Dadlexa is a homemade smart speaker that records a child's question, sends the audio to the father's phone, and plays back the father's recorded reply. It behaves like a commercial voice assistant when activated, but the intelligence answering general questions is the father himself rather than AI.
The device detects its wake phrase, records the question, and sends it through Telegram. When the father replies with a voice message, the device downloads and plays it. Music commands can also play files stored locally on the device. It was created by Sean Clark.
A modern smart speaker was built from scratch, only for the intelligence layer to be outsourced entirely to Dad. Since a real person answers the questions, it is arguably an unusually capable assistant.
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.
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.
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.
Throaty Mumbo built a custom GBCTube cartridge to play YouTube video on a Game Boy Color's 160×144 display. The project progresses from displaying images and video to streaming over the link cable, then adds custom Wi-Fi-capable hardware.
The video demonstrates playback on real Game Boy Color hardware and covers the cartridge electronics, battery and enclosure built for the project.
There are countless easier ways to watch YouTube, but this one starts by building a Wi-Fi cartridge for a handheld that originally did not even have a backlit screen. The setup is more elaborate than the viewing.
A modern smart speaker was built from scratch, only for the intelligence layer to be outsourced entirely to Dad. Since a real person answers the questions, it is arguably an unusually capable assistant.