This Twister-Themed Coffee Table Has Unexpected Functionality...

Matty Benedetto of Unnecessary Inventions builds all kinds of wacky stuff and his most recent project is no exception. It is a coffee table that has a Twister theme. No, not tornadoes or Helen Hunt in her prime. It has a bunch of big dots in red, blue, yellow, and green. But those dots aren’t for positioning your hands or feet, they’re actually control inputs for smart devices.

Here’s how it works: you grab one of the devices that Benedetto made for this purpose. Those devices have NFC readers in their bases. Then you place the chosen device on one of the dots, which all have NFC stickers hidden on their bottom sides. The device reads the NFC tag and then performs an action assigned to that specific tag. A single tag can have different actions, depending on the device that scans it.

For this video, Benedetto constructed three different devices. The first is an RGB LED lamp, controlled by a custom Matty32 board, that changes color to match the dot it rests on. The second is a music player with a DFRobot DFPlayer Mini, which plays songs tied to the dots.

The third is a bit more complicated and uses an Arduino UNO R4 WiFi board for control. It is a battery-powered coffee warmer that heats up when placed on any of the nearest four dots. The heating element is actually a tiny 3D printer bed, which the Arduino controls via a MOSFET module.

This is a really fun way to control smart devices, because it incorporates physical actions that feel natural to us. It is also reliable, because the underlying RFID technology is rock solid. The disadvantage, of course, is having to cram a reader into any device you want to control, which is probably why Benedetto only built three of them.