A circular screen, an ESP32, and a German maker's own photograph of the moon as the texture map. The choice most builders would skip is the one that gives the object its weight.
Bose killed the cloud. A $5 ESP32 stick called SixBack brings the preset buttons back by pretending to be the server. The speaker never knows the difference.
A solar-powered, e-ink GPS compass that does exactly one thing: points you home. No app, no cell signal, no charger. Built with a XIAO ESP32-C6 and published as open hardware.
A developer put an entire fake Bose cloud on a $5 ESP32 stick. Your SoundTouch speaker can't tell the difference.
A solar-powered e-ink navigator built on an ESP32. It points you home and runs for days. No signal, no charger, no map app.
Back Market is running iPod Shuffle subway ads. TechCrunch just gave the friction-as-feature movement a name. The shift from maximum functionality to maximum well-being now has a market category.
At Columbia's 2026 MFA thesis show, an artist from the Iyarhe Nakoda Nation lists "my ancestor's stories" as a material, equal to wood and ribbon. The room fills with sound that knows where you are sitting, and refuses to be louder than that.
Cooper Hewitt award winners Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy made a bedside lamp for SHINE, the seventy-designer lighting survey curated by Harry Allen. When calm-tech makers turn to the bedroom, the bedroom changes.
A Raspberry Pi inside, a lab voltmeter outside, and a single needle that swings to tell you the hour. The cost of one needle is patience. Maybe that is the feature.
A $15 ESP32 dev board, a cheap yellow display, and a piece of code where every fish has its own personality. The result lives on your desk and lets you tap to feed it.
A six-year-old System76 Galago Pro with the desktop OS wiped, replaced by a black tty that boots straight into vim. Network-manager exists only so files can sync when there's signal. The rest of the time, the laptop just writes.
Spanish artist Javier Riera spends months shaping geometries pulled from shells and honeycombs, then projects them onto a Sydney landmark until the stone seems to reveal a pattern it was hiding all along. Light handled as a tool for noticing, at the scale of a building.