This ESP32 slot machine does not take money. It is a desk toy that teaches what “random” means on a computer. Three reels spin, the symbols stop, and the program checks whether they match. You can watch it, change the art, and read the few lines that decide a win.
A movie is a flipbook. You hold a stack of still pictures and flip them fast, and your eyes see motion. That is the whole trick inside this little slab. The board is a Waveshare ESP32-C6-LCD-1.47. The screen is 172 pixels wide and 320 pixels tall, driven by an
A busy light is a state machine you can see from across the room. This one has four moods, a huge word on a small screen, and a single LED that matches the word. It is a DIY busy light you can flash from a browser and cycle with one
Three screens live in one little slab: a clock, today’s weather, and a note you send from your phone. That is the whole desk command slab. It is an ESP32 desk clock that also answers a web page. The hardware is the Waveshare ESP32-C6-LCD-1.47 (Amazon B0DK5J6LX3). The display
Airports used to flip metal cards to show the next flight. Each card was cut in half, so the letter seemed to tumble into place. This project paints that look on a small screen: a DIY airport departure board you can print a case for and flash in the browser.
A round screen the size of a bottle cap can be a DIY etch-a-sketch ESP32. Drag a finger and ink follows. Hold still and the color changes. Shake the puck and the drawing turns to dust. The board is the Waveshare ESP32-S3-Touch-LCD-1.28 (Amazon B0CM68M8LR). Its cover is a circle
A magic 8-ball hides a die in blue liquid. This one hides a small computer. You print a round black puck, snap in a Waveshare round screen, and shake it. A blue window swirls up, a triangle rises, and a two-line fortune appears. Tap to ask. Tap again and the
You sit in the middle of a green circle. Airplanes show up as little triangles, each one pointing the way it is flying, with a callsign like UAL182 beside it. That circle is a real ESP32 plane radar, small enough to live on a desk. The board is the Waveshare
The best Arduino projects in 2026 are not blinking an LED on a breadboard. They are small finished objects: a screen, a printed case, and a program you can load from Chrome or Edge without installing a toolchain first. These nine are the ones on PrintPal right now. Each guide
A 40 cm bust on a 256 mm bed has two honest options: scale it down until the pose no longer matters, or cut it into parts that glue back into the original size. Splitting is the right call when the parts meet exactly where you planned. A flat cut
A slicer warning is usually a geometry problem, not a printer problem. Not watertight, non-manifold edges, model has errors — those mean the file does not have a clear inside and outside. Sometimes the slicer repairs it. Often it fills the wrong hole, drops a chunk of the shell, and you
A Desk Pal is a head that sits on your desk and looks back. There is no body, no legs, and no separate bezel to design. A 1.28 inch round touchscreen is the face, and the printed shell is the rest of the character: ears, a sprout, a robot
A multi-color print is only as good as the color map. If the red is supposed to stop at the edge of a fin, one stray triangle on the next layer schedules a whole filament swap, a purge tower, and a longer print. Painting that map inside Bambu Studio or
Every electronics project eventually hits the same wall: you have a component that needs to go on a DIN rail, and the manufacturer never made an adapter for it. Ours was a Thor RPS-400-TF power supply with four M3 mounting holes and no rail clip of any kind. This is
Five years ago, getting into 3D printing meant building a kit, leveling a bed with a folded piece of paper, and then discovering that the actually hard part wasn't the printer at all — it was that you couldn't design anything. You were limited to whatever strangers
Almost every new 3D print seller prices the same way: check how much filament the slicer used, multiply by the spool price, double it, round to something that ends in 9. Then they wonder why a shop doing 40 orders a month somehow isn't making money. The problem
A printed QR code is one of those objects that's obviously useful the moment you own one. A guest Wi-Fi sign on the kitchen counter. A tag on a market stall that opens your shop. A keychain that pulls up your contact card. It's also the
Most 3D printing shops fail for the same boring reason: the products take too long to print, cost too much to ship, and look exactly like the free model everyone else downloaded. Custom fidget clickers dodge all three. They're small, they print in under an hour, they ship
A fidget clicker is the simplest satisfying object you can 3D print: a chunky puck you press with your thumb that goes click. What makes a custom one worth printing is the face on top — your logo, your cat, your team's mascot, or just a word you like
A few months ago a friend asked me to make a 3D print of the street where he grew up. Not a cute little diorama, but the actual place, with the real hills, the real river bend, and the real buildings standing where they really stand. I assumed it would
A few weeks ago I wanted a little island for a tabletop game night. Nothing fancy, just a chunk of land with a beach, a hill, and a couple of trees. The problem was that every path to get there ran through CAD software I did not want to learn
