Super Valid Designs built a semi-automated ski lift to live-catch mice in a chicken coop and carry them down a hill. Each gondola doubles as a mousetrap: bait lures a mouse onto a ceiling trapdoor, which drops it into the car.
The occupied gondola then travels downhill, where another trapdoor opens over a brush pile to release the mouse. The lift was assembled largely from wood and parts on hand and was made to transport and release the mice automatically.
The goal was simply to get mice out of the coop, and somehow that led to dedicated gondolas and a ski lift. The mice now have public transit.
Larger robot vacuums can struggle to fit beneath furniture and into other tight spaces. Roomba Duo tackles that problem with a large cleaning robot that carries a smaller companion robot and lowers it to the floor using a mechanical arm on top. iRobot presented the two-robot system as a concept at IFA 2026.
The main unit handles regular vacuuming and mopping, while the roughly 8.35 cm-tall companion can enter places the larger robot cannot. Both share the same home map, dividing the job between two machines of different sizes.
Robot vacuums now have something like parent-and-child roles. The appliance is starting to look more like a tiny team.
Newson's Electronics' Self Catching Projectile Machine launches a ball bearing, moves a catcher to the predicted landing point, and catches its own projectile.
It reads the launch angle and calculates the range using projectile speed and gravity. An Arduino then moves the catcher along a rail to the calculated target position and returns the mechanism to its home position for the next shot.
Put the thrower and catcher into the same machine and even a one-person game of catch no longer needs the person.
Mark Rober invited engineers and makers to CrunchLabs Casino to build and test devices for cheating at casino games. Cheating itself was allowed, but getting caught was not.
The creations included a remote-controlled robotic poker chip that could move a roulette bet after the wheel stopped, dice whose internal weighting could be changed with heat, and a concealed wearable card-counting assistant. Another contestant hid a pinhole camera in a sleeve and used computer vision to reconstruct the order of a deck.
Change the rule from “no cheating” to “cheating is fine if you don't get caught,” and a casino suddenly becomes an engineering contest.
Since its 1993 release, DOOM has been ported to countless devices that were never intended to be game consoles, including digital cameras, printers and pregnancy-test hardware. The 1997 release of the game's source code, together with an architecture that made platform-specific parts relatively replaceable, helped turn porting DOOM into a widespread hacking tradition.
As unusual ports spread through YouTube and social media, getting DOOM to run became less a practical benchmark and more a trophy for technical ingenuity. Recent projects have connected the game to hardware as unlikely as satellites and models of a fly's nervous system, stretching even the question of what it means for a device to 'run DOOM.'
After more than 30 years, the answer to 'Why would you run DOOM on that?' has settled into a simple 'Because you can.' Predicting the next platform may now be harder than porting the game.
The goal was simply to get mice out of the coop, and somehow that led to dedicated gondolas and a ski lift. The mice now have public transit.