Compass Points Only to Times Square Olive Garden

Sometimes the internet delivers exactly the kind of wholesome weirdness we need, and a compass pointing only to a chain restaurant in Manhattan definitely qualifies.

Jason Goldberg and Steve Nasopoulos, working with Glub Glub Labs, created a fully functional compass that ignores magnetic north and instead points directly to the Olive Garden in Times Square. The project started as a joke about being tired of guessing which direction to find unlimited breadsticks, but it turned into a real product with real engineering.

The device packs serious tech into a simple concept. An Arduino Nano microcontroller connects to GPS hardware typically used in drones, a gyro sensor for rotation tracking, and a stepper motor that turns the dial. The whole system runs on batteries salvaged from disposable vapes and works completely offline using hardcoded coordinates and onboard math.

The creators picked Olive Garden for one specific reason: it's the only place where you can order lasagna as a side dish. Their terms of service include warnings about not walking off cliffs or into the ocean while following the compass, scenarios they admitted they just made up while imagining potential liability issues.

Why This Inspires

This project celebrates the joy of making something completely unnecessary but undeniably delightful. In a world where every gadget promises to optimize our lives or solve urgent problems, these creators built something that exists purely to make people smile.

The response proves people are hungry for this kind of creative playfulness. Over 2,000 people signed up for the waitlist, far exceeding what Goldberg and Nasopoulos expected. They plan to manufacture the compasses in small batches of fifty to maintain quality, and they're keeping the door open in case Olive Garden wants to take the concept global.

The team jokes about going public in 2038 with a fifteen billion dollar market cap, but the real value is already clear: sometimes the best inventions are the ones that remind us not to take ourselves too seriously.

This quirky compass proves that creativity and technical skill can combine to create something wonderfully pointless yet perfectly meaningful.