Maker Ivan Miranda is no stranger to turning ordinary glass marbles into reliable timekeepers. His latest machine abandons fixed digits entirely. Instead of showing hours and minutes, a massive circular wheel slowly rotates while black and white marbles form continuous scrolling text around its outer edge.
Phone Repair Guru set out to answer a straightforward question: could parts pulled from a broken iPhone 14 Pro sit inside a housing made entirely on a 3D printer and still produce a phone that boots and functions. To push the idea further, the tools used for the assembly would also come off the printer, with only the metal screwdriver bits kept real. A Bambu Lab P2S Combo handled the printing, but designing a housing precise enough to hold everything required outside help. PatoCube handled the 3D scanning of original housings and the subsequent design work, going back and forth until the tiny internal details lined up.
A Waveshare board built for reading pages now keeps up with running and jumping. InkBoy fits a full Game Boy emulator onto the ESP32-S3-ePaper-1.54 V2, a compact module with a 1.54-inch panel that measures 200 by 200 pixels. Stock software on that panel barely managed two updates each second. Custom driving code raises the rate to roughly thirty, enough for Super Mario Land and other original titles to feel responsive instead of frozen between frames.
Kirigami, the Japanese practice of cutting paper in addition to folding it, opens possibilities that pure folding alone cannot reach. Matthew Lim applied the method to a series of objects that shift from a completely flat sheet into a usable three-dimensional form and back again, relying on carefully placed cuts and folds rather than fasteners or adhesives. One result is a compact phone grip that springs into place when needed. Another is a side table large enough to hold everyday items, assembled from plywood panels linked by printed hinges.
Riley picked up an old Prusa MK3S+ 3D printer whose hot-end had already failed in an explosive blow-out. Most owners would scrap the machine or hunt for a replacement nozzle and heater block. He saw an opportunity to remove the entire filament path and install something else in its place. The motion system, frame, and stepper motors still worked. Only the part that melts plastic was gone, which left an open mounting point for a different kind of extruder.
Steven at 3D Printer Academy spent close to a year tearing up his own desktop pinball machine and starting over. The first one, sold as file packs after a spring Kickstarter that drew about 1,500 backers and roughly $120,000, already proved a strange point. A playable pinball table can come off a normal home printer, run with no wires, and live on a desk. Version 2.0, shown in his latest build video and lined up for a new Kickstarter, treats that first machine as a draft with real limits.
A pocket-sized adding machine that costs two dollars in filament and a dab of oil should not work. This one does. YouTuber 3D All Workshop spent two months designing, reprinting, and oiling a fully FDM mechanical calculator that uses no screws, no metal springs, and no electronics, then showed the whole fight in a video.
Filip and Peter stood on the shore of a small lake and pressed the button that cut every link to the machine in the water. For the first time the submarine they have been building for more than a year had to find its own way home, with no radio, no tether, and no one steering. They could not see it. They could not hear it. A few minutes later it broke the surface near the spot where the mission was supposed to end.
ProfessorBoots has tons of experience 3D-printing remote excavators that can climb boxes, scoop dirt, and crush cans. His latest version parks a three-axis camera in the cab and wires a chair that copies the layout of a full size machine, so a look to the left turns the camera left and a pair of pedals drive the tracks. The result is a backyard digger you operate as if you were sitting in a Caterpillar, only without diesel and without twenty acres.
Phones aren’t the best journals because most people open one to save a sentence, and then the original thought is lost, buried beneath a feed of other thoughts. Paper pads avoid this unless they disappear inside a bag or require a second round of typing. Mirza, better known as Mirza Makes, became dissatisfied with both outcomes and spent one small project transforming a brief parts list into a distraction-free machine whose sole purpose is to take notes.