The $195K Tiny Home That Finally Makes Sense for Families

The tiny house movement has always been better at Instagram than at parenting. A couple, a dog, maybe a sourdough starter on the counter: that’s the fantasy it learned to sell. The moment a child enters the picture, the aesthetic dream quietly dissolves into a very real problem: where does anyone actually sleep, and who gets the bathroom first? Unplgd Tiny Homes, the Blue Mountains studio behind the original 26-foot Kookaburra, has spent the past year trying to answer that question seriously, and their answer is the Kookaburra 2.0.

The new model stretches to 8.5 metres long, 3 metres wide, and 4.5 metres at the gable (27.8 × 9.8 × 14.7 feet), adding just over half a metre to the original footprint but reorganising almost everything inside. Where the first Kookaburra was designed around two people working from home, the 2.0 reframes the interior around four distinct zones: cook, wash, store, and what the studio calls “reset after a big day.” That last phrase tells you exactly who this is for. Not minimalists chasing freedom, but parents chasing a moment of quiet.

Designer: Unplgd Tiny Homes

Structurally, the design’s smartest move is the dual-loft layout. A double-height void anchors the centre of the home, with the queen master loft at one end and a children’s single loft at the other, each reached by the same staircase-storage unit that doubles as the home’s main organisational spine. The queen loft offers standing headroom on three sides, which sounds like a minor detail until you’ve spent a morning in a traditional tiny house loft hunched over trying to find your socks. The kids’ loft sits separately, with its own clerestory window band that pulls in light while keeping privacy intact. On paper, the spatial hierarchy is genuinely considered.

The bathroom is getting a lot of attention, and for good reason. A full-size freestanding bathtub in a home under 28 feet is a confident choice, paired with an integrated laundry nook that treats domestic routine as a design problem worth solving. The L-shaped kitchen with breakfast bar follows the same logic. Outside, VJ panelling meets cream corrugated steel, a material palette that signals a specific aesthetic position in 2026 Australian residential design: not rough-hewn bush shack, not cold minimalist box, but something closer to considered coastal warmth.

AU$195,000 is the turnkey starting price, which puts it squarely in the range where comparisons to conventional housing become unavoidable. For roughly the same budget in regional New South Wales, you could find a small permanent house with a yard, without the towing and zoning complications that come with any road-legal tiny home. The 3-metre width is legal for towing across most Australian states without a wide-load permit, but regulations shift the moment you cross certain state borders, and the logistics follow. That’s not a dealbreaker, but it’s a real calculation that the breathless expo coverage tends to skip past.

It’s also worth naming the elephant in the room: no family has actually lived in this house yet. Every piece of coverage, including this one, is written from a display unit that toured the Hawkesbury Show circuit. The questions that matter most are the ones that can’t be answered from photos: whether noise transfers between lofts, whether the staircase is negotiable at 2am with a toddler, whether two adults and one child can share a morning bathroom without losing their minds. Unplgd deserves credit for thinking the brief through more carefully than most in this space, but the gap between a stunning expo build and a liveable family home is exactly the gap that gets papered over by beautiful photography.

One last thing worth flagging: search “Kookaburra tiny home” right now and you’ll pull up at least three different brands. Unplgd, Adapt Homes, and Kookaburra Tiny Homes AU are all trading under variations of the same bird name. They are completely unrelated companies. Do your research before you request a quote. The Kookaburra 2.0 is a genuinely promising design pushing against a real limitation in the tiny house category. Whether it delivers on the promise is a question only a family who actually lives in one can answer.

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Xiaomi’s $281 Portable Projector is effectively cheaper than paying for Netflix for a year

Here is what $281 buys you in an American projector aisle right now: TCL’s C1 at $250 with 230 ISO lumens, or XGIMI’s Vibe One at $269 with 250 ANSI lumens and zero HDR support. Both are decent little machines. Both also demand a room dark enough that you stub your toe finding the sofa. The sub-$300 bracket in the West has genuinely improved, but it improved into “acceptable,” which is a low ceiling for a category promising a 120-inch screen. Xiaomi’s newest budget projector landed in China this week and makes that ceiling look even lower.

