Category: Toy Hacks

Here is a hacker showing off their engineering chops. This video shows successive design iterations for a LEGO vehicle which can cross increasingly large gaps. At the time of writing this video from [Brick Experiment Channel] has been seen more than 110,000,000 times, which is… rather a lot. We guess with a view count like […]
Few of us will ever find ourselves piloting a full-sized military tank. Instead, you might like to make do with the RC variety. [TRDB] has whipped up one of their own design which features a small little pellet cannon to boot. The tank is assembled from 3D printed components — with PETG filament being used […]
Some hacks just tickle the brain in a very particular way. They’re, for a change, not overly engineered; they’re just elegant, anachronistic, and full of mischief. That’s exactly what [Frans] pulls off with A Gentleman’s Orrery, a tiny, simple clockwork solar system. Composed of shiny brass and the poise of 18th-century craftsmanship, it hides a […]
[It’s on my MIND] designed a clever BB blaster featuring a four-bar linkage that prints in a single piece and requires no additional hardware. The interesting part is how it turns a trigger pull into launching a 6 mm plastic BB. There is a spring, but it only acts as a trigger return and plays […]
For most of us, turrets that aim and shoot at things are the sole domain of video games. However, they’re remarkably easy to build with modern technology, as [meub] demonstrates. Meet the SwarmTurret. The build is based around an existing foam blaster, namely the Nerf Swarmfire. This blaster was chosen for being easy to integrate […]
Some readers may recall building a line-following robot during their school days. Involving some IR LEDs, perhaps a bit of LEGO, and plenty of trial-and-error, it was fun on a tiny scale. Now imagine that—but rideable. That’s exactly what [Austin Blake] did, scaling up a classroom robotics staple into a full-size vehicle you can actually […]
If you’ve ever squinted at a DE10-Nano wondering where the fun part begins, you’re not alone. This review of the Mr. MultiSystem 2 by [Lee] lifts the veil on a surprisingly noob-friendly FPGA console that finally gets the MiSTer experience out of the tinker cave and into the living room. Developed by Heber, the same […]
You’d think a paper from a science team from Carnegie Mellon would be short on fun. But the team behind LegoGPT would prove you wrong. The system allows you to enter prompt text and produce physically stable LEGO models. They’ve done more than just a paper. You can find a GitHub repo and a running […]
When [Terence Grover] set out to build a Tamagotchi-inspired simulator, he didn’t just add a few modern tweaks. He ditched the entire concept and rebuilt it from the ground up. Forget cute wide-eyed blobby animals and pixel-poop. This Raspberry Pi-powered project ditches nostalgia in favour of brutal realism: inflation, burnout, capitalism, and the occasional existential […]
You have to admire the lengths designers went to back in the day to create engaging games and toys. One particularly clever game of this type was called GEE-WIZ, a horse racing game from the 1920s that seems like it might have been right at home at a bar or pub, and that caught [Michael […]