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Uploading files to an e-paper reader felt needlessly awkward, so Nishant Joshi made an Xteink X3 appear on a computer as an ordinary network printer. Select it in the macOS print dialog, send a document, and the page appears directly on the reader's display.

Because the ESP32-C3 cannot hold a full high-resolution print job in RAM, the firmware processes incoming pixels row by row and writes them straight to the screen. Finished pages are also saved to the SD card, making a folder the printer's equivalent of an output tray. E-paper has become so paper-like that its interface loops back around to printing.

Real Hot Wheels track runs from the roof and down the sides of a 1970s Chevy G10 van. Boogie Racers' Roller Boogie Machine does not use the track merely as decoration: visitors can send toy cars down the vehicle and into a roughly 30-foot, six-lane drag strip.

The setup includes an electronic starting gate, infrared finish sensors and a digital timing display, while the van interior keeps the 1970s theme with shag carpet and disco balls. Instead of making a real van merely resemble a toy, the project turns the real vehicle into infrastructure for playing with the toys.

RotaryCell turns an old rotary telephone into something you can carry away from the phone line and use over a cellular network. The original handset, dial, switch hook and mechanical bell remain intact: dial a number normally and it places a mobile call; receive one and the old bell rings.

Maker fregacmols fits an ESP32-S3, cellular modem, battery and circuitry that imitates the telephone exchange the vintage phone expects. Rather than teaching the 1950s hardware new behavior, the project miniaturizes enough of its old infrastructure to make the phone feel at home on LTE.

Put transparent tape in front of a bare image sensor and the raw result normally looks like useless blur. Maker okooptics instead measures how that diffuser scrambles light and uses computation to reconstruct an image, then extends the same lensless approach into three-dimensional imaging.

Using a Raspberry Pi camera with a thin diffuser, different reconstructions of the same captured data can reveal views that behave like slightly shifted perspectives. Rather than adding more sophisticated optics, the project replaces the lens with something tape-like and transfers much of the difficulty into mathematics.

A seemingly ordinary mouse has been turned into a complete computer by fitting the electronics from a Samsung Galaxy S21 inside its shell. Connect it to a display and Samsung DeX provides a desktop capable of running apps and games such as Minecraft, while the same enclosure still works as the mouse for clicking and moving the pointer.

YouTube creator Gadget Industry stripped the phone down to the needed boards and added a handmade brass heat spreader to manage temperature. The peripheral normally used to control a computer now contains the computer it is controlling.

Within days of the MaleCNS v1.0 fruit-fly nervous-system connectome becoming publicly available, an experiment appeared that used its simulated neural activity to control DOOM. Visual input from the game is converted into neural stimulation, while selected responses are mapped back to movement and firing controls.

Software engineer Alex Wormuth is also using damage in the game as a reinforcement signal to test whether the system can learn behaviors that help it survive. It has not mastered the game, but the speed from serious neuroscience dataset to “make it run DOOM” is remarkable.

Spend too long in selected phone apps and the small AI pet on your desk starts getting sick. PolyMO changes its face and internal state when screen-time limits are exceeded, and it does not recover until the offending app is closed.

In normal use it can chat, read notifications aloud, and show needs such as hunger or boredom. Instead of presenting screen time as another number or warning, it reacts like a tiny creature whose condition visibly worsens when you keep scrolling.

Maker brenpoly built the system with Android monitoring app usage and sending state changes over BLE to an ESP32-S3 device. The unit has a 1.8-inch AMOLED display, microphone and speaker, while the phone runs local language, speech-recognition and text-to-speech models.

A demonstration about the impact of AI and robotics on jobs put roughly 30 robots on the pavement alongside its message. On September 7, humanoids and quadruped robots appeared outside Poland’s Ministry of Digital Affairs in Warsaw, carrying flags and moving in circles.

The machines were not independently protesting. The event was staged by Democratism, an initiative seeking public debate over automation and the labor market. Chants were played through loudspeakers, and robots including an AgiBot A3 operated by Delta Robots took part.

Poland’s digital affairs minister also met the organizers. The visual argument was unusually literal: to warn that robots may replace human work, the organizers recruited robots to perform the protest itself.

At Adventure World in Wakayama, a robotic penguin swims beside real penguins, moving its flippers to turn and dive.

The robot was built by the park operator’s Kokorobo team. The result is a zoo exhibit where a machine can briefly blend in with the animals people came to see.

The runway at IFA 2026 featured humanoids and quadruped robots rather than human models. During the September 5 “Robots on the Runway” event, machines walked the stage, struck poses, danced and performed moves including backflips.

IFA’s official program listed participants such as Primebot Robots, EngineAI, Dobot, DEEP Robotics, AgiBot and Unitree. Instead of limiting the machines to booths and specification sheets, the event presented their sensing and motion-control abilities as a live runway show.

A space normally built around clothes and human presentation thus became a robotics demonstration. Once machines acquired humanlike bodies, apparently one of the next tasks waiting for them was learning how to make an entrance.

When an AI coding agent starts working, a small robot on the desk starts moving too. Tiny Engineer turns states such as reading files, thinking, writing code and finishing a task into physical gestures, display changes and sounds from a 3D-printed desktop robot.

Different stages of the job trigger different movements, and completion can even make the robot ring a real desk bell. Instead of watching a tiny status indicator in an IDE, you get something closer to a miniature coworker acting out what the agent is doing.

Creator Krzysztof Jamroz currently connects it to Cursor hooks. Under the hood, an ESP32-C3 receives REST API calls over Wi-Fi and drives five servos, an OLED display and a speaker, so other tools that can send HTTP requests can be connected as well.