The first LEGO Dragon Ball set is here, and Shenron costs $180

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LEGO has been making anime for about fifteen years now, it just never bothered to license any. Ninjago is a spiky-haired ensemble of teenage martial artists who power up through color-coded elemental forms and shout while they do it. Monkie Kid pulls straight from Journey to the West. Both shows are anime in everything except paperwork, built by a Danish company that clearly spent a lot of time watching after-school TV and taking notes. So there’s something very funny about LEGO finally going to an actual Japanese animation studio in 2026 and asking, politely, if it could borrow the real thing.

Toei said yes. The result is the LEGO Icons Dragon Ball: Shenron & Goku (11390), a 1,764-piece display model of the wish-granting dragon coiling up out of all seven Dragon Balls, with Kid Goku parked on his Kintoun off to one side. It’s the first LEGO and Toei Animation collaboration ever, the first Dragon Ball set LEGO has ever produced, and the first time Goku has existed as a minifigure. For a debut, going straight for the dragon is a confident move. Shenron is the hardest thing in the franchise to build out of rectangles.

Designers: Jae Won Lee & LEGO

Bar-and-clip hinges hold Shenron’s body together internally while plate hinges do the work on the outside, and that combination is the entire reason this thing reads as a curve instead of a staircase. Jae Won Lee built the dragon in repeating segments, each angled a few degrees off the last, so the deviation accumulates into a loop rather than a series of visible steps. Brickset’s review called the process repetitive in stretches, which is true and also the price of admission. Anything smoother would need custom molded parts, and then it stops being LEGO. The finished body flows upward through 32 centimeters of height without a single moment where you can see the seams doing their job.

A grey rock pillar runs up the center of the model, and Shenron is permanently attached to it. Brickset confirmed the dragon cannot be built or displayed independently, which is the honest engineering tell here: 1,764 pieces of green plastic arranged into a loop have to hang off something, and physics does not negotiate. I respect that LEGO left the pillar visible rather than disguising it as scenery. Articulation is modest as a result, with a few degrees of head rotation, an opening jaw, and legs that pivot at several joints. This is a statue that lets you nudge it, and the marketing sensibly sells it that way.

Goku arrives here as a minifigure for the first time in either company’s history, wearing the orange gi with Master Roshi’s Kame kanji printed on the chest. He carries the Power Pole, wears a printed Saiyan tail, and sits on the Kintoun, which matters more than it looks. At this point in the original series Goku cannot fly on his own ki yet, so the cloud is his actual transportation rather than a prop. Riding it also requires being pure of heart, a detail that becomes very funny once you learn he is an alien from a warrior race. The new spiky wig element is the best part of the figure.

Seven Dragon Balls sit at the base on trans-clear studs, each individually printed with its correct star count, one through seven. Lightning bursts in translucent yellow where the dragon breaks through, and the front nameplate carries the original manga logo rather than anything from the Z era. LEGO also colored many of the internal structural pieces orange to match the Dragon Balls, including parts buried inside the base where nobody will ever see them. The instruction booklet highlights new pieces in orange instead of the usual red. Those two decisions cost money and win nothing measurable, which is exactly how you tell a licensing exercise apart from a set somebody cared about.

One minifigure for $179.99 is where this set loses me. Bulma invented the Dragon Radar and drove the entire original search, and her absence from a set celebrating that specific storyline is a genuine gap that Brick Fanatics and Stonewars both flagged. Brickset’s per-piece math lands at 10.2 cents in the US against fairer numbers in the UK and Eurozone, part of a wider 2026 exchange-rate drift on LEGO pricing. Bandai’s S.H.Figuarts Shenron sits around $130 fully painted and articulated. LEGO is charging a premium for the privilege of assembling yours.

Insiders get early access on November 1, with general release on November 4 through LEGO Stores and LEGO.com, and more Dragon Ball sets are already confirmed for 2027 and beyond. Put this beside the 681-piece Pokémon Rayquaza and the comparison stops being polite, which tells you something about how seriously LEGO treated its first swing here. Fifteen years of building its own anime gave the company an unusually good understanding of what this material needs. Toriyama died in March 2024 without seeing his dragon in brick form. The set that finally arrived is worthy of him, and I hope Bulma is in the next one.

