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.

The University of Florida's Marston Makerspace held a Crappy Robots event where teams had to use motors and battery packs to get a robot across a five-foot plank without falling off. Participants built everything from an alligator robot to a caterpillar-style machine and robots with spinning arms.

One participant even argued that the rules never said the whole robot had to reach the end, then tried to catapult just a piece of it down the plank. The event rewarded improvisation, loopholes and gloriously imperfect machines.

Most automatic Rubik's Cube machines are built to solve the puzzle as efficiently as possible. This one was deliberately made to represent the experience of someone who cannot solve it. Created by Shintaro Tamefusa, who says he cannot solve a Rubik's Cube himself, the machine grabs the cube with four arms, performs apparent analysis on a PC and keeps turning the puzzle. Eventually it starts voicing doubts, suggests dubious shortcuts and finally gives up and drops the cube. Instead of automating competence, it automates being stuck.

Press a button and the Vomit Comic Robot generates a one-off random comic and spits it from its mouth on receipt paper. Created by Cadin Batrack, the machine combines a Raspberry Pi, a thermal printer and a laser-cut plywood body. Processing software arranges hand-drawn elements into comic panels at random. There is no intended narrative relationship between the images, but the comic layout encourages people to invent one anyway. Even the physical output mechanism reinforces the joke: the robot appears to vomit nonsense comics on demand.

A handheld fan is usually supposed to be small and light. KOBAYASHI KAITO ELECTRO took the opposite route with a 'world's most powerful(?) handheld fan' driven by a Makita power-tool battery for Maker Faire Tokyo 2026. The device is assembled from five 3D-printed parts and accepts the chunky tool battery directly. It remains technically handheld, but its power system has clearly wandered into the world of workshop equipment.

Bentobot was built so online friends could control real combat robots from phones and computers anywhere in the world. Thomas Nguyen created three small Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W-powered machines with drive motors and separate weapon motors, including flippers and spinning weapons. Viewers could join live streams, receive access through an app and immediately fight physical robots in the arena. Nguyen even created a lightweight custom language to reduce control latency. Instead of simulating robot combat online, the network ends at actual machines hitting each other.