The Redmi Projector 5 Pro sells for 1,899 yuan, roughly $281, against a 1,999 yuan list price. That buys native 1080p at up to 120 inches, 1,000 CVIA lumens, HDR10, a 120Hz refresh rate with 5ms latency, dual HDMI, Wi-Fi 6, and a metal gimbal arm that swings the body through 150 degrees. A year of Netflix Premium now runs $323.88 after March’s price hike, so the hardware costs less than the subscription. What holds my attention is that the industrial design survived the price target intact, which almost never happens down here.

Designer: Xiaomi

The body is a soft white wedge with a fabric-wrapped front panel, cradled in a U-arm carrying the REDMI wordmark along its cross-member. That arm is structural rather than a bracket bolted on afterward, so the silhouette holds together from every angle instead of looking like a box propped on a stand. Budget projectors usually betray themselves at the seams, with plastic that doesn’t look premium or boast of a perfect surface finish. Here the perforated grille wraps one flank as deliberate texture, and the white-and-grey split keeps the mass visually light. The posture borrows from a studio monitor on a yoke, a smarter reference than the black plastic router look most of this segment settles for.

A ToF sensor, an HD camera and Xiaomi’s algorithms handle focus, keystone, obstacle avoidance and screen alignment without you opening a menu, and wall colour adaptation reads your paint job to adjust the image. The 150-degree tilt lets you aim at the ceiling by nudging the body rather than stacking books under one end. Thirty degrees of side projection correction covers the reality that nobody’s coffee table sits square to the wall. Sealing the optical engine behind an all-glass lens keeps dust off the internals and, Xiaomi claims, sharpens the picture 10% over last year’s model. Both features used to be premium-tier boasts.

Temper expectations on brightness before you get excited. 1,000 CVIA lumens converts to roughly 700 ISO lumens, which puts this firmly in dim-room territory rather than sunlit-living-room territory. CVIA is a stricter Chinese standard than the fantasy figures printed on Amazon listings, where anonymous brands promise 10,000 lumens and deliver maybe 150. So the number is honest, and the honest number is modest. You will still be drawing the curtains.

The catch arrives at the end, as it always does with Redmi hardware. Xiaomi has said nothing about a global release, and Redmi projectors historically stay inside China while the Xiaomi-branded models travel. It runs HyperConnect and the XiaoAI assistant, meaning no Google TV, no Play Store, and no Netflix app. A projector that costs less than a year of Netflix and cannot run Netflix is the funniest possible ending to this story, and also the most frustrating one, because the rest of us are still shopping in a bracket that peaked at 250 lumens.

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The Sunglasses Built for When You’re Actually in the Water

Every summer, I do the same thing. I bring my sunglasses to the beach, spend twenty minutes deciding where to put them once I get in the water, and end up burying them in the sand next to my towel. Sometimes they’re there when I get back. Sometimes they’ve migrated. Sometimes I sit on them. It’s not a good system, and I’ve never really stopped to ask whether the problem is me or the design.

That’s why the Water Glasses project by Tbilisi-based XYZ Integrated Architecture stopped me mid-scroll. Not because it’s flashy or over-designed, but because it addresses something so obvious I can’t believe it’s taken this long. Most sunglasses are built for everything except the exact moments when you most need sun protection: poolside, at the beach, wading through a river. The second the water comes into the picture, the glasses come off, the case comes out (if you remembered to bring one), and suddenly your supposedly practical accessory becomes a liability.

Designer: XYZ Integrated Architecture

Water Glasses rethink the object from the ground up. The design strips everything back to two elements: lenses and a paracord. No frames, no hinges, no temples. The lenses are threaded onto the cord so they sit on the face when worn, drop below the chin when you don’t need them, and hang around the neck like a necklace the rest of the time. No case, no pocket, no towel burial. They stay with you.

It sounds almost too simple, and I think that’s the point. The studio, which typically operates in the realm of architecture, has been developing this project since 2019, and the refinement shows. The restraint feels deliberate rather than minimal for minimalism’s sake. They’ve essentially asked: what would sunglasses look like if they were designed specifically for the one environment where the existing design completely fails? The answer turns out to be lenses and a cord. That’s either obvious in retrospect or quietly radical, depending on how you look at it.