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Campanero builds tent trailer that grows from 2-person to 6-person family camper with swappable design

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Camper trailers have a lifespan that is not dependent on their construction, but on the requirements of your growing family. When you’re a couple, the trailer’s smaller, and as the kids join, the requirements grow, and everything from the tow vehicle to the loss of money in trade-offs adds up to the cost. This is why Campanero, known for its lightweight, modular tent trailers and folding campers, has unveiled a new modular tent trailer that’s one base for three models. It grows with the growing needs of your family or friends.

So, the three new models released by Campanero build on the same modular trailer platform. You are just required to unzip the tent from the trailer and swap it with the model that best suits the phase of your life you’re in. “That way, one trailer becomes a Pah-Pah, an Eck-Oh, or a Char-Lee,” Campanero explains. When your life changes, your Campanero changes with it, but without the cost of a trailer every time.

Designer: Campanero

To understand what each of the three tent trailer models has to offer, let’s start with the base model called the Pah-Pah. This Campanero trailer packs a living space comfortable enough for solo or two-person escapes that one can tow behind their EV or a small vehicle. Compact yet feature-rich and cozy to live in like a furnished bedroom, the Campanero Pah-Pah has no hard folding panels, no massive tent expansion; it takes up a small space atop the trailer and is designed to let you live there comfortably.

It is made from high-quality Tencate KA-10 poly-cotton fabric supported by a stainless-steel frame on a German chassis prepared for speeds up to 62 mph (100 km/h). Riding akin to a roof tent on a trailer, Pah-Pah’s interior feels more comfortable to camp in than an average rooftop tent (RTT), propelling it into the camper spectrum. When ready to ride away, the tent folds away into the cargo box below. The tent trailer weighs 705 lbs. and is limited to two people. If you make the compromise, you may fit a couple and a small child at max. No matter how many people you have onboard, the tent trailer comes with just one 63 x 79-inch mattress that is roughly 7 inches thick and a total sheltered space of 40 sq. ft.

As mentioned above, Campanero has developed the Pah-Pah base model to function as the foundation of a modular camping system, which grows with your family’s needs. The second model in the list is called the Eck-Oh. Designed for four people, the trailer-top tent increases the sheltered living space from 40 sq. ft. to 91.5 sq. ft., so you can accommodate additional sleepers in there. If you want it as a secluded family retreat, you can choose to utilize the additional space created by the 102 sq. ft. awning for a covered dining area or bathroom.

Eck-Oh, which also bumps up the price from base Pah-Pah’s €13,950 (approx. $15,800) to €16,950 (approx. $19,200), weighs 815 lbs. and ensures up to four people can camp in it easily. If even the four-person tent trailer doesn’t cut the bill for you, Campanero is working on a six-person modular tent trailer model it calls the Char-Lee. This model will increase the sheltered living space to 99 sq ft. inside. It will include a larger 124 sq. ft. awning but will start at a slightly higher €18,950 (approx. $21,500).

 

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A full desktop PC is hiding inside this picture frame

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Dieter Rams famously said good design is honest. With all due respect to Dieter, Matt from DIY Perks has built something that lies through its teeth, and it is one of the better design ideas to come out of a YouTube build video this year. The project is a wall-mounted picture frame, painted with an original mountain landscape by Matt himself, that conceals a fully working PC workstation behind it. Nothing about the closed frame hints at what is inside, a monitor, a computer, a keyboard, a mouse, and a pair of salvaged speakers. It takes a gentle pull at the top to break the illusion and fold the whole thing down into a desk.

DIY Perks is Matt’s YouTube channel, sitting at nearly 5 million subscribers and built on exactly this kind of project, builds that solve a real problem while ignoring every conventional idea of what the solution should look like. This one hides an ultra-wide monitor stripped to its bare panel for minimum depth, a computer on a repurposed laptop motherboard, and TV speakers behind a veneer-clad wall panel finished in a warm 1970s dark-wood aesthetic. Power arrives via copper tape strips painted invisibly into the wall. The desk surface is MDF covered in oiled hardwood veneer, convincing enough to pass as solid wood. The whole setup runs Linux Mint, draws about 90 watts, and looks like a painting until it doesn’t.

