Skill Make spent most of his latest video doing the unglamorous part of high-voltage work: counting wire. A ferrite core got measured, a layered cylinder got designed around it, and a Formlabs printer laid that form down in clear resin. Hair-thin 0.1 mm wire then went on in sections of about 800 turns, tracked with a modified tally counter, until the secondary reached 12,000 turns.
Emmet wanted a living room console that still asked for a disc, so he built one instead of buying a PlayStation 5 or an Xbox. The result sits on a ZimaBoard 2, a small x86 computer with an Intel N150, 32GB of onboard storage, DisplayPort, USB, and a pair of SATA connectors. A USB CD drive hangs off one port. A 500GB SSD occupies the other after he opened a SATA-to-USB enclosure, pulled the drive free, and wired it straight into the board. DisplayPort runs to a television at 4K and 60 frames a second. Batocera, a Linux build made for retro emulation on x86, handles the library.
Most visitors would pass the frame of Matthew Perks’ new invisible PC without a second glance. A mountain valley fills the canvas, river through the center, pines and rock along the banks, a small steam engine lost in the mist. Real paintings hang on either side, and the arrangement reads as ordinary wall art. A pull on the top edge breaks a pair of magnets. Piano hinges carry the panel down until Dyneema cord, running through a small roller, stops the swing at a right angle and keeps the line clear of the work surface once the panel is shut again. A finished desk is now in front of you.
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.
Game of Tobi spent the last stretch of September proving that Super Mario 64 can move on a Super Nintendo if the cartridge carries a Super FX chip. His video, titled Fine, I made Super Mario FX, shows the result on original hardware, with Mario jumping through low, blocky versions of rooms that still read as Peach’s Castle, Bob-omb Battlefield, and Jolly Roger Bay.
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.
Nintendo 64 owners spent 1996 lining up hang gliders over Little States and hoping the analog stick would forgive a late flare. Nearly thirty years later, Pilotwings 64 Recompiled puts that same flight school on Windows and Linux as a native program you launch like any other PC game.
Real water and live fish refuse to share a pocket without making a mess. Strato Doumanis, who posts as StratoBuilds, built Pocket Tank instead: a 1.8 inch AMOLED aquarium you can hold in one hand, where every high level choice a fish makes comes from a language model that lives entirely on the board.
HTX Studio spent about two months turning a full work desk into a charger that finds a phone wherever you set it down and starts feeding it power. Apple showed that idea in 2017 as AirPower, a small mat that would charge a phone, Watch, and AirPods case without lining them up on a single coil. The pad never shipped. Apple cancelled it in 2019. The YouTube builder waited through nine promised “next years,” then built a version big enough to work on.
Jude Robinson built Daisy as his final year mechatronics project at the University of Glasgow, finished with first class honors, and took the IET prize for the best manufacturing project on campus. Two upright gantries face each other across a short workspace. Each carries a four joint gripper whose V shaped fingers close on a daisy stem and center it whether the stem is thick or thin.