A playable electric guitar has been built without a conventional neck or body, using strings, frets, and tensioned aircraft cable. Instead of relying on the usual wooden structure to withstand string tension, the instrument supports its playing components on a tensioned cable system.
It was built by Burls Art, a YouTuber and guitar maker known for unusual instruments. The build video ends with the finished instrument actually being played.
Removing the neck and body sounds like it should end the guitar, but a completely different structure is brought in so the playing function survives anyway.
The MetMo Cube is a desktop fidget toy precision-machined from solid stainless steel using wire EDM. Pressing it produces a smooth sinking motion that uses pneumatic resistance inside the mechanism.
The specialized machining is time-consuming enough that production is limited each month, with separate September and October 2026 shipping waves offered on the product page.
It is a stress-relief desk toy built around precision-machined stainless steel and pneumatic motion. The mechanism for simply pressing something to relax is taking the job very seriously.
The official report from Hebocon 2026, the robot contest for people with low technical skills held on August 29, is now online. It covers this year's matches and machines, including a robot that scatters candy like caltrops and a robot-bowling exhibition in which 16 eliminated machines run at once.
This year's event also featured HEBO-GPT, a dog-shaped toy connected to AI, while teams of children made a strong showing. The report includes award winners and many of the strange moments from the event in photos and videos.
Even a contest built around low technical skill now has AI and a new generation arriving. Technology is advancing, and somehow Hebocon is advancing right along with it.
AcoustiHarvest is a headphone system designed to harvest tiny amounts of electrical energy from the vibration caused by traffic, construction, and other urban noise. Piezoelectric material in the earcups converts sound pressure into electrical current, which is stored and used by the audio electronics.
Creator Alessandro Sgarzi designed the full audio chain to consume just 17 nW so that it can operate from the very small amount of power available from everyday city noise.
The headphones meant to help you listen in a noisy city use that same noise as their fuel. Instead of fighting noise pollution, the design puts it to work.
PicoDMG rebuilds the original Game Boy experience with modern microcontrollers while preserving the original shell, controls, and AA-battery feel. Game files live on microSD, and a game can be selected by holding a cartridge fitted with an NFC tag near the system.
On the original Game Boy, changing games meant inserting a cartridge into the console. PicoDMG modernizes that interaction too: the open-source project by dodger-one can associate an NFC tag in a cartridge or other object with a corresponding ROM and launch it when scanned.
Even the old clunk of inserting a cartridge has been modernized into a tap. The Game Boy makeover reaches all the way to how the cartridge is used.
Edge AI Balcony Guard detects visiting pigeons locally and sweeps a water gun to drive them away. It is designed to deter pigeons without a camera and without harming them, helping prevent droppings on balconies.
Creator Hiroshi Nakata built it with Arduino, a servo, and Solist-AI, and published it on ProtoPedia on September 23, 2026.
The final form of balcony security is an AI-controlled automatic water gun. From a pigeon's perspective, the equipment is taking this more seriously than the resident.
OVODYO displays time by rotating two numbered 12-sided solids until the appropriate faces point upward. One indicates the hour and the other advances in five-minute intervals, with internal gearing rotating each shell around two axes.
Creator ekaggrat singh kalsi built the clock. Because the minute solid only changes every five minutes, LEDs indicate the exact minute between those steps.
Changing a clock digit now requires two polyhedra to physically tumble into new poses. Checking the time has become a tiny mechanical performance.
A Rube Goldberg machine sends balls, levers and other mechanisms through a long chain reaction before a wooden hand finally pulls down a jacket zipper. After all of the staged motion, the final task is simply opening the zipper on a piece of clothing.
The machine was created by Steven Price of Sprice Machines, a builder specializing in chain-reaction contraptions.
A zipper normally takes one quick hand movement, so the machine supplies an entire roomful of cause and effect instead. The journey has become much larger than the task.
A homemade alarm clock gives the sleeper five seconds to stop the alarm before a loaded banknote is fed into a shredder. Instead of merely continuing to make noise, the device makes oversleeping carry a physical monetary consequence.
The Arduino-based build was published by the Japanese maker channel Mechatro on September 12, 2026.
The punishment for snoozing is not a louder alarm but the physical loss of a banknote five seconds later. Waking up now has a financial deadline.
M5Flick is an input interface that lets users type Japanese by punching a cushion while wearing a red glove. Instead of flicking a phone screen with a finger, the user turns full-body motions into text input, including moves styled after a Shoryuken uppercut.
Creator Hatake / Furukawa built it with M5Stack and UnitV2 hardware, combining text entry with a stress-relief punching interface.
Every bit of typing now requires punching a cushion. Flick input has somehow grown from a fingertip gesture into a full-body sport.
Hardwired to Destroy Itself combines a one-hertz timing circuit with a motor-driven drill so that operation periodically damages components on its own protoboard. A 555 timer provides the 1 Hz signal while a synchronized DC motor rotates the mechanism that brings the drill bit into the circuit.
The machine is built largely from scrap wood, recycled cardboard, and a motor salvaged from an old printer. Creator bornach made it for Hackaday.io's One Hertz Challenge.
A classic useless machine merely turns itself off. This one keeps working by physically destroying the circuit that lets it work. Completion may be indistinguishable from disappearance.
A robot with rows of suction cups arranged like tracks can stay attached while driving from walls onto ceilings. As it moves, cups at the front attach one after another while those at the rear peel away in sequence.
The passive cups maintain adhesion without a vacuum pump. The robot traveled on glass, wood, metal and painted surfaces, and the roughly 3.5 kg machine also climbed while towing a 7.94 kg payload. The work was carried out by University of Michigan researchers Andrew Nguyen, Mingyuan Li and Daniel Bruder.
Turn every segment of a track into a suction cup and suddenly walls and ceilings become roads. It looks strangely ordinary while driving upside down.
Removing the neck and body sounds like it should end the guitar, but a completely different structure is brought in so the playing function survives anyway.