Author Archives: Sarang Sheth

Redmi just debuted an ultra-affordable $42 monitor arm that hides your cables too

Posted on by

Xiaomi is assembling your desk one cheap piece at a time. First came the monitors, from 24-inch office panels to 4K gaming screens. In July, the Mijia Monitor Light Bar 2 arrived to perch on top of them for about $39. Now Redmi, Xiaomi’s budget sub-brand, has launched the piece that holds the whole thing up, a monitor arm with a hidden cable channel for roughly $42. At this rate, a Xiaomi standing desk is probably already sitting in a spreadsheet somewhere.

The Redmi Monitor Arm went on sale October 12 on Xiaomi Youpin for ¥299 (about $42), and Xiaomi has not announced a US release. It holds screens up to 34 inches, and the body is 3mm aluminum alloy. Xiaomi’s pitch is that cables tuck inside the arm, so your desk shows a single post. A five-year replacement guarantee comes along for the ride, which is a lot of faith at this price. If you have ever fought a monitor arm and zip ties in the same evening, you can see the appeal.

A load range that starts at 4.2 pounds

Redmi rates the arm for 4.2 to 19.8 pounds (1.9 to 9 kg), and the low end is the interesting part. An arm tuned for a heavy screen will push a light one skyward, so a 1.9 kg floor suits the featherweight office panels Xiaomi itself sells. At the other end, 17173 notes a loaded 34-inch ultrawide lands around 8 kg, so the 9 kg ceiling has room. Anything heavier, or anything past 34 inches, needs a different arm. Check your panel’s spec sheet before you click buy.

The lift comes from a dual-spring design, with springs on both sides firing together so the force stays even through the whole 11.8 inches (30 cm) of height travel. Xiaomi says it survived 30,000 test cycles. Chinese outlet Kuai Keji worked that out to about 20 years of use at four adjustments a day, which is a lot of standing up and sitting down. The listing cites a Chinese utility model patent, a lighter registration than a full invention patent. Redmi adds a separate tilt-force adjustment at the VESA head to go after screen sag

Cable routing that hides the mess, mostly

Redmi’s renders show cables running through a channel beneath the arm and down the riser. Only the clamp stays visible on the desk. It echoes the trick behind Calvin Lien’s Console Desk concept, which hid its cabling inside the desk’s spine so the surface stayed clean. The arm adds reach to that job, with 17.1 inches (43.5 cm) of front-to-back travel and a 360-degree screen rotation. The promo shots still show a little cable curling out near the VESA plate, which is fair, because a moving screen needs slack somewhere.

Six years ago, Redmi’s first PC monitor, the Display 1A, launched with nothing to hide its cables, a gap a Polish review called out at the time. Concealed routing is now a headline feature on the company’s own product page. That tells you where desk setups have gone. A channel in the arm means the monitor’s cables follow one path instead of dangling in every direction. Redmi’s version is far simpler than a full desk rebuild, and it only has to live inside one arm.

The ¥299 price and China-only availability

The arm costs ¥299 in China (about $42) and went on sale October 12 through Xiaomi Youpin. The listing shows a struck-through ¥499, but Youpin’s fine print calls that a reference price, so read ¥299 as a launch price rather than a markdown. Notebookcheck points out that pricier ergonomic arms can run up to $350 in the US, which makes $42 look like a typo. A five-year replace-instead-of-repair guarantee comes with it, though the full terms are not spelled out on the page. The currency conversion is approximate.

Compatibility looks friendly, since the VESA plate takes the 75x75mm and 100x100mm patterns that most monitors use. That is the same pair CORSAIR’s Platform:6 desk specs for the arms it ships with, so most panels should line up. Xiaomi has not published a clamp thickness range, so measure your desk edge before you get excited. There is no word on a global release, but Xiaomi often sends its accessories abroad later, sometimes wearing the Xiaomi name. The part holding your screen up has never been the exciting purchase, which is exactly why a $42 version is worth watching.

 

The post Redmi just debuted an ultra-affordable $42 monitor arm that hides your cables too first appeared on Yanko Design.

