Maker Ivan Miranda is no stranger to turning ordinary glass marbles into reliable timekeepers. His latest machine abandons fixed digits entirely. Instead of showing hours and minutes, a massive circular wheel slowly rotates while black and white marbles form continuous scrolling text around its outer edge.
A small white cube sits on its motorized base and quietly sweeps left, right, up, and down at your command. The Blink Mini Pan-Tilt Camera, priced at $23.99 today (was $40), plugs into any wall outlet, connects to 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi in minutes through the Blink app, and gives you control over nearly an entire room from a phone or tablet. Its 110-degree lens sits on a base that pans roughly 350 degrees and tilts about 125 degrees, so you can check the far corner of a living room, glance at a hallway entrance, or look down at the floor without walking over to move the camera yourself.
Hexbugs start as tiny plastic toys that scurry around floors on the strength of a single vibrating motor and a few angled bristles. One maker took that basic idea and scaled it up until a person could climb aboard. The result, shown in a recent video, looks more like a moving plywood platform than a finished robot, yet it does travel under its own power once someone sits down.
Launch week for Apple’s first foldable brought the usual ritual from TechRax, who has spent years sending new iPhones through increasingly harsh trials. This time he took two separate iPhone Duo units. One went down a spiral staircase from roughly 200 feet. The other spent an afternoon being released over and over on ordinary city surfaces.
Marine invertebrates called feather stars drift and turn by coordinating clusters of flexible arms, rising, sinking, or hovering with almost no visible effort. Researchers at North Carolina State University copied that coordination in a soft underwater robot that manages the same range of motion with only two actuators.