HTX Studio spent about two months turning a full work desk into a charger that finds a phone wherever you set it down and starts feeding it power. Apple showed that idea in 2017 as AirPower, a small mat that would charge a phone, Watch, and AirPods case without lining them up on a single coil. The pad never shipped. Apple cancelled it in 2019. The YouTube builder waited through nine promised “next years,” then built a version big enough to work on.
Days after Valve started sending Steam Frame kits to buyers, iFixit already had one open on the bench and mostly liked what sat inside. Steam Frame launched September 14 as a standalone SteamOS headset that also streams from a PC through an included wireless adapter, starting at $1,059 for 256GB and $1,299 for 1TB, with controllers and Half-Life: Alyx in the box.
Jude Robinson built Daisy as his final year mechatronics project at the University of Glasgow, finished with first class honors, and took the IET prize for the best manufacturing project on campus. Two upright gantries face each other across a short workspace. Each carries a four joint gripper whose V shaped fingers close on a daisy stem and center it whether the stem is thick or thin.
Google will send its first AI chips into space next week as the opening flight of Project Suncatcher, a long-term research effort to find out whether machine learning hardware can run in low Earth orbit on solar power. A refrigerator-sized prototype named MVP, built with Planet Labs and carrying four Tensor Processing Units, is booked on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 Falcon 9 rideshare from Vandenberg, with a target date of October 1. The satellite is not a working orbital data center. It exists to measure what launch vibration, radiation, and vacuum heat do to Google’s chips once they leave the ground.
Most charging cases only hold a charge and a pair of buds. JBL Live Buds 3, priced at $129.95 (was $200), add a 1.45-inch color touchscreen that turns the case into a control panel you can use with a laptop, tablet, TV, or phone without opening an app. Swipe to play, pause, or skip, raise or lower volume, flip between adaptive noise cancelling, Ambient Aware, and TalkThru, pick an equalizer preset, or set spatial sound for music, movies, or games. Incoming texts and call alerts can flash across the same display, battery levels for both buds and the case sit along the top, and you can load a photo from your phone as a lock wallpaper. A lanyard loop on the case makes it easier to keep that little screen within reach.