In 1994 Nintendo handed Scotland’s DMA Design a Kirby license and a Super NES Mouse and asked the studio to make a prequel. DMA was already known for Lemmings and Uniracers and would, two years later, ship Grand Theft Auto. Kid Kirby started even earlier as a golf-style mouse prototype from freelancer Tony Colgan, then became a stretch-and-launch blob called Jellies before Nintendo suggested the pink puffball.
Amirhossein Kazemipour, Hehui Zheng, and Robert Katzschmann of ETH Zurich’s Soft Robotics Lab began with a commercial WUJI right hand with five fingers designed for grabbing. They put a Raspberry Pi, an IMU, and a battery to its back, resulting in a package weighing 818 grams and operating without a cable. Twenty powered joints remained factory standard, four on each finger, with different lengths and a thumb positioned to one side. Lift one finger to step, and a support point disappears.
BOSGAME E5 Mini PC, priced at $186.99 with promotion code: 5400U45 (was $340), keeps showing up in deal threads because a machine this small almost never arrives with two 2.5-gigabit Ethernet ports, three 4K outputs, and a licensed copy of Windows 11 Pro for less than $300. Inside is a 15 watt laptop processor, a Ryzen 3 5400U with 4 cores and 8 threads to get the work done.
A 2019 Ford EcoSport Titanium left Ford as a short compact crossover with four wheels, Titanium trim, and a naturally aspirated 2.0-liter Duratec four-cylinder rated at 166 horsepower and 149 pound-feet. Prior ownership later sliced the body open behind the rear doors, welded in an extra rear section plus an auxiliary subframe, and added a third axle so six matching 17-inch alloy wheels now sit on Firestone WeatherGrip tires. Black paint and thin white pinstripes cover the longer sides, filler panels close the gaps, and a roof-mounted wing sits over the stretch. A side-swinging rear gate still opens onto cargo space lined in gray deep-pile carpet.
You already know how a cube is supposed to behave. Toss one onto a table and it tumbles, bounces, and settles on a face. That expectation is the reason this build exists. A maker who posts as The Tinkering Techie spent a few weeks packing motors, a reaction wheel, and a spring piston into a five inch black cube so it could do the opposite. It sits on a small foot, fires that foot, flies, rights itself in the air, and comes down on an edge, then it stays there.