The collection comes in three configurations, with one, two, or three pairs of lenses strung along the cord. The multi-lens versions are where the project gets genuinely interesting. Worn as a necklace or draped across the body, they stop being sunglasses altogether and shift into the territory of wearable sculpture. The photography, shot at Tbilisi Olympic Pool, leans fully into this reading, and it works. The lenses come in vivid colors and irregular shapes, some softly circular, some almost organic with wavy, knotted edges, all of them laced with paracord in contrasting hues. They look like something you’d find at a contemporary jewellery fair as much as at an eyewear launch.

The lenses themselves are produced by Divel Italia, a specialty optics manufacturer, which grounds the project technically even when the visuals feel more like art than product. This matters because a design this stripped back lives or dies on the quality of its components. There’s no frame to absorb any imprecision.

I keep thinking about how much of what we own is really designed to be managed rather than used. A sunglass case is a perfect example of an object that exists purely to protect another object. We accept it as necessary without really questioning why. Water Glasses quietly make the case that a well-designed thing shouldn’t require its own support infrastructure. The cord is the case. The wearing is the storage.

The studio calls it a reexamination of the typology, which is accurate but slightly undersells how pleasantly disruptive the result feels. Conceptual eyewear projects come and go, and most stay safely in the realm of theory. These feel like they could actually sit on your face at a rooftop pool in July, which is the whole point.

Whether or not they move into full production, Water Glasses do what good design projects are supposed to do: they make you look at a familiar object and wonder why it was ever done any other way. That’s a harder thing to pull off than it looks.

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This air-conditioned formal shirt keeps you cool during heated board meetings

Let’s face it, global warming is real, and it’s already affecting millions worldwide. Japan is also bearing the brunt of hot summer days, prompting manufacturers to come up with innovative ways of cooling down in the peak heat. There are personal fans to direct chilled air at the most sensitive neck areas that cool down the whole body, or the more radical solutions like the human refrigerator to walk into and have the next-generation cooling effect.

We’ve come across another interesting personal cooling solution that comes from the land of the rising Sun, and is equally out of the box for everyday use. The solution takes the popular Yofuku no Aoyama formal attire and outfits it with fans to provide active cooling to settle down the extreme heat build-up on hot days. Called the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Short Sleeve Work Shirt, the attire developed in collaboration with fan-equipped fashion maker FZN is meant for people exposed to extreme daytime heat.

Designer: Yofuku no Aoyama

If you are in Japan, Yofuku no Aoyama is a household name when you need to be dressed for important events or meetings with clients. They’ve got the idea to keep you well dressed all day long without any uncomfortable feeling triggered by the lack of proper cooling outdoors. This seemingly normal button-up shirt has the understated summer business look, but on the inside, it comes loaded with two active cooling fans. Who could have thought of that? Although it does look a little bulged up on the sides, which can make you seem slightly fatty on the sides. That’s because of the wearable cooling fan system taking up the space, and the fans engaged during use.

The fans have three operating settings: direct cool air inwards, keeping the wearer comfortable when the Sun is beating down hard. Although not as foolproof as the human cooling refrigerator mentioned earlier, this one does provide temporary relief. At the highest settings, it can stretch for around 3.5 hours, while at the lowest operation mode the wearer can enjoy cool air for around 10 hours. We’ve seen such solutions in the past coming from Japan, mostly targeted for field workers, but they are mostly gear and nothing like apparel. This one changes the outlook, as it is a blue-collar uniform disguised as a cool-down solution for more formal business settings.

From the front, the Kuchofuku Air-Conditioned Short Sleeve Work Shirt doesn’t give away the innards, but from the back, the fans can be visible. That means you’ll either have to mask it with some blazer, or not expose to onlookers from the side profile. You’ll also have to be mindful of the 95 grams added weight of each of the fans, and the 165 grams rechargeable battery pack. I hope the weight distribution is done better on this formal shirt; it’ll feel like carrying a sizeable phone or battery bank.

