At Maker Faire Tokyo 2026, the Ultra-Compact Hovercraft Laboratory exhibited its 11th single-seat hovercraft, designed to hover and move using human power alone. Pedaling drives four reciprocating compressors that pump air beneath the craft, while the rear propeller is also powered by the rider.
According to the report, hovering only requires pedaling at about one revolution per second, but moving forward under propeller power takes an all-out effort. The group has experimented with many different hovercraft mechanisms over the years.
A hovercraft looks like it should glide effortlessly, but once all the power comes from the rider, moving forward means pedaling flat out. The floating sensation and the workout do not match at all.
The MetMo Cube is a desktop fidget toy precision-machined from solid stainless steel using wire EDM. Pressing it produces a smooth sinking motion that uses pneumatic resistance inside the mechanism.
The specialized machining is time-consuming enough that production is limited each month, with separate September and October 2026 shipping waves offered on the product page.
It is a stress-relief desk toy built around precision-machined stainless steel and pneumatic motion. The mechanism for simply pressing something to relax is taking the job very seriously.
A Rube Goldberg machine sends balls, levers and other mechanisms through a long chain reaction before a wooden hand finally pulls down a jacket zipper. After all of the staged motion, the final task is simply opening the zipper on a piece of clothing.
The machine was created by Steven Price of Sprice Machines, a builder specializing in chain-reaction contraptions.
A zipper normally takes one quick hand movement, so the machine supplies an entire roomful of cause and effect instead. The journey has become much larger than the task.
A homemade alarm clock gives the sleeper five seconds to stop the alarm before a loaded banknote is fed into a shredder. Instead of merely continuing to make noise, the device makes oversleeping carry a physical monetary consequence.
The Arduino-based build was published by the Japanese maker channel Mechatro on September 12, 2026.
The punishment for snoozing is not a louder alarm but the physical loss of a banknote five seconds later. Waking up now has a financial deadline.
Cookie Dunker keeps the cookie fixed in place and electrically raises the glass of milk to meet it. An infrared remote shaped like a milk carton controls a 3D-printed scissor lift, slowly lifting the glass until the milk reaches the waiting cookie.
A linear actuator drives the lift. Creator Chanyanuch Charoensuk describes the project as inspired by Chindogu and deliberate over-engineering.
The cookie could move a few centimeters, but instead the machine lifts the whole glass of milk. Dunking a snack has acquired stage machinery.
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.
Kazuya Shibata's Fully Automatic Disposable Chopstick Splitter 2 is designed to split disposable wooden chopsticks cleanly and evenly. It feeds the chopsticks in, centers and pulls the two halves apart, then uses a circular saw to cut the remaining joint and a belt sander to smooth the ends.
The machine includes suspension to accommodate thickness variations and a self-centering gripping mechanism. Shibata spent about a year developing it, while processing one pair of chopsticks takes roughly four minutes. A task normally finished by hand in a moment has grown into a complete miniature production line.
All this machinery exists to avoid one bad chopstick split, and by the end a circular saw and belt sander have joined the process. The disposable chopsticks are receiving remarkably premium treatment.
Steven Gong and fellow University of Waterloo engineering students built a robot that can retrieve a shirt, straighten it, fold it, and place it on a stack. Two human-operated leader arms control two follower arms while cameras record the process; the team collected about 200 demonstrations for training.
Early models either failed to begin the task or moved violently enough to break a 3D-printed gripper. The team eventually fine-tuned a robotics foundation model, then had to collect more data after moving the setup to a new building changed the lighting. By the next morning, the system could complete the folding sequence autonomously.
A chore that takes a person less than a minute required four robot arms, hundreds of demonstrations, a broken gripper, and an overnight model search. Laundry has excellent scaling properties.
Throaty Mumbo built NESCD-001, an unofficial optical-disc add-on for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. A custom RP2350B board bridges a standard IDE CD drive and an EverDrive N8 Pro, reading a game ROM from the disc and transferring it to the flash cartridge so the NES can launch it.
The creator describes the project as something made "just because," and it can even play ordinary audio CDs through the console. The idea began with the history of the canceled SNES CD add-on, then deliberately moved one generation backward to a machine for which an optical drive makes even less historical sense.
This is not restoring a lost NES accessory; it is manufacturing an alternate history in which the NES somehow demanded a CD drive. Engineering has been used to create nostalgia for something that never existed.
Peter Ryseck built a system that keeps a long pole standing on one end by mounting a quadcopter-like set of propellers at the top. The propellers are not used to lift the pole away from the ground; instead, the controller changes thrust to counter each developing tilt.
The project had to deal with motor response, oscillation and even flex in the pole itself. The final control strategy can let the pole lean slightly into the wind rather than demanding a perfectly vertical pose.
The goal is a pole that appears to stand still, achieved by putting a small storm of actively controlled propellers on top. Maintaining “nothing happening” takes an impressive amount of happening.
Living directly under the departure path from San Francisco International Airport, Cameron Paczek built a Raspberry Pi 5 system that receives 1090 MHz ADS-B broadcasts with an RTL-SDR, calculates each aircraft's position relative to his home, and projects the live position onto his ceiling.
An outdoor PTZ camera uses ADS-B data for its initial aim, then YOLOX-Nano finds the aircraft in frame and adjusts the camera to follow it. The video is streamed to the TV, completing a plane-spotting setup that can be enjoyed from the couch.
Missing a plane overhead led to reconstructing the sky on the ceiling and automating an outdoor tracking camera too. The commitment to plane-spotting without leaving the couch is impressive.
After building a fully functional 7:1-scale Arduino UNO, UncleStem made a matching 7:1-scale version of the classic beginner turtle robot. The oversized parts mimic an UNO, L298N driver, ultrasonic sensor and jumper wires, while the internals are replaced with appropriately beefy hardware such as 12–24 V ride-on-toy motors and a pair of 300 W motor drivers.
The giant robot still behaves like the original classroom build: it pans an ultrasonic sensor, detects obstacles and drives around them.
The obvious question after building a giant Arduino is “what is it for?” The answer was not to shrink the Arduino—it was to enlarge the entire beginner robot around it.
A hovercraft looks like it should glide effortlessly, but once all the power comes from the rider, moving forward means pedaling flat out. The floating sensation and the workout do not match at all.