Geek
Deep dives into niche interests, curiosities, experiments, hardware, software, science, and ideas that appeal to technically curious and enthusiast audiences.
LEGO Navigation System: How A Toy Dock Became A Flawless Car Phone Mount
Cars age in two ways now: metal and mechanics, and then the invisible clockwork of software. When the in-car interface starts to lag and map updates cost a premium, the result is a user experience that feels both needlessly expensive and instantly outdated. That is the pressure that drove a maker to ...
USB Volume Control That Makes Desktop Audio Feel Physical
Changing the volume should be trivial, but too often it is not. For people who edit, switch apps, or juggle media, hunting for sliders or remembering shortcuts breaks flow. The maker behind this project solved that friction by building a tiny USB control panel, and the surprising lesson is not just ...
LEGO Typewriter: The Strange Tricks That Finally Let Bricks Write
When LEGO released its mechanical typewriter set in 2021, the model nailed the look and the motion but stopped short of a simple promise: it could not actually type a letter back onto the bricks. That gap is the exact place one builder decided to start a new project, not by copying how typewriters u ...
3D Holographic Display You Can Build With A Phone And The Sync Trick That Makes It Work
The future that used to live in science fiction - a floating, viewable object that looks right from any angle - turns out to be something a smartphone can fake with a little clever timing. The real significance here is not that a phone becomes a projector, but that true parallax is created when the ...
Real-Life Minimap: ESP32 Minimap Pulled Off The Impossible
When someone says a microcontroller cannot do something, the conversation usually ends before the engineering work begins. That is exactly the tension this project embraced: a Need for Speed Underground 2 style minimap running on an ESP32 P4 with a 3.4-inch 800 by 800 Waveshare display, using real-w ...
Hummer H1X3: The World’s Largest Drivable Car That Doubles As A Duplex
This is not a stretched Hummer in the way enthusiasts imagine a low rider or lifted SUV. The Hummer H1X3 is three times longer, taller, and wider than the original H1, and it is built to be lived in as much as driven.
The real significance here is not the headline size. What actually determines w ...
Invisible PC Setup: How A Desk Swallowed A Gaming Laptop And Left The Screen Floating
This story starts with a simple ambition: an impossibly clean desk, not the cleaned desk you see on social feeds but one that truly disappears. The creator wanted no visible PC, no mouse, no keyboard, and a screen that seemed to float in midair. That ambition is the useful signal here, because what ...
Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck: The 3D Printable Dual Screen Build That Reveals The Real Constraints
Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck builds have become a shorthand for maker ambition: portable, futuristic, and deeply personal. This project pushes that shorthand into something practical, pairing dual screens, a mechanical keyboard, and a suite of sensors inside a fully 3D printable enclosure.
The real sig ...
DIY Smart Lab: Holographic AI Makerspace For Home Workshops
Most how-to videos start with tools. This one starts with a problem that every growing maker hits: the desk becomes the bottleneck. The consequence is not only cramped hardware, it is lost momentum. The decisive move in this setup was less about buying a particular gadget and more about reorganizing ...
Function Calling Gives AI Hands And Changes Everything: How LLMs Turn Language Into Action
What happens when a chatbot stops being only a voice and becomes a body? That is the question Travis, the maker behind GPTARS, is asking out loud. He built a tiny TARS replica that listens to normal speech, parses intent, and then hands off specific commands to motors and services. The result reads ...
Flying Umbrella Finally Follows You, After A Year Of Hidden Failures
Imagine an umbrella that hovers beside you and follows your steps across a field. After a year of hidden failures and repeated rebuilds, that concept moved from novelty to a functioning autonomous demonstrator. The project exposed the real constraints that determine whether a playful idea can become ...
Levitating Phone Stand: Why One Millimeter Was The Difference Between Magic And Disaster
Floating a phone looks like a party trick, but engineering a levitating phone stand that survives daily use is a different problem. This build focuses on the practical work behind the spectacle: using a commercial magnetic levitation module, careful counterweighting, and precise 3D printing to turn ...
Cat Town Subway: How A Miniature Metro Forced Rethinks On Doors, Escalators, And Cost
When Xing opened the gates of Cat Town Station, the project started as a cute bit of toy architecture and turned into a concentrated lesson in engineering tradeoffs. The build exposed how timing precision, mechanical reliability, and repeat maintenance scale differently when you compress a transit s ...
Bioluminescent Piano: Magic Piano Brought To Life With Living Light
What the project ultimately reveals is not a gadget trick but a design lesson: when a physical effect resists invention, nature can sometimes supply the missing mechanism. Most people assume glowing piano visuals must come from screens or CGI. The part that changes how this should be understood is t ...
Talking Magic Mirror: How A One-Way Glass Frame Became A Living Prop
There is something quietly subversive about turning a decorative mirror into a personality. This build does it deliberately: a huge ornate frame hides a floating, speaking head that can compliment or roast you on demand. The result is unsettling in the best way because the maker treated timing and c ...