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.
Citroën pulled the cover off its 2 CV Concept at the Paris Motor Show this week, and the little electric hatch looks ready to pick up where the original left off after production ended in 1990. Officials describe it as a preview of a production model due by 2028, built in Europe and aimed at buyers who want something compact, light, and priced around 15,000 euros. That figure sits well below most current electric city cars and would place the finished version between the tiny Ami and the C3 in the lineup.
Hotel rooms, airport lounges, and Airbnbs often leave travelers sharing a single public network with strangers or struggling with a weak signal that drops during a video call. TP-Link’s Roam 7 BE3600 travel router, priced at $89.98 (was $130), solves that by sitting between any available internet connection and a private network that belongs only to the person who set it up.