To help a homemade two-wheel bike steer and balance, the designers built a system where the stuffed cat riding on top physically shifts its weight from side to side. The Maker Space KM1 user group showed the project ahead of Maker Faire Tokyo 2026. The wheels steer, but the cat moves too, and the battery is deliberately carried on the cat's body to raise the center of gravity and make the weight shift more effective. The mascot is not decoration; it is part of the control strategy.
The cat isn't just a passenger; it has an actual engineering job as moving ballast. Cuteness now comes with control-system responsibilities.
A small robot car has been built to detect a face with its camera, turn until that face is centered and then drive toward the person it sees. The project upgrades an Elegoo robot car kit with an Arduino UNO Q and webcam, using computer vision to locate faces and adjust steering. It was created by Iulia Feroli and featured on Arduino's official blog.
Face detection is familiar on a screen; connecting the detection result directly to motion gives the same software a much stronger physical presence.
Face detection feels harmless on a screen, then you add wheels and it starts closing the distance. Giving AI mobility really changes the mood.
A small rechargeable air blower meant for cleaning desks and keyboards was taken apart to test whether its internal EDF (electric ducted fan) could propel an RC airplane. The fan and ESC form a convenient compact package, and testing reportedly produced up to about 110 grams of thrust at 16.5 amps.
One unit may not provide enough thrust for the intended model, so using two is also being considered. The project treats a consumer gadget less as a product and more as a convenient container of reusable components.
This is the mindset where you see a product and immediately ask “what's inside that I can repurpose?” The blower probably didn't expect an aviation career.
Camera with Digital Film lets you physically pull the captured image out of the camera as a cartridge. A Raspberry Pi 3 A+ and 5 MP camera write each shot to a removable module containing a 1.54-inch four-color e-paper display.
The cartridge can then be displayed as a physical photograph. Because it is e-paper, the image remains visible without power and can later be overwritten. Modern digital hardware brings back one very specific analog pleasure: taking the picture out of the camera.
Digital cameras spent years eliminating film, and now the joy of pulling the picture out has come back around. A very elegant detour.
Library for Ants is a storage device where a tiny robotic mechanism physically carries 12 microSD cards and inserts them into a reader one by one. Instead of switching solid-state storage electronically, it deliberately moves the media itself.
Maker svofski describes it as a robot that wants to grow up to become a tape library. It is essentially an old large-scale storage behavior carefully transplanted onto one of today's smallest memory formats.
Instead of using microSD because it's tiny, the project uses that fact to say “great, a tiny robot can carry it.” Wonderful reversal.
To push 3D printing down to roughly 150 µm scale, a microscopic printer was built that shines a 405 nm laser through the tip of an optical fiber and cures resin point by point. Created by Diffraction Limited, it moves the illuminated point much like an FDM printer moves its nozzle.
To improve resolution further, the resin is mixed with curcumin from turmeric as a UV absorber. The result includes a Benchy just 150 µm long and a Stanford Bunny that appears smaller than a human hair.
Push microfabrication far enough and turmeric somehow joins the materials team. That's an unexpectedly kitchen-adjacent breakthrough.
If an alarm sound is not enough, why not have the clock play a 720×720 video when it's time to wake up? The Video Alarm Clock uses an ESP32-P4-based Waveshare module and can store plenty of clips on an SD card.
The futuristic part comes with some very old-fashioned requirements: AVI with MJPEG and PCM, plus classic 8.3 filenames. The display feels modern; preparing the files suddenly feels like an earlier era of computing.
It's a video alarm clock from the future, quietly asking you to respect 8.3 filenames in the background. Nice little time warp.
A project has turned vacuum-tube logic into an 8-bit computer you can actually play with at home. Built from dual-triode tubes manufactured in the former Eastern Bloc, the machine uses a 16-instruction von Neumann architecture and NOR-based logic reminiscent of Apollo-era computing.
It goes well beyond a logic demo: the wall-mounted system connects to old British Rail flip-digit displays and even a control panel for an airship simulator. Old computing technology is not merely preserved; it has been put back to work as a playable machine.
Vacuum tubes were already enough, then railway displays and an airship simulator joined in. Every component seems to come from a different timeline.
A spinning top eventually slows down, so this project answers by putting a brushless motor, ESC, microcontroller, rechargeable battery and eccentric weight inside the top and keeping it going for roughly two hours. It works without an external base or magnets.
When the spin weakens, the internal mass shifts the center of gravity and adds energy back into the motion. Electronics and mechanical control are deployed directly against the very normal fact that tops stop spinning.
You open a spinning top and discover something close to a tiny robot inside. That's a lot of commitment to not stopping.
The cat isn't just a passenger; it has an actual engineering job as moving ballast. Cuteness now comes with control-system responsibilities.