Maker PETCraft tested how many discarded plastic bottles it takes to produce one kilogram of 3D-printing filament: thirteen 5-liter bottles, one 10-liter bottle, two 8-liter bottles and one 1.5-liter bottle, or 17 in total.
The bottles were heat-smoothed, cut into strips with a homemade cutter, then drawn through a heated nozzle and wound into filament. Printing with the result is a future step.
Recycling one kilogram of filament required collecting and processing 17 enormous bottles. Saving material turned into a surprisingly large manufacturing project.
Hacker conference JawnCon 0x3 has made an interactive event schedule using HyperCard, software first released in 1987.
Its website runs a 68k emulator with a Macintosh Plus inside the browser, and HyperCard runs inside that machine. A conventional web schedule is also available.
To check a modern conference schedule, you boot a nearly 40-year-old Mac inside your browser. The event is in 2026, but its calendar has traveled back in time.
A simulator reproduces a Commodore 64 motherboard down to component pins and electrical connections. Remove a chip or disconnect a pin on screen, and the virtual machine responds to the resulting fault.
Creator Salvatore Sanfilippo, known as antirez, built it to investigate problems without risking an old computer. The detailed simulation runs at about 31% of a real C64's speed even on an Apple M3 Max.
A simulator intended to help investigate computer faults actually lets you break its components on purpose. That's dedication to reproducing what goes wrong.
Project Infin_IT is a portable computer shaped like a boombox. The two front panels that resemble speakers are actually removable wireless keyboards. At the back, an SSD is housed in a cassette-shaped cartridge.
Maker Watt IV combined a Framework Laptop 12 mainboard with a salvaged iPad screen and webcam. The carrying handle also doubles as a stand.
Remove what looks like a speaker and it's a keyboard; pull out the cassette and it's an SSD. Familiar boombox parts have been given entirely different jobs.
Smart-home control panels often consist of plain buttons and icons. Anton Frolov took a different approach: he turned a hand-drawn illustration of his house into a smart-home dashboard.
A fireplace flickers in the illustration, garden lights glow, and an air conditioner animates in response to the real appliances' states. The artwork changes between day and night. Frolov commissioned illustrator Owen Yeconiel and connected the drawing to Home Assistant. A TV displays the whole house, while phones and computers provide controls.
When the family didn't want to use the smart-home controls, the solution was to illustrate the entire house—and animate its appliances. The interface redesign became an art commission.
Strange Inventions Lab made a book of every possible image at a tiny resolution, along with an Image Locator Camera that returns a page number instead of a photograph. The 512-page physical book contains all 512 possible 3×3 black-and-white pixel patterns. The camera reduces a scene to nine pixels and displays the page number for the matching pattern.
It neither saves the photograph nor searches the book. It calculates the page number directly from the pixels. The concept also works at higher resolutions and in color, but complete physical books for those modes have not been made.
Take a photo, receive a page number, and reach for a book. This camera makes a bookshelf part of the photography workflow.
A prototype of Tesla's next-generation Roadster 2 drove up a curved ramp and used suction to cling to the surface while upside down. It then used thrusters to leave the ramp, flip through the air and land. In another demonstration, it leaped over a row of Tesla vehicles.
The stunts took place at a SpaceX facility in Texas with the car operated remotely for safety. Production is planned for 2028. These were short prototype maneuvers, not proof of a production car capable of sustained flight.
It uses suction to stay attached to the ground, then thrusters to escape it. This car has a complicated relationship with the road.
A team including sousci is developing an oversized mechanical finger designed to deliver powerful finger flicks. The project uses a large mechanism to amplify a simple flick.
The work-in-progress device is documented on ProtoPedia and uses components including Arduino hardware and servo motors.
To make a finger flick more powerful, they built an enormous mechanical finger. That's a lot of hardware for a single flick.
Hiroshima University will host Hebocon, a robot sumo tournament for people with little technical skill. Participants bring homemade robots that may be clumsy or poorly engineered; unexpected behavior and failures are part of the fun rather than something to hide.
The events are scheduled for December 5, 2026, and February 13, 2027, at Omoshiro Lab in the university's engineering building, from 10:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Eight teams can enter each event, including participants from outside the university. The first application deadline is November 7, and a basic robot-building workshop is planned ahead of the second event.
A university is hosting a robot contest where being inexperienced is welcome. The fun is in making something anyway, not in perfect engineering.
An external expansion adds typed and spoken AI conversations to a working 1989 Atari Portfolio while retaining its original keyboard and LCD. The device can also describe camera images and play internet radio.
Maker Davide La Sala uses an ESP32-based external module for networking, audio and camera functions, with the AI accessed online. The language model does not run on the vintage computer itself.
The keyboard and screen are still from 1989, but the machine can answer you with modern AI. It feels like a phone call from the future.
ESP32 iPhone Agent uses a tiny board to receive iPhone screen mirroring and act as a USB mouse and keyboard. An AI app on that same phone directs taps and swipes, such as setting an alarm. No separate computer is needed at runtime.
The AI lives in the phone but needs an external mouse to touch its own screen.
DinoBOY is a one-button dinosaur-jumping handheld designed to replace phone scrolling. Opening its lid wakes it up. The creator says its hidden NFC tag switches a phone to airplane mode. It also works as a clock and Bluetooth keyboard.
To avoid one screen, you carry another one that can shut off your phone's connection.
Recycling one kilogram of filament required collecting and processing 17 enormous bottles. Saving material turned into a surprisingly large manufacturing project.