Designer: DIY Perks

A Desktop With No Actual Desk

Desktop computers require a desktop, which is right there in the name, and this one provides one on demand. The hinge mechanism opens like a laptop, but there is no lap, the screen is not attached to the part you hold, and you are definitely not putting this on a plane tray table. It could qualify as a standing desk, except it sits at seated height and has no legs of any kind. The most accurate product name might be something like “wall-mounted fold-down all-in-one,” which sounds like a line item in a government procurement document. Matt just calls it a PC, and at a certain point that is as good as it gets.

The design works because it commits fully to the illusion. Closed up, it reads as furniture and decor first, tech never. Open it, and the whole thing shifts personality in one move, from framed artwork to compact workstation. That transformation is the hook, but it also says something interesting about the way we live with devices now. Plenty of people want a proper setup at home, but very few want their living room to look like a call center. This build solves that with sheer elegance. It gives you a desk without asking your room to look like it has one all day.

Built Like Furniture, Wired Like Hardware

Fitting a monitor, computer, speakers, and peripheral storage flush within a frame the depth of a painting required solutions at every layer. The monitor gets stripped to its bare panel, with the control board relocated below using low-profile HDMI connectors so the assembly sits nearly flush with the wall. The computer runs on a repurposed laptop motherboard, cooled by a server heatsink from an electronics recycling center, fitted with a copper shim Matt trimmed by hand with a hacksaw. A blower fan handles airflow through a small shroud. The entire assembly slots into its compartments without a CNC machine anywhere in the process, which is a deliberate choice that keeps this build within reach of a serious maker.

Most wall-mounted desks carry a laptop and nothing heavier, and the bracket design tends to reflect that. This one carries a monitor, computer, speakers, and the desk surface itself, distributed through the main wall panel via brackets sunk directly into wall studs, with piano hinges spreading load across the full desk connection. Power arrives via two strips of copper tape running up the wall surface, painted over with metal primer and standard wall emulsion until they completely vanish. The tape carries low-voltage DC, with the power brick at the bottom acting as short-circuit protection, and the voltage is low enough that shock risk is not a concern. Even standing directly in front of it, you cannot find the wires.

Art on the Outside, PC Inside

A mountain valley with a winding river, pine-covered slopes, rocky crags, morning mist, roaring rapids, and a steam engine pulling cargo through a mountain pass. Matt spent hours on that painting, which now lives on the front of his PC, and it reads convincingly as something out of a Bob Ross tutorial, warm and dense with detail. The frame sits surrounded by other paintings from family members on the same wall, completing the camouflage to the point where a visitor to the house would have no reason to look twice. That is what separates this from every other clever PC build and puts it squarely in design-object territory. The disguise is the design.

Most technology objects demand attention even at rest, the idle glow of a standby indicator, the visual mass of a monitor and its arm, the cord tangle underneath. Matt’s build refuses to participate, choosing instead to disappear completely into its domestic context and only announce itself when needed. That posture shows up far more often in high-end furniture design than in PC builds, where the prevailing instinct is to make hardware as visible as possible, preferably with RGB lighting aimed in multiple directions. The painting on the front is the punchline of the project, but it is also its most considered creative decision. Every other detail serves function; the painting serves the idea.

When a PC Forgets It Is Tech

Matt has been building invisible and fold-down PCs for over a decade, and the 2020 version of his invisible PC alone pulled in over 8 million views on YouTube. This iteration raises the stakes by making the camouflage the actual creative output, which shifts it from an engineering exercise into something closer to an art installation. The home workspace trend has been moving this way anyway, look at the DropTop desk by Pith and Stem or Anker Bak’s wall-mounted desk inspired by the logic of Japan’s compact homes. Matt’s build sits at the logical extreme of that movement, a workspace so thoroughly integrated into its surroundings that it ceases to exist until you ask it to. No commercial product has pulled that off.

The build is not a product you can buy, which is the one thing most people will find frustrating after watching the video. Matt points to Framework mainboards as an off-the-shelf shortcut for anyone attempting a recreation, and the documentation is thorough enough that a determined maker could get reasonably close. The painting, though, is entirely up to you. Either paint your own art, or print something online. Or if you really want to one-up Matt, add a glare-free screen instead of the painting and program it to work as a smart art frame!

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