CleanMyMac just made a Screen Cleaning Perfume for your MacBook that smells like a pine forest

Posted on by

Apple’s official answer to a smudgy MacBook screen is a $9 Polishing Cloth, which, to be fair, is ten bucks cheaper than the version everyone roasted in 2021. MacPaw has a more extravagant answer. The Ukrainian company behind CleanMyMac just revealed CleanMyMac Mist, its first physical product, a screen and keyboard cleaner dressed up as a bottle of designer fragrance. One spritz on a microfiber cloth is meant to lift the fingerprints and leave your laptop smelling like a frosty pine forest. Your candles, your hand soap and your car already have signature scents, so honestly, the MacBook was overdue.

MacPaw calls the scent Frosted Juniper, picked because juniper grows both in Ukraine, where the company was founded, and in California, where the Mac was born. That’s a little sentimental, and I’m completely here for it. The notes run from camphor, ozone and citrus up top to fir needle, cedar leaf and green apple at the base, and the brief was to smell clean without smelling like a cleaning product. Pole, a design and small-batch production studio in Ivano-Frankivsk, made the glass atomizer, its metal case, and a pink box loud enough to see from across the office. Only 100 bottles exist, and they’re up for grabs via a CleanMyMac Instagram and TikTok giveaway until October 23, so don’t go hunting for a price tag.

Designers: MacPaw & Pole

Every design choice here borrows from the perfume counter instead of the cleaning aisle. A slim glass atomizer sits inside a cylindrical metal case, and its silver-and-gray finish would sit happily next to any MacBook. The box flips the mood entirely, with a hot pink tray holding the Mist, a microfiber cloth, a small brush and a scent card, which is basically a perfume blotter for your laptop. The whole package is designed to live on your desk in plain view, far away from the Windex under the kitchen sink. Le Labo pulled a similar trick with its hand-cast concrete diffuser, treating a fragrance gadget as decor first.

Apple’s own cleaning guide warns against aerosol sprays, so the Mist uses a pump atomizer, and you spritz the cloth instead of the screen. That small habit change tackles a real problem, since one in three US Mac owners in MacPaw’s survey admitted to damaging their machine while cleaning it. The product site names the usual culprits: glass cleaners that strip anti-reflective coatings, paper towels that leave micro-scratches, and the hoodie sleeve that only feels like it’s doing something. Apple Stores reportedly keep their display units spotless with WHOOSH!, so dedicated screen formulas are nothing new. MacPaw’s twist is making the formula something you’d happily smell on your fingertips afterward, though nano-texture displays should still stick to Apple’s dry cloth.

As a longtime CleanMyMac user, I find the whole thing delightfully on the nose. The app launched in 2008, has racked up 29 million downloads sweeping caches, logs and leftover app files out of Macs, and MacPaw says it cleans a million machines a day. For 18 years, “clean” was a metaphor for digital housekeeping, and now the metaphor has a nozzle and a note pyramid. MacPaw handed the physical side to Pole, a design and production center in Ivano-Frankivsk with metal, wood, ceramics and biolab workshops under one roof. Pole specializes in runs of 1 to 500 units and built elements for Ukraine’s pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka, so a 100-bottle drop sits right in its comfort zone.

The Mist isn’t for sale, and the only way to get a bottle is a giveaway on CleanMyMac’s Instagram and TikTok that closes at 11:59 PM EST on October 23. MacPaw will pick 10 winners on Instagram and 5 on TikTok, so the odds are slim, but every entrant still gets a 20% CleanMyMac coupon. The full scent breakdown and entry details live at cleanmymacmist.com. Millions of Mac owners already trust MacPaw with the inside of their machines, and I suspect plenty of them would buy a refill to keep the outside smelling like a snowy forest. Frosted Juniper makes a great first edition, though I’m already lobbying for a cozy sandalwood one by December.

The post CleanMyMac just made a Screen Cleaning Perfume for your MacBook that smells like a pine forest first appeared on Yanko Design.

Why CMF’s New Milk Carton Speakers Are So Irresistible To Look At

Posted on by

Everyone has held a milk carton, which is exactly why CMF’s new speakers are so hard to stop looking at. CMF, the budget sub-brand of Nothing, shaped its first Bluetooth speakers like gable-top cartons, a form that toy manufacturer John Van Wormer of Toledo, Ohio, patented in 1915 as the Pure-Pak. Your brain files that silhouette under breakfast, fridge door, and home before it even registers the grille. Then the colors and a deliberately mismatched knob finish the job. Black cylinders and bricks have run the speaker aisle for a decade, so a carton is practically a plot twist.

