The Skeuomorphicer Candle turns on when heated by a flame and turns off when you blow on it. A thermistor responds to the heat and switches the circuit on. Once lit, warmth from nearby resistors keeps it on; a puff of air cools the circuit and turns it off.
Maker Marek designed it without a microcontroller, using a single transistor, a thermistor and a handful of passive components. Keeping the thermal feedback reliable required careful tuning, and battery voltage can affect its behavior.
An electronic candle is supposed to spare you the trouble of a real flame. This one asks you to bring a flame back just to switch it on.
A homemade telephone lets you enter digits using a Morse key, displays the number on an LCD, and places a call when you press the MAIN button. For example, to call extension 31, you key in the Morse codes for 3 and 1. A push-to-talk speaker microphone gives conversations a radio-like feel.
Maker 7m4mon reused the enclosure, LCD and buttons from a test instrument built in 2008. An Arduino handles the input, while a Raspberry Pi provides the phone connection.
Instead of pressing number keys to make a call, you tap out Morse code. It is like taking a detour through the history of communications just to dial a number.
A homemade arcade cabinet starts a game when a rectangular concrete cartridge is inserted. The cartridge does not contain the game itself: an NFC sticker provides an ID that tells the cabinet which game to launch from its internal computer.
Maker Asger Kjærholm cast the concrete cartridges using 3D-printed molds. He also built a wooden cabinet with a cartridge slot and a drawer for storing the blocks.
Each concrete cartridge contains little more than an ID, but you still have to slot a solid block into the machine to pick a game. That's a remarkably literal way to give digital games some weight.
The feature film Garagara, Akuta is in preparation. It follows a father who spent his time making impractical inventions and a daughter who left home partly because she disliked his projects. After her father develops young-onset dementia, she begins rebuilding one of his unfinished inventions with help from people around her. Filming is planned for December 2026, with completion expected in spring 2027. The production is raising funds through crowdfunding.
The film is written and directed by Asuka Hachimaru, with Shigehiro Yamaguchi playing the father. Daiju Ishikawa, founder and organizer of Hebocon, is involved in supervising the film's inventions and building large-scale props. Even the film's title lettering was created using cardboard and a toilet-paper tube.
In this story, inventions that serve no practical purpose may help bring a family back together. Even the title lettering is made with improvised tools.
Four old rotary telephones become a reflex game. One rings at random, and the player must pick up the correct handset within one second. Answer the wrong phone or miss the deadline and the game is over.
The Tōhō Electronics Club built the game, called 'Nostalgic Rotary Phone Whack-a-Mole.' An Arduino and relays choose which phone rings. The team also built circuitry to generate the 75 V, 16 Hz signal needed to ring the bells and detects when a handset is lifted through a change in resistance.
Answering a ringing phone is normally an everyday action. Give it a one-second time limit and four possible receivers, and suddenly it's a reflex sport.
Brux built a working miniature bowling alley inspired by Wii Sports. Three lanes reset their own pins and return the balls. The lanes can also feature walls, ramps and a loop-the-loop. Gears and linkages power the mechanism, with many parts 3D-printed.
Turning video-game bowling into a physical game means building the pin-resetting machinery too. And adding a loop-the-loop.
A 15-year-old student hand-wound 250 meters of wire for EFNMRQC, a home quantum computing project using Earth's magnetic field. So far the maker reports detecting an NMR signal, not working quantum computation.
The first step toward futuristic computing is winding a huge amount of wire.
Nick Bild built the µTari Go, a handheld Atari 2600 that uses the original console's circuitry rather than emulation. It has a built-in four-inch CRT, controls, speaker and a slot for original Atari 2600 cartridges.
The components fit inside a 3D-printed enclosure. The device uses an external 12-volt power supply rather than an internal battery.
To make a handheld console, the maker chose a CRT instead of an LCD. It fits in your hands, but the power cable still has to come along.
In a study announced in 2025, researchers described a thin electronic tattoo that sticks to the forehead to estimate mental workload. Its sensors read electrical activity from the brain and eye movements, while a small battery pack enables wireless use.
The sensors are customized to fit each person's facial features. In tests with six people doing memory tasks of increasing difficulty, brainwave patterns changed as mental demands rose.
The work comes from researchers at the University of Texas at Austin and collaborators.
To find out how busy your brain is, you put circuitry on the outside of your face. The more thinking you do, the more futuristic your forehead looks.
LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER's Furby Organ turns 44 Furby toys into a playable musical instrument controlled from a keyboard.
The video demonstrates the group being controlled to change pitch and vocal sounds, and also shows the extensive wiring and modified toys behind the build. The creator describes it as a project that took many hours to complete.
One Furby already has plenty of personality. Gather 44 of them and make every one obey a keyboard, and playing an organ starts to look more like conducting a flock.
An electronic candle is supposed to spare you the trouble of a real flame. This one asks you to bring a flame back just to switch it on.