The short-sleeved shirt meant to be worn hustling for a day’s meetings from one location to the other is available in blue or gray colors, in medium, large, or XL sizes. It can be bought right away from the Yofuku no Aoyama stores or the company’s online shop for 17,490 yen (approximately $111).

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This 3D-printed modular sneaker ditches glue for repairable design inspired by Asian craftsmanship

Sneakers have become more advanced than ever in terms of performance and comfort, yet their construction has barely changed. Most are assembled with permanent adhesives that bind together layers of fabric, foam, rubber, and plastic into a single unit. While this creates durable footwear, it also makes repairs nearly impossible. A worn-out sole or damaged upper often signals the end of a shoe’s life, regardless of the condition of its remaining parts. Designer Daniyar Uderbekov believes there is a better way, creating a pair of sneakers that embraces repairability from the very beginning instead of treating it as an afterthought.

Called UDBR, the modular footwear improves on the earlier sneaker concept by the designer. Rather than relying on glue to hold everything together, the design borrows assembly techniques from traditional Central Asian footwear, specifically the Makhsi and Ichigi. These handcrafted shoes were designed around individual components that could be assembled, maintained, and replaced with relative ease. The idea feels surprisingly relevant in an era increasingly focused on sustainability and product longevity.

Designer: Daniyar Uderbekov

The sneaker is built around just three primary elements: a 3D-printed TPU sole, a leather sock-like inner boot, and a rope-based fastening system that locks the entire structure together. Every component has a defined purpose and can be separated without damaging the others, allowing the shoe to be fully disassembled whenever maintenance is required. Instead of discarding an entire pair because of a single worn component, users can simply replace the part that has reached the end of its lifespan.

At the core of the idea is the updated 3D-printed thermoplastic polyurethane sole, designed to deliver cushioning and flexibility comparable to conventional sneaker soles. If years of use eventually cause the sole to lose its resilience or develop cracks, it can be reproduced using recyclable TPU through 3D printing, extending the product’s usable life while reducing unnecessary waste. The approach shifts the focus from replacement to renewal, offering a practical example of circular product design.

Complementing the sole is a leather inner boot inspired by traditional footwear, wrapping the foot in a soft, sock-like structure that prioritizes comfort while maintaining a handcrafted character. Holding everything together is an intricate rope lacing system that does more than create visual appeal. It eliminates the need for adhesives entirely while allowing the wearer to tighten, loosen, or completely separate the components with minimal effort. The exposed fastening becomes both a functional engineering solution and a defining aesthetic feature.

What makes UDBR particularly compelling is how naturally it blends old and new. Advanced 3D printing supplies precision, customization, and recyclable materials, while traditional construction principles provide a blueprint for repairability that modern sneakers have largely abandoned.

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A $150 Portable Espresso Machine That Heats Its Own Water in 135 Seconds

Good coffee and travel have never really gotten along. At the hotel, there’s that sad drip machine on the counter producing something closer to warm brown water than an actual espresso. At the campsite, it’s instant granules and lukewarm hope. Even for commuters, the office coffee situation rarely inspires confidence. The demand for a proper cup of espresso away from home has always been real; the solutions, less so.

Fanttik’s Cafein 11 is the kind of portable coffee machine that takes that problem seriously. Rather than asking you to pack a separate kettle or hunt for an outlet, it handles heating, pressure, and extraction entirely on its own, running off a built-in rechargeable battery. Fanttik, a brand behind over 40 product design awards, including multiple iF Design Awards, didn’t approach this as a novelty gadget.

Designer: Fanttik

Weighing 825g, the Cafein 11 sits comfortably in the same mental category as a travel thermos, which makes packing it feel like a non-decision. It’s built from food-grade stainless steel, which keeps it durable and easy to clean, and its cylindrical silhouette slips neatly into a backpack without fuss. The machine doesn’t look or feel like a compromise, and that’s actually a harder design goal to hit than it sounds.

The most meaningful thing the Cafein 11 does is heat its own water. That might sound basic, but it’s the feature that separates a genuinely portable espresso machine from one that’s merely small. From room temperature, it reaches brewing heat in about 135 seconds, meaning a proper shot is ready before a campsite morning gets going, or before the next highway stretch begins. No kettle required.