The CMF Speaker S ($59) and Speaker M ($109) launched October 12 at nothing.tech and select retailers, in white, dark grey, turquoise, and orange. CMF’s own product pages cite a carton’s sharp geometry as the inspiration, so the resemblance is deliberate. A sloped roof carries the knob where a carton’s screw cap would sit, and the M’s top fin doubles as a carry handle. The front panel and knob pop off, which turns each speaker into a base for swapping or 3D printing. Both are IP68 too, so the carton can sit on a patio table without a worry.

Designer: CMF by Nothing

The carton’s anatomy, rebuilt as a speaker face

A carton has three recognizable parts, and CMF kept all three. The sloped gable roof becomes the top edge of a folded color panel that wraps over from the front face. The sealed top seam becomes the M’s raised fin with a handle cutout, while the S settles for a round cutout in the corner. The screw cap, a carton upgrade Elopak dates to 1991, becomes a knob you press and turn. On the orange and turquoise models, a dark grey body sits behind the panel, so the color reads like printed paperboard around a core.

The grilles do the decorating. On the turquoise model the mesh is a deeper teal, on the orange it turns brick red, and on white and dark grey it goes black, so each face is a flat field with big circles punched in. The M stacks two of them, the S gets one, and a small pixel-style cmf wordmark sits above like a tiny brand stamp. An oval button with a white light bar is the only other mark besides the knob. That is very few elements, all of them deliberate.

Pint-and-quart proportions and a color system with a mismatched knob

The S measures 5.1 by 3.3 by 1.7 inches (130.5 by 85 by 44mm). The M stretches to 8.7 inches (220mm) tall at the same 85mm width, so the pair reads like a pint and a quart of the same product. Helen Sanematsu’s 1999 AIGA Journal essay on milk packaging argued that cartons get their punch from standing in rows, with color separating the varieties. CMF’s launch imagery lines up four colors across two sizes, which plays that exact game. Put them on a shelf together and you get a dairy case designed by someone with great taste.

Each colorway gets its own knob: a black X on orange, a white ring on turquoise, a red paddle on dark grey, and a teal paddle on white. That deliberate mismatch gives every speaker a single accent, like a bright cap on a carton. Pop it off and you can mix freely or 3D print your own, a habit that follows the CMF Phone 1, whose community printed everything from Lego-friendly backs to a foam dart launcher. We once featured a fan concept for a CMF speaker that went retro radio. The carton is the braver call.

Drivers, battery life, and durability behind the carton

The S pairs a 1.8 inch (45mm) driver with two passive radiators, unpowered diaphragms that beef up bass, for 10W. The M adds a 2.8 inch (70mm) woofer and 0.6 inch (16mm) tweeter for 35W RMS, a continuous power rating. Both claim 18 hours at 50 percent volume with Ultra Bass on, enough for a workday and the commute. A 10 minute charge buys an hour while you hunt for your keys. They survive 30 minutes in nearly 5 feet (1.5 meters) of water and passed a 30 inch (0.76 meter) drop test.

The S costs $59 and the M $109, and both are on sale now at nothing.tech and select retailers. That puts a distinctive object within impulse-buy range, which is unusual for a design this committed. It is the rare budget speaker that makes you want to rearrange a shelf. Van Wormer’s carton survived a century by being easy to hold, stack, and carry, and a portable speaker wants the same three traits. Somebody finally noticed a great speaker shape was sitting in your fridge door all along.

The post Why CMF’s New Milk Carton Speakers Are So Irresistible To Look At first appeared on Yanko Design.

Meet the electric beach wagon with smart assist, remote control, and underglow

Posted on by

I have a theory that the beach wagon was invented by someone who never actually took one to the beach. On pavement it’s a dream, then the sand starts and you’re dragging a shopping cart through oatmeal. BougeRV’s new DuneRover is an electric wagon built around that exact misery. It folds, it hauls up to 198 pounds while moving, and it rolls on wide airless wheels with two motors doing the work. Soft sand is the whole design brief, and every part of the machine answers to it.

