Dr. Semiconductor, who built a semiconductor cleanroom in a backyard shed, has fabricated working LED chips using his home equipment. Rather than buying LEDs and building a circuit around them, the project processes the light-emitting semiconductor itself, packages the resulting chips on circuit boards, and finishes them as white LEDs.
The process starts with a gallium-nitride LED wafer on sapphire. An ultraviolet laser bought on eBay is used for machining, metal contacts are deposited, the wafer is cut into individual chips, and the dies are bonded to custom boards. Phosphor is then added to turn the blue emission into white light.
Most electronics projects begin by buying an LED for pocket change. This one begins by building enough semiconductor-fabrication capability to manufacture the LED itself. The starting point of the project is absurdly far upstream.
A light-field display has been built using a rapidly spinning drum perforated with holes and stationary LED matrix panels behind it. Each hole reveals a different view of the rendered object, so the image changes with viewing angle and appears three-dimensional.
The prototype uses three LED panels and has an effective resolution of roughly 100 by 48 pixels per eye. Its viewing range covers only part of a full circle, but the display is already capable of running DOOM. It was built by AncientJames.
Building a mechanical 3D display was not enough; the roughly 100-by-48-pixel image also had to run DOOM. Even when the screen becomes volumetric, DOOM remains the final test.
El Pulpo Magnifico is a roughly 8.5-meter-tall mobile kinetic sculpture shaped like a giant octopus. Its eight tentacles and eight eyes move, while flames shoot from its extremities. The exterior is built from reclaimed metal and repurposed objects including kitchenware.
A control panel operates its movement and fire effects, and the machine carries about 200 gallons of propane. It was built by Duane Flatmo, Jerry Kunkel, Will Startare and their crew.
A giant octopus could have stopped at being a sculpture, but this one also drives, moves its tentacles and eyes, and carries enough propane to breathe serious fire. The least necessary octopus features received the most engineering.
The Laundry Chair is made for clothes that have been worn but are not yet ready for the laundry. Its clothes-hanging section can rotate behind the backrest, so garments can stay on the chair while the seat remains usable.
The hanging section rotates on a ball-bearing mechanism. Swing it forward to drape clothes over it like a drying rack, then move it behind the chair to clear the seat. Simone Giertz developed the product from an earlier prototype through Yetch Studio.
Instead of trying to stop people from leaving not-quite-dirty clothes on a chair, this chair is designed to be their proper home. The furniture changes so the habit does not have to.
Dadlexa is a homemade smart speaker that records a child's question, sends the audio to the father's phone, and plays back the father's recorded reply. It behaves like a commercial voice assistant when activated, but the intelligence answering general questions is the father himself rather than AI.
The device detects its wake phrase, records the question, and sends it through Telegram. When the father replies with a voice message, the device downloads and plays it. Music commands can also play files stored locally on the device. It was created by Sean Clark.
A modern smart speaker was built from scratch, only for the intelligence layer to be outsourced entirely to Dad. Since a real person answers the questions, it is arguably an unusually capable assistant.
A custom version of the roughly 12 cm cube Kubb Fanless mini PC has been built with a chassis made from solid 24-karat gold rather than gold plating. The standard model weighs about 2.1 kg, while the gold version reaches about 13 kg and costs roughly $1.7 million.
Because the fanless PC uses its chassis as a heatsink, gold's high thermal conductivity does provide a cooling benefit. GIGAZINE notes, however, that copper and silver conduct heat even better, so gold is not the optimal material if cooling alone is the goal.
Instead of merely making a mini PC look gold, the entire case is 13 kilograms of solid gold. It even helps cooling a little, while the much cheaper and better-conducting copper continues to exist.
A real walnut shell has been turned into an IR blaster by packing an ESP32-C3 and infrared LEDs inside. The shell is split along its natural seam and fitted with small neodymium magnets so the two halves can be opened and closed.
The walnut sits in the living room and connects to a home-automation system over Wi-Fi. When it receives a command, the LEDs inside transmit infrared signals to control appliances that do not have their own network connectivity. It was built by JSK-koubou.
Instead of buying a discreet enclosure for a home-automation IR transmitter, the electronics were hidden inside an actual walnut. The remote sitting in the living room is now literally a nut.
Robot Karaoke is an event at New York's Wonderville where a custom system replaces the lyrics of a familiar song with completely different text. THE WEIRD ALGORITHM matches the replacement text to the original lyrics by syllable count, and human performers then sing the newly generated words to the familiar melody.
The catalog offers more than 100 songs and over 50 texts. Past combinations have included Yelp reviews of psychics, Craigslist vehicle ads, and negative professor reviews set to familiar songs. The event is hosted by Jamie Brew and Jenn Schiffer.
Instead of using technology to make karaoke easier, the system deliberately turns a song you know into text you have never sung before. The lyric system has joined the sabotage team.
A miniature version of a center-pivot irrigation system has been rebuilt to mow a lawn instead of watering crops. Multiple wheeled sections are flexibly linked together and coordinated from the outer section inward as the whole structure rotates around a central point.
The mower uses two motor-driven pivoting blades mounted on a carriage that travels back and forth along one of the linkages. The sections are controlled to stay aligned while the machine gradually cuts a circular area. It was built by rctestflight.
A machine architecture normally spread across huge farm fields has been miniaturized just to cut a yard. The lawn mower makes the garden look like a scale model of industrial agriculture.
TamaFi V2 is a pocket virtual pet that treats nearby Wi-Fi and Bluetooth activity as its environment. When it goes hunting, the radio activity it finds changes hunger and mood, while it can also choose behaviors such as discovering open networks or taking a rest.
Nearby radio activity is classified as calm, busy, open, noisy, or hostile. Detecting deauthentication or disassociation activity can lower comfort and happiness and trigger a glitch-like facial reaction. The current firmware is read-only and does not store SSIDs or MAC addresses. It was created by CiferTech.
Instead of feeding a virtual pet with a button, this one treats the Wi-Fi around you as its food supply and habitat. Take it somewhere with hostile radio traffic and even the pet gets upset.
P.A.R. is a 37×18 display made from 666 two-sided square tiles. Instead of giving every pixel its own actuator, a single robot moves behind the panel and physically flips individual tiles as needed to draw monochrome pixel art.
Artwork can be submitted through a website, and the machine reproduces it on the physical grid. The CAD models and code are open source. The project was created by Zimm.
Every time the display updates, a robot has to travel around behind the screen and physically flip the pixels one by one. Refreshing the image has become an actual mechanical chore.
FLIP Fluid is a large display that simulates moving liquid using thousands of electromechanical flip dots that physically switch between black and white. Because the pixels themselves move, the flowing image naturally produces a rippling mechanical sound instead of relying on added audio.
For EMF2026, eight panels were combined into a large installation with a joystick labeled “GRAVITY CONTROL” that changes the direction of gravity in the simulation. Creator mitxela says the large panel cost under £500, excluding donated parts and labor.
Instead of adding a speaker to make a fluid simulation sound physical, the display itself is made from thousands of moving parts. The screen has become its own sound-effects system.
Most electronics projects begin by buying an LED for pocket change. This one begins by building enough semiconductor-fabrication capability to manufacture the LED itself. The starting point of the project is absurdly far upstream.