On the extraction side, the Cafein 11 operates at 20 bar of pressure and runs an 8-second pre-infusion cycle before the main brew begins. Pre-infusion saturates the grounds before full pressure is applied, which generally leads to a more even extraction and a richer cup. It’s a detail that suggests Fanttik was thinking as much about what ends up in the cup as about how compact the machine could be.

What also helps is that the Cafein 11 works with both capsules and ground coffee. On a rushed office morning, a capsule is in and out in seconds with no measuring or cleanup required. On a slower weekend trip, freshly ground beans are equally welcome. Either way, the machine adapts to how you feel rather than asking you to commit to one kind of coffee ritual.

Charging works through USB-C, which sounds like a small detail but matters more in practice than you’d think. There’s no proprietary cable to track down or forget at home, since the cord you’re already using for your phone or laptop does the job. A triple 4,500 mAh battery configuration handles multiple shots per charge, so the machine doesn’t run out of steam faster than the average traveler’s patience does.

At $149.99, the Cafein 11 isn’t the cheapest addition to a bag, but the math shifts when you consider what it replaces: hunting for a decent café in unfamiliar places, hotel drip machines that have seen better days, and the persistent compromise between going somewhere and having a good espresso while you’re there. It’s the kind of thing you don’t realize you want until you’re somewhere without a decent cup.

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CMF Clip Pro open-ear buds come with a charging case dial to take calls

Clip-on-style earbuds are the new trend, and the fever is catching on fast across mainstream brands. While Nothing has already impressed with the Ear (open) buds released a couple of years ago, the budget sub-brand CMF has not had one in its line-up till now. That changes now as they’ve launched the first-ever clip-on earbuds, and they look impressive.

Like most open-ear earbuds, the CMF Clip Pro targets budget-conscious users who want to experience open-ear listening without spending too much. With offerings like Bose Ultra Open, Sony LinkBuds Clip, Anker Soundcore AeroFit 2, and Shokz OpenDots One, Huawei Freebuds 6 gives plenty of options for music lovers who don’t mind the steep price tag; the CMF’s offering fills in the gap for users constrained by the price tag. Priced at $99, they directly pit against the likes of Moondrop Pill.

Designer: CMF

Comfort and long-term wearability are the USP of these IP54-rated earbuds as they cling to the ears with the 3-point Clip Design, which distributes the pressure during extended listening sessions. This reduces the pinching sensation attributed to some of the existing options on the market. On the inside, the elastic titanium wire structure keeps the structural bridge made out of skin-friendly material connected, resulting in a flexible fit that adapts to the individual’s unique ear shape. Weighing just 5.9 grams, each of the buds is designed to disappear in the ear.

CMF wants to polish out one quirk common with this style of earbuds: a very lean and dull low-end. The 10.8 mm dual-magnet dynamic driver tuned with Ultra Bass Technology (low-end enhancing) feature tweaks the sound signature to iron out the treble distortion and also refine the low end to a level that clip-on style earbuds hardly manage to achieve. I just hope the bass is not synthetic and masks all the other frequencies for a very bland audio output that audiophiles hate. The Hi-Res Audio certified LDAC codec should mean otherwise, but you never know with software-level tweaks of the audio signal. Other supported codecs include AAC and SBC.

What intrigued me about these open-ear buds is the inclusion of a Smart Dial on the charging case, which adjusts the volume, controls the playback, or can even answer calls. The dual device Bluetooth 5.4 support means you can connect to two devices simultaneously. Battery life on the earbuds is going to be around 10 hours, with a total of 32.5 hours with the case, weighing 38.81 grams. A fast charge of 10 minutes should juice up the buds for 4 hours of playback if you are on the go more often than not.

CMF will offer the Clip Pro open-ear buds in colors including gray, dark gray, and coral. The audio accessory is set to be available in the US, UK, and Japan from 15 August for $99 via the official website and retail partners. In Europe and other parts of the world, the buds will be available from 15 September.

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Nobody Designed a Drum Kit for Beginners. Until Boxboom.

Picking up the drums has always come with a quiet, frustrating tax. Before you’ve played a single beat, you’re already being asked to make a significant financial commitment, figure out where to put a massive piece of equipment, and accept that your neighbors might hate you. For most people, that’s where the dream ends. Not with failure, but with logistics.