The handle is the smartest thing about it, and it responds to your walking instead of a throttle. Sensors measure how hard you pull and multiply that effort, so a gentle tug gets a gentle nudge and a brisk stride gets a brisk wagon. Head down a dune and it brakes for you, and the moment you let go, it holds its position. Detach the control unit and the wagon becomes a remote-controlled beach truck, rolling ahead from up to 328 feet away. BougeRV, the Houston outdoor brand known for portable fridges and solar panels, built the whole thing.

Designer: BougeRV

Click Here to Buy Now: $539 $899 (40% off). Hurry, only 120 units left! Raised over $40,000.

Airless foam wheels that float instead of dig

The rear drive wheels measure 12 by 4 inches and are made of low-density PU foam, with no air inside. That means no flats, no pressure checks, and no tire coming off the rim halfway across the beach. A patented tread spreads the load across a wide footprint, rolls smoothly, sheds water, and treats turf gently. The front pair are 10-inch airless wheels in the same material. Wide contact area is the old trick for staying on top of sand, and here it comes with motors attached.

Two brushless geared motors deliver 66 N·m of combined torque, fed by a battery with 880W of peak output. Raw power can be a problem on sand, because spinning wheels just dig a trench. DuneGrip TCS, the wagon’s traction control system, watches for wheel slip and trims torque within milliseconds to stop it. A one-tap beach mode on the handle switches it on. Top speed is 3.7 mph, a relaxed walking pace, and the range runs 5 miles or more with a 165-pound load.

A handle that multiplies your pull and brakes without being asked

BougeRV calls the system RoverDrive Dynamic Assist, and it runs on what the company calls a Multiplicative Assist Algorithm. The handle measures your pulling force in real time and scales the motors in proportion, which is why there is no throttle, no gear shifting, and no direction switch to think about. Accelerate and the wagon accelerates with you. The dockable handle houses a power button, a mode switch, and an indicator light. A trigger-release design lets you empty out the sand that inevitably works its way into the control unit.

Uphill, the wagon holds its speed without extra effort from you, and it is rated for 15-degree slopes (a 26.8% grade) even at full load. Downhill, it brakes on its own. Release the handle on a slope and fail-safe electronic braking engages instantly. That covers a toddler sprinting toward the surf, a dropped pair of sunglasses, and any moment you stop to snap a photo. I like that the safe state is also the default, so letting go is always the right move.

Remote steering from 328 feet and an app with underglow

Undocking the control unit takes one step, and it becomes a 2.4 GHz remote with a range of up to 328 feet. Point it where you want the wagon to go, which frees you to carry the surfboard while the wagon carries everything else. If the signal drops or the remote disconnects, the wagon brakes and holds itself in place. Docking the unit back onto the handle returns you to assisted pulling automatically. There is zero setup and zero menu toggling in either mode.

Through the BougeRV app, you get real-time wagon status, battery levels for both the wagon and the remote, a mileage tracker, and system health monitoring. Firmware updates arrive over the air, and you can pair the remote, set speed and mode, and drive the wagon from your phone. Then there is the underglow, a customizable ambient lighting setup. One tap switches between preset scene modes. A glowing wagon on the sand at sunset is a ridiculous feature, and I would still turn it on.

A 2-pound battery that also charges your phone

The detachable UPP-88 battery weighs 2.06 pounds and measures 7.68 by 3.58 by 1.57 inches, about the size of a large power bank. Capacity is 24,000mAh, or 88.8Wh, which keeps it under 100Wh and airline-approved, with no prior declaration needed. It can discharge at up to 10C, enough to feed the 880W peak output. Fast charging runs through USB-C or XT60 ports at up to 100W. A multi-stage vent and flame-arresting labyrinth are meant to keep a single failing cell from setting off the rest, and the pack carries an IP66 rating.

The battery doubles as a power bank. BougeRV’s figures list up to 4.2 phone charges, 3.4 gaming device charges, 2.2 tablet charges, or 1.1 laptop charges. USB-C output reaches 100W and there is a USB-A port too. A built-in MPPT solar regulator tops it up on the move through an XT60 input that accepts 11 to 28V at up to 100W. BougeRV’s flexible portable panels are compatible, but the panel is sold separately. So the same pack that hauls the cooler can keep the phones alive until sunset.

