Beats and The Pokémon Company International announced a special-edition Beats Pill on October 13 that places artwork of Pikachu and Mimikyu across the speaker’s grill. The collaboration arrives during the franchise’s 30th anniversary period and follows a short teaser the previous day that simply stated “Time to catch something new.”
Apple HomeView landed this morning as a dedicated screen meant to sit in a kitchen, on a nightstand, or fixed to a wall, handling music, video calls, and the controls for lights, locks, and cameras all at once. Both the tabletop version and the wall-mounted version cost $299, with pre-orders open today and units shipping on November 13 in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and a handful of other countries.
Building an electric 8×8 camper from scratch looks impossible until Quiet Nerd opens a workshop and starts cutting square punch tubing into a lightweight frame. Eight separate 48-volt, 1000-watt brushless differential motors soon sit under that frame, each one ready to push its own wheel.
An electric helicopter built by a small team in Columbia, Maryland, flew away with first place in the DARPA Lift Challenge after hauling a load of cast iron that weighed nearly four times the aircraft itself. The machine, called Katana, finished its winning run in just over nineteen minutes at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force in Dayton, Ohio. Judges measured an empty weight of 29.3 pounds and a payload of 112.4 pounds, producing a ratio of 3.84 to 1. No entry cleared the official four-to-one mark that would have unlocked the full prize amounts, so the top check was cut to $1.25 million. Still, the result set the highest completed score of the week and left every other finished aircraft behind.
Photo credit: Ruochen Hou et al. / RoMeLa, UCLA / New Atlas
Old Android phones sitting unused in drawers can now serve as the central brains for a compact walking robot that stands about nineteen inches tall and weighs under four pounds. Researchers at UCLA’s Robotics and Mechanisms Laboratory built PhoneBot as an open-source platform that mounts a commodity smartphone as the torso, relying on the phone’s camera, motion sensors, processor, and wireless connection to handle vision, balance sensing, and movement calculations. Hardware costs for the body, motors, and supporting electronics run around four hundred dollars, leaving the phone itself as the main variable. The design deliberately keeps electronics simple so that swapping one phone for another requires no rewiring.