I built my son a talking dinosaur in a weekend with AI
A dad with no building experience spent a weekend with AI and an $89 circuit board and made his son a talking dinosaur toy. It reads stories, plays the radio, and tells jokes, and it works.
A random mix from the whole library. Shuffle for a new set.
A dad with no building experience spent a weekend with AI and an $89 circuit board and made his son a talking dinosaur toy. It reads stories, plays the radio, and tells jokes, and it works.
A ready made dashboard only shows what the maker thinks matters. His own status monitor, built with AI on a 10.3 inch second screen, shows him when an n8n workflow, a hoster or his lawn mower socket fails, with 53 tests included.
Niraj Rajgor's unused 10th generation Kindle is now a photo frame. Working through AI over Wi-Fi, GPT-6 Astra built tools to run custom software on the Kindle and installed a slideshow app that cycles ten photos, four minutes each, and picks up where it left off after sleep.
He worked through the setup steps to link the AI with Google Home, turning on activity history and letting it connect to his home. After that, he could ask the AI to turn on his lights and it worked.
Kilsonmoon sent the AI a photo of a neighborhood water-pipe cleaning notice: The AI identified when his street would be cleaned, added it to his calendar, set a messenger reminder for the day before, and relayed the precautions — close the valve, avoid running the washing machine. It also found the full schedule on the water utility's website and registered ongoing monitoring so future notices trigger automatic alerts.
His local LLM runs permanently as a Home Assistant agent with agentic access to his sensors, answering voice queries about his solar and battery data and creating automations.
An engineer gave the AI his house drawings, the original solar plans and a Powerwall expansion permit (mostly PDFs plus DXF files) after a contractor was slow to quote, and the bot produced a complete 17-page B-size permit drawing package in under five minutes, including a roof layout and one-line wiring diagrams drawn from scratch. He checked every line himself and planned to submit once a licensed engineer stamped the structural parts.
He scans a whole list with schedules for his daughter and tells the AI to add them as events in his Google Calendar. The AI adds them, and the job is done.
The AI configured his network, fixed an incomplete fast-roaming setup and a DFS channel delay issue.
He used AI to jailbreak an old Kindle and set it up as a small wall dashboard. The whole job took about 10 minutes.
Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.