. In the mean time version 1 is available here. I had planned to share the STL files for the elephant also, but the original elephant model has a restrictive licence that prohibits redistribution, so I unfortunately cannot supply those.

The FCC says the most controversial aspect of Reflect Orbital's Earendil-1 satellite, the giant mirror, falls out of its purview since the regulator mainly focuses on radio spectrum.