Xiaoyu Yu, a graduate from the Umeå Institute of Design’s class of 2026, noticed this gap and did something about it. Her project, Boxboom, is a rental-based, foldable electronic drum kit designed specifically for first-time players. On paper, it sounds straightforward enough. In practice, it reframes the entire conversation about what a beginner drum experience should actually look like.

Designer: Xiaoyu Yu

The existing drum market is oddly shaped. At the entry level, you get cheap kits that feel nothing like playing real drums. At the high end, you get electronic kits that come closest to replicating acoustic feel, but they’re expensive, require serious space, and carry the weight of a long-term commitment for someone who isn’t even sure they like drumming yet. As Yu observed, the market offers little for true beginners. Boxboom identifies that gap clearly: the problem isn’t that beginners can’t learn, it’s that the tools were never really designed around them to begin with.

The physical design is worth appreciating on its own terms. Boxboom unfolds from a compact box into a fully functional drum configuration. Modular joints allow for quick setup and flexible arrangement, which means you’re not stuck with one rigid layout that doesn’t suit your body or your room. Parts are designed to be replaced individually, a detail that matters a lot for longevity. When a product is rentable, it has to survive multiple users, multiple moves, and the general roughness of being a learning tool. The design accounts for all of that without looking like it’s trying too hard.

What makes Boxboom more than just a folding drum kit is the service thinking built around it. Yu designed a three-sided ecosystem connecting users, rental shops, and drum training institutions through an online booking and delivery system. You’re not just renting a piece of hardware. You’re entering a structure that connects you to learning, not just to ownership. That shift matters more than it might seem. Ownership, it turns out, is one of the biggest barriers to entry, not a lack of enthusiasm.

The research behind the project is just as considered. Yu conducted field research at Umeå Music School and Toontrack, a leading drum sound engine company, to understand how beginners experience rhythm and what it genuinely takes for a kit to support early learning. The design process ran from 1:10 scale models all the way to full 1:1 prototypes, testing folding logic and setup sequences until the physical experience matched the idea. A central Hub integrates a phone holder, power panel, and teaching stick storage dock into a single arm. The whole system is organized around one driving question: how can a drum kit itself teach you to play?

That question is what separates Boxboom from the many beginner-focused products that quietly shrink their ambitions and rebrand it as accessibility. Yu isn’t simply lowering the financial barrier. She’s rethinking the relationship between a learner and their instrument entirely. Most musical tools are designed with the assumption that you already know what you’re doing. Boxboom assumes you don’t, and it respects you for exactly that.

Graduation design projects like this tend to get filed away a little too fast. They show up at exhibitions, earn some well-deserved attention, and then disappear before anyone asks whether they could actually become something real. Boxboom feels like it deserves a longer conversation than that. The drumming market hasn’t seen this kind of structural rethinking in a long time, and the problem it’s addressing is genuinely underserved.

Whether Boxboom ends up in production or remains a concept, it already does something worth noting: it makes you wonder why nobody asked these questions sooner. Drums have always been for everyone. The design just hadn’t caught up yet.

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Someone Stuffed a Full Retro Console Inside an NES Controller for $17

Most original NES controllers haven’t seen active duty in decades. They survive in storage bins and attic boxes, physically intact and perfectly functional as controllers, but with nothing left to plug them into. The consoles they were paired with have long since been replaced or decommissioned. The hardware was always well built, but the form factor has been sitting idle for years.

This mod changes the job description of that controller shell entirely. The electronics inside a standard NES-style gamepad were stripped out and replaced with a Wemos ESP32-S2 Mini development board, a 1.54-inch 240×240 TFT display, a MicroSD card module, a 500 mAh lithium-polymer battery, a charging board, a speaker, and a slide power switch. From the outside, it still looks exactly like an NES controller.

Designer: Logic Gate Labs

Choosing the right processor was essentially a geometry problem. A larger ESP32-S3 would have offered dual-core performance and enough PSRAM to keep entire game ROMs in memory, but it was too big to fit inside the housing. Smaller ESP32 variants without PSRAM lacked the memory for smooth emulation. The ESP32-S2 Mini landed in the narrow window between board size and processing capability that the build required.

