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.
The Long Clock uses a roughly 2.3-meter rail mounted on the ceiling, with a single hand slowly traveling along it to show the time. It was built so children watching movies would notice time passing through a large visible mechanical movement rather than an alarm.
Mechanically, it is essentially a one-axis CNC machine. The build reuses a roughly three-meter aluminum extrusion, linear rails, a stepper motor and other parts salvaged from older projects. A carriage moves the pointer along an elongated clock face. It was created by freefoote.
The problem was simply not having a clock in the room, and the solution was not to buy one but to mount a 2.3-meter CNC mechanism on the ceiling. The clock itself is harder to ignore than the time.
The proko-rc05 is a radio-controlled car built to carry an entire custom 3D printer while driving and jumping. To cope with the printer's weight and high center of gravity, the vehicle uses a wide 2WD buggy layout and weighs about 3.7 kg in total.
The printer itself was newly designed for the vehicle around a Core-XY mechanism with a 53×53×50 mm build volume. A 90-degree hotend modification was intended to keep the machine low, but filament leakage prevented printing, so the event demonstration ran without extrusion. It was created by proko.
The linked page covers several RC projects. See the section titled “Chassis #5: proko-rc05.”
This is not just a cart carrying a printer: the whole machine is built to drive and take jumps with the printer onboard. It is a precision machine mounted on a vehicle that is deliberately heading for a jump ramp.
Rock-a-Pomo is a Pomodoro timer that starts crying when a work session ends and will not begin the break until the user picks it up with both hands and gently rocks it. A few seconds of appropriately gentle, rhythmic motion gradually fills a soothing meter; once the robot is calm and smiling, the break timer begins.
A single hard shake does not work, and rocking it too violently does not increase the meter either. The enclosure is deliberately large enough to encourage two-handed use so the user has to let go of the keyboard and mouse. It was created by nabekura.
Instead of making a break reminder louder or harder to dismiss, it adds a new task: soothe a crying robot. Taking a break now begins with a tiny piece of simulated childcare.
A 1970s Texas Instruments Silent 700, which combines a keyboard and thermal printer, has been connected to a local AI so that answers arrive on paper. The device, called Termi3, prints a response two or three seconds after a question is typed. It was built by Cameron Coward.
Earlier versions needed an internet connection to query Wolfram Alpha, but Termi3 runs a 2 GB local LLM on the Arduino and works entirely offline. Coward notes that its answers are sometimes reasonable and accurate, and other times baffling or hilarious.
A modern local AI does the thinking, but the output device is still a 1970s paper terminal. The intelligence got newer while every reply still arrives as a printout.
A handheld compass has been built to point exclusively toward the nearest Taco Bell. It uses GPS for location and heading data to point toward the destination while counting down the remaining walking distance as the user gets closer. The project was created by hardware maker Tru Narla.
Narla made it as a gift for her Taco Bell-loving fiancé. The prototype still needs calibration work at startup, and she plans to take it outside to see whether it can actually guide her all the way to a restaurant.
A compass can point anywhere, so this one removes almost every possible direction and keeps only Taco Bell. It is less about finding your way than eliminating every destination except tacos.
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.