Storage, folding, and pricing

The bed holds 161.7 quarts (153 liters) inside 600D Oxford fabric, with a side frame that opens to take longer gear like surfboards, secured with an elastic cargo net. Pockets are covered too: a front pocket, inner front and back pockets, and utility hooks. The wagon weighs 50.7 pounds (23 kg) and opens to 41.5 by 23.7 by 47.5 inches. Folded, it shrinks to roughly 23.7 by 12.2 by 28.7 inches, small enough for an SUV cargo area. IPX6 protection covers the whole vehicle, motors and control hub included, so a hose-down ends the day.

BougeRV lists the DuneRover at an MSRP of $899, with launch pricing running from $396 to $539 depending on the offer. A bundle with an extra detachable battery runs $603 against a $1,097 MSRP. The box holds the wagon, battery, remote, charging cable, two wheels, and a manual. Shipping is planned for the US, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, and Hong Kong, with deliveries expected to start in February 2027. Nobody packs lighter for the beach, so a wagon that keeps your pace is the sensible fix.

Click Here to Buy Now: $539 $899 (40% off). Hurry, only 120 units left! Raised over $40,000.

The post Meet the electric beach wagon with smart assist, remote control, and underglow first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Shenzhen Natural History Museum looks like it was carved by water instead of architects

Posted on by

Most natural history museums look like banks. Big stone steps, columns out front, and a lobby so grand you feel underdressed for a trip to see a stuffed moose. 3XN’s Shenzhen Natural History Museum looks like a piece of riverbank that wandered into town and decided to stay. Its curving walls bend and loop like a river cutting oxbows across a floodplain, with gardens planted on top where the water should be. It’s easily the friendliest-looking museum I’ve seen in a while, and I mean that as a huge compliment.

The museum opened on July 28, 2026, beside Yanzi Lake in Shenzhen’s Pingshan District, six years after we first saw it as a set of competition renders. Danish studio 3XN led the design alongside B+H Architects and local firm Zhubo Design, calling the scheme Delta after the river landscapes that inspired it. It covers roughly 1.13 million square feet (105,300 square meters), making it South China’s largest natural history museum. The roof is a public park you can stroll across without a ticket, and the galleries sit inside five enormous cones. One of those interior spaces holds a spiral staircase so swoopy it could pass for a Frank Gehry sketch.

Designer: 3XN, B+H Architects & Zhubo Design

Seen from above, the building is pure river doodle. Its walls swing out in long, lazy bends and then curl back in, leaving crescents of lawn and trees tucked inside each loop like oxbow lakes that dried up and became parks. Five rounded volumes sit along the curve, a bit like smooth stones the current forgot to carry away. Paths trace the tops of the walls the way a riverside trail follows the water. The footprint was drawn from the bends of the nearby Pingshan River, so the building is basically doing an impression of its neighbor.

The walls are built from vertical fins of Shandong granite, packed so tightly they read like rock that rain has been scratching at for a few thousand years. Those fins shade the galleries while still letting daylight slip through, which counts for a lot in Shenzhen’s subtropical heat. At sunset the stone turns warm and peachy, and every ridge throws a thin stripe of shadow down the curve. Most of the panels are standardized, so a damaged one can be swapped out without anyone noticing. The overall effect is a cliff face, which feels about right for a building that stores fossils for a living.

Cut into that stone are wide arched openings that look like the mouths of sea caves. The main one sits on the south side, linking the busy street to the wetland park behind the museum, so the front door doubles as a shortcut into nature. Reflecting pools stretch out in front, giving the arches mirrored twins in the water. Walking in should feel like ducking under a rock overhang on a hike, minus the risk of bumping your head. 3XN describes these openings as fissures in the cliff, a fancy geology word for a crack that happens to look cool.

Inside, the gray granite gives way to golden marble. Each of the five cones is wrapped in wood-grain marble from Guangxi, with stripes that look like layers of sediment or, if you’re hungry, a really nice slice of tiramisu. Between the cones, a central atrium rises toward a big rooflight, and a staircase spirals up around the core in wavy, uneven rings. This is the Gehry moment, all ripples and swoops, like the Guggenheim’s spiral after a double espresso. The architects named the atrium the Tree of Life, and the stair really does seem to grow upward, branching off onto each floor.

The roof slopes up from the ground like a grassy hill, so getting onto it feels about as formal as climbing a park mound. It’s split into five garden zones, from succulents and tropical plants to species pulled from Chinese literature, which is a very poetic way to sort a lawn. At its tallest the building reaches 118 feet (36 meters), but about half of it stays low to match the school and convention center next door. That keeps the mountain views to the north open for everyone, rooftop picnickers included. The roof is also set up for nighttime stargazing, which might be the best use of a museum ceiling yet.