Getting everything to fit required real surgery on the shell. Internal plastic supports had to be trimmed back to make room for the display, and new openings were drilled for the screen, USB charging port, MicroSD slot, speaker, and power switch. A bare copper wire serves as a central ground distribution rail, cutting the number of individual ground wires needed and making it possible to actually close the controller afterward.

On the software side, the device runs the Retro-Go emulator framework, compiled using ESP-IDF and CMake since the ESP32-S2 isn’t a standard Retro-Go target. The result handles a range of classic 8-bit systems comfortably. As a bonus, Doom runs via PrBoom-Go from a Freedoom WAD file loaded on the MicroSD card, managing somewhere between five and 15 frames per second depending on the scene.

The total build cost runs about $17 using common suppliers, or closer to $8 when sourcing directly from overseas markets. That puts the project well under the price of a single modern game release. Flip the power switch, select a ROM from the MicroSD card, and the screen loads games that once required a dedicated console and television setup. No additional hardware is needed.

What makes this more than a novelty is how it reconsiders a form factor most people already have muscle memory for. The D-pad clicks the same way it always did, and the A and B buttons carry the same spring. What changed is where the signal goes after the press. Instead of traveling to a console that no longer exists, the controller now processes it directly inside its own shell.

The Retro-Go framework is open source, the parts are widely available, and the NES controller shell is one of the most common pieces of vintage hardware still circulating through the secondhand market. Nothing about this build required specialized equipment or proprietary components. The total part list costs less than a single new game on any current platform and fits inside hardware that most people already own.

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Camera Batteries Go Missing, So This $70 One Tracks Itself

Camera batteries are one of those accessories that photographers never think about until something goes wrong. They’re small enough to vanish into the bottom of a bag or a jacket pocket, common enough to own several of and regularly mix up, and important enough that losing one mid-trip can force an early stop to a shoot. The solution most people reach for is buying more of them, which only increases the number of things to keep track of.

The FALCAM TagBatt addresses the problem from inside the battery itself. Compatible with Sony’s NP-FZ100 form factor, it integrates Apple’s Find My tracking technology directly into the cell, so the battery carries its own location data wherever it goes. If it ends up left behind at a studio, a venue, or the seat pocket of a flight, the Find My app will flag it and show its last known position.

Designer: FALCAM

Because the tracker lives inside the battery rather than clipped to a camera strap or screwed into a cage mount, it’s considerably harder to spot. An opportunistic thief who grabs a camera bag and removes any obvious Bluetooth puck from the outside can’t strip out what’s already built into the power source. It’s the kind of discreet integration that external trackers can’t quite replicate, no matter how small they get.

The tracking isn’t the only thing the TagBatt changes about how a camera battery behaves. A built-in USB-C port lets it charge directly from any standard USB-C source, including a power bank or a travel adapter, without needing the dedicated Sony battery charger that typically takes up its own space in a kit bag. Pop it out of the camera, plug it in overnight, and it’s ready in the morning without routing around a charger at all.

Capacity comes in at 2,600mAh against the OEM Sony NP-FZ100’s 2,280mAh, which translates to a modest but real advantage per charge. An advanced decoding chip handles the communication with the camera’s internal systems so the body treats it as it would any genuine battery, with accurate charge-level reporting and none of the “non-genuine battery” warning messages that typically accompany third-party cells.

Compatibility covers a wide sweep of Sony’s current lineup, including the Alpha 7 series through the Alpha 7 V, the Alpha 9 series, the Alpha 6700, the FX3 and FX30, and the ZV-E1, among others. A Canon LP-E6 version is also available now, with Nikon EN-EL15 and Fujifilm NP-W235 versions confirmed to be in development.

At $69.99, the TagBatt costs more than a standard third-party replacement but considerably less than the Sony original, and it comes with two capabilities that the original simply doesn’t offer. For photographers who travel frequently, work in locations where gear occasionally goes astray, or are just tired of carrying a charger they’d rather leave at home, the trade-off makes a fairly straightforward case.

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