A Nico Nico Douga maker named Korori built a triangular machine for the anything-goes JCJC time-attack scene. The idea targets one of the course's hardest sections, the lane change, where roller contact can slow or destabilize a conventional rectangular chassis.

By making the body triangular, the design aims to reduce that contact near the crest. In the pursuit of speed, even the familiar shape—and effectively the usual four-wheel assumptions—of a Mini 4WD car are treated as optional.

Uploading files to an e-paper reader felt needlessly awkward, so Nishant Joshi made an Xteink X3 appear on a computer as an ordinary network printer. Select it in the macOS print dialog, send a document, and the page appears directly on the reader's display.

Because the ESP32-C3 cannot hold a full high-resolution print job in RAM, the firmware processes incoming pixels row by row and writes them straight to the screen. Finished pages are also saved to the SD card, making a folder the printer's equivalent of an output tray. E-paper has become so paper-like that its interface loops back around to printing.

Real Hot Wheels track runs from the roof and down the sides of a 1970s Chevy G10 van. Boogie Racers' Roller Boogie Machine does not use the track merely as decoration: visitors can send toy cars down the vehicle and into a roughly 30-foot, six-lane drag strip.

The setup includes an electronic starting gate, infrared finish sensors and a digital timing display, while the van interior keeps the 1970s theme with shag carpet and disco balls. Instead of making a real van merely resemble a toy, the project turns the real vehicle into infrastructure for playing with the toys.

RotaryCell turns an old rotary telephone into something you can carry away from the phone line and use over a cellular network. The original handset, dial, switch hook and mechanical bell remain intact: dial a number normally and it places a mobile call; receive one and the old bell rings.

Maker fregacmols fits an ESP32-S3, cellular modem, battery and circuitry that imitates the telephone exchange the vintage phone expects. Rather than teaching the 1950s hardware new behavior, the project miniaturizes enough of its old infrastructure to make the phone feel at home on LTE.

Put transparent tape in front of a bare image sensor and the raw result normally looks like useless blur. Maker okooptics instead measures how that diffuser scrambles light and uses computation to reconstruct an image, then extends the same lensless approach into three-dimensional imaging.

Using a Raspberry Pi camera with a thin diffuser, different reconstructions of the same captured data can reveal views that behave like slightly shifted perspectives. Rather than adding more sophisticated optics, the project replaces the lens with something tape-like and transfers much of the difficulty into mathematics.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

To give in-game death more physical consequence, maker Hori built a system where dying in Super Mario Bros. triggers a basin to fall from above the player's head. The setup listens for Mario's death music, then activates a servo that releases the basin. During testing, microphone noise caused a false detection and dropped the basin even though Mario was still alive. A machine designed to increase immersion accidentally introduced its own real-world version of an unfair game event.