Shenzhen has a reputation for building fast and building big, and plenty of its megaprojects shout to get noticed. This one speaks in curves, warm stone, and a whole lot of grass, which makes a 1.13-million-square-foot building feel oddly approachable. It also suits the job, since the exhibits inside trace how water, rock, and time shaped everything on the planet. The architecture tells that same story from the outside before you read a single label. I’d bet plenty of kids leave remembering the dinosaurs, and just as many remember the afternoon they rolled down the museum.

The post The Shenzhen Natural History Museum looks like it was carved by water instead of architects first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Kid-Friendly Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Teaches Children How To Build Chatbots

Posted on by

Remember those Radio Shack project kits with the spring terminals, where you bent wires into a working radio and felt like Tony Stark? Elecrow’s CrowPi 3 is that feeling, updated for a world where the thing kids want to build is a chatbot. It is a Raspberry Pi 5 learning station with 41 built-in sensors and modules, a camera, a microphone, and a 4.3-inch touchscreen. The courses run from blinking an LED to face recognition and voice control, plus plugging in LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek. Kids already talk to AI all day, so Elecrow figured they should get to build one.

The CrowPi 3 ships in a bumpered gray briefcase with a frosted magnetic lid, a fold-out handle, and an orange pull tab, which makes it the friendliest cyberdeck I have seen. For the uninitiated, that is a DIY computer built into some rugged container, usually with a Raspberry Pi for a brain and a lot of sci-fi attitude. Most of them cost their builders a few weekends of 3D printing and swearing, while this one arrives finished. The faceplate is silkscreened with labels and pin numbers, so the board doubles as its own wiring diagram. A middle schooler can legally carry the whole thing onto the bus, and I did not own anything this cool at that age, so I am only slightly bitter.

Designer: Elecrow

Click Here to Buy Now

Every module gets its own labeled cell, so the ultrasonic sensor, buzzer, tilt switch, RFID reader, and flame sensor sit in plain view instead of hiding behind a lid. That layout is the best teaching decision in the box, since a kid can point at the part they just coded and watch it react. Two breadboards on the left handle custom circuits, and a Pico, Arduino Nano, or micro:bit can join the Pi 5 on the same board. The unit measures 11.2 by 7.3 by 1.5 inches (285 by 185 by 38mm) and weighs 2.43 pounds (1,100g), about a hardcover textbook. Elecrow calls the design open source, with resources on GitHub.

The touchscreen is the one part of the faceplate that moves, folding flat or flipping forward for a better angle. A 2MP camera sits on a small bar above it like a laptop webcam, which is exactly where a face-recognition lesson wants it. At 800 by 480 pixels and 300 nits, the screen suits status readouts and debug info, and the It’s FOSS reviewer found the custom learning interface doesn’t display properly at that size. The full-size HDMI port solves that, so a bigger monitor can take over once the real coding starts. The RGB cooling fan got a gripe too, loud for its size and always spinning, though the same reviewer cheerfully called silencing it a free coding exercise.

The AI curriculum covers OpenCV (an open-source computer vision library) image processing, object tracking, face recognition, QR codes, pedestrian and car detection, and speech recognition. Elecrow says there are 180+ lessons in total, which is a lot of homework disguised as fun. The LLM lessons connect the board to ChatGPT, Gemini, and DeepSeek, and since a Pi 5 can’t host models that big, expect those to lean on online services. Elecrow’s project ideas are pleasantly small, like a voice-activated night light or a piggy bank that recognizes coins and plays a sound for each deposit. There is also a Minecraft course where tapping an NFC card spawns TNT, which is how you sneak Python into a kid’s weekend.

Raspberry Pi’s own 500+ answers a simpler question: what if the whole computer lived inside a keyboard? For $200 you get 16GB of RAM, mechanical keys, and a 256GB SSD, which makes a fine desktop and a poor science fair. It has no joystick, no ultrasonic sensor, and no flame detector, which are the things a kid actually wants to poke. The closest direct rival is the Joy-Pi Advanced, a Pi 4 kit that TechRadar put above $470 while comparing it to the CrowPi 3’s Kickstarter pricing. The CrowPi 3 is the one that sells the poking.

The original CrowPi hit Kickstarter in 2018 with a Pi 3B+ and a carry case, and the CrowPi 2 later fit in over 22 sensors and modules. The CrowPi 3 nearly doubles that count and adds the AI courses, plus Pico and micro:bit support that the earlier kits never had. Makers who build briefcase cyberdecks from scratch will get the appeal immediately, since this one skips the modeling and wiring marathon. The sensors come pre-wired and the lessons come already written. That is a fair trade when the person at the desk is eight.

Elecrow sells two kits, and the gap between them is a Raspberry Pi. CNX Software’s December 2025 roundup had the Basic Kit at $229 on Elecrow’s store and the Advanced Kit at $439, with the Advanced Kit listed at $599 on Amazon, so check that listing for today’s price. The Basic Kit expects you to bring a Pi 5, while the Advanced Kit adds a 16GB Pi 5, a wireless keyboard and mouse, two 18650 batteries, and two game controllers. Kids will spend the next decade chatting with AI, and the Radio Shack kids turned out fine because someone let them open the box. Somebody will build a piggy bank that judges your coins, and honestly, I would back that.

Click Here to Buy Now

The post This Kid-Friendly Raspberry Pi Cyberdeck Teaches Children How To Build Chatbots first appeared on Yanko Design.

5 Reasons why a foldable iPad Duo is a BAD Idea

Posted on by

Exactly a month and 2 days ago, John Ternus unveiled Apple’s first foldable phone. It’s been a decade in the making, Apple’s done a whole bunch in the interim, hit $1 trillion in 2018, and subsequently grown to a $3 trillion brand, shifted from a hardware company to a hardware AND services company, launched a spatial computing headset, pretty much worked on and shelved their Apple Car. Rumors are tracking a few more devices that Apple’s been secretly working on. A smart ring that does the same job as a watch, or alternatively a screen-less Watch Air that competes with the likes of Whoop and Fitbit, and even a foldable single-screen laptop modeled on the same design of the iPhone Duo.

I’m not entirely sure whether Apple’s truly working on a larger folding device, but scaling the iPhone Duo up to a larger hardware unit isn’t a good idea for a bunch of reasons. Aside from the fact that it would cannibalize a whole slew of existing products, it would also create a bit of a UX nightmare for the iPadOS developer community. An iPad Duo (let’s just call it that) is nothing but a MacBook Neo with extra screens. The MacBook Neo ITSELF is designed to be compact and handle compact tasks, giving it a foldable design with maybe iPad Pro-level power achieves nothing. Here are a few reasons why the foldable iPad Duo isn’t the best idea.

1. The foldable Android tablet doesn’t exist for a reason

Samsung, Xiaomi, Huawei, Google, Motorola, and a bunch of other makers have folding phones on their roster – yet nobody’s tried to push a folding tablet beyond maybe just 1 iteration. Huawei unveiled the MateBook Fold last year and hasn’t done much to work on a v2.0. It cost around $3,300 when it launched and occupied headlines for precisely a month before becoming yesterday’s news (partially because of its China-only distribution platform). The point I’m making is that companies haven’t explored the foldable tablet space because there’s little merit to it. Lenovo’s worked on a ThinkPad X1 Fold too, but here’s the hilarious bit – they’re marketing it more as a laptop than as a traditional tablet.

Tablets aren’t designed to be carried in pockets, therefore a smaller tablet that turns into a bigger one isn’t really a pressing need. Even if they were, the size of a pocket confines you to a very limited bounding box, giving you a folding phone template rather than a folding tablet one. Tablets themselves aren’t as popular as phones are, and folding phones are already a niche to begin with – making folding tablets mainstream would cost more money than it’s worth.

2. The aspect ratio nightmare

Of all the companies that have worked in the foldable space, there’s always been one question they’ve struggled to answer. What aspect ratio do we make? Because a foldable device exists in two states – a shut state and an open state. With phones, there are broadly 3 templates – the flip style foldable, which offers a square aspect ratio that turns into a vertical screen when opened. The second is the long book ratio that turns squarish when opened sideways. The third one, which Apple’s popularizing, is the middle ground – a book-shaped design that’s short and stout and has a repeating aspect ratio like the A