Awesome Tech

Keyboard enthusiast and woodworker Barrett Creative makes beautiful wood keyboard cases. They’re sold in kit form with a KL-90 circuit board, encoder(s), and a matching wooden knob(s). They’re currently available in Woodland, Rustic, and Infernum kits. Keycaps, switches, and stabilizers are not included. Hipyotech has a hands-on look at one of these keyboards.

This unique coffee table has a built-in 43″ touchscreen and tilts from a flat to an angled display. The Nxtbl’s 4K screen is backed by Android 13 and has HDMI, USB-A, and USB-C connectors. It has a waterproof, scratchproof, and glare-resistant tempered glass surface and works for gaming, computing, watching videos, and Zoom calls with an external camera.

In 1994, Sony and Nintendo collaborated on an unreleased video game console that birthed the PlayStation name. While there is a rare prototype of the system, James Channel thought it would be fun to build his own. His Frankenstein’s monster of a console has the body of a Super Famicom, the brains of a PlayStation, and a sketchy exposed CD-ROM drive.

Health technology is inching closer than ever to Star Trek’s sickbay. The Withings BeamO combines a digital thermometer, a stethoscope, a fingertip electrocardiogram, and a blood oxygen meter in one small gadget. It can help detect and track various health issues and upload and share data to your doctor. It’s expected to drop later in 2024 for around $250.

Ali Spagnola thought making her car change colors like a gigantic mood ring would be fun. So she sprayed it with thermochromic liquid crystal paint. This stuff doesn’t show if she’s happy or sad but instead reacts to changes in temperature. If you’re wondering what those discs are on her car, they’re the 9,000 PopSockets she attached in a previous video.

We have robotic musicians, cooks, and barbers. Engineers at the University of Tokyo taught a robot to play Charades. The team took the Alter3 humanoid robot, connected it to OpenAI’s GPT-4, and used what it learned to act out prompts through its movements. Check out more of the bot’s interpretive dances on Takahide Yoshida’s YouTube channel.

A little while back, maker Ivan Miranda engineered a very cool clock that tells time using marbles. But his kinetic sculpture is too slow to tell the time accurately. He’s since made numerous refinements to the design of his clock, and it’s now faster and smoother, so it can properly update its digits once per minute. It’s totally awesome but ridiculously loud.

Because umbrellas do their job pretty well, there hasn’t been much need for innovation in their design. I Build Stuff came up with a modern spin on the old umbrella by making one that flies and hovers above his head. The umbrella drone has lots of drawbacks like it doesn’t fold and has a built-in time limit, but it’s still a fun build.

This unique power bank from Sharge is straight out of a science fiction movie. Really. The cyberpunk charger is based on the Internet Host Key seen in the Chinese flick Wandering Earth II. It’ll charge three devices at once via two USB-C and one USB-A port. It comes in 10,400 mAh, 40-watt and 20,000 mAh, 130-watt versions.

Shane from Stuff Made Here already invented an unmissable basketball hoop. But what do you do if the basketball hoop is 16 feet off the ground? To give himself a fighting chance at making extra-tall dunks, he built a pair of telescoping boots that lift him to the net like Inspector Gadget’s leg springs. They work but look dangerous as hell.

Benlydesign’s retrofuturist watch has a stainless steel case inspired by the DeLorean DMC-12 and the Tesla Cybertruck. Its OLED display is angled towards its wearer for easy viewing without twisting your wrist and activates when you raise your arm. It also has a visible circuit board with LED lighting and comes with a matching sandblasted steel band.

There are electric guitars, and then there’s this thing. SamuraiGuitarist Steve-san Onotera got his hands on one of the weirdest guitars ever, the MCI B-35 Guitorgan. This late 1970s oddity combined a guitar with an electric organ. The hollow-body instrument packs a large circuit board and plays keyboard sounds using sensors between its frets.

For those unfamiliar with the One Hacker Band, it’s a roomful of electromechanical musical instruments created and programmed by Aaron Todd. For this performance, he programmed his robotic band to play Video Killed the Radio Star, the 1979 Buggles song that launched MTV and kicked off the music video era.

If you live somewhere cold and your car doesn’t have heated seats and a heated steering wheel, you need to upgrade next time. It’s worth it. In this video from MrFastFox666, he used a thermal camera to show what’s going on inside his Cadillac ELR’s heated steering wheel. We assumed the heating element wire would be straight but it has a zig-zag pattern.

Do you have to replace your gadgets more often than you think you should? You’re not alone. While some products wear naturally, others have been engineered to last a specified time. Veritasium host Derek Muller digs into the sordid history of planned obsolescence, including how a cartel of companies conspired to make light bulbs last less time.

It’s easy to take the high-fidelity 3D graphics in today’s video games for granted, but a lot of artistry, hardware, and software goes into every frame you see on screen. Branch Education provides an in-depth yet understandable explanation of the processes and technology at work when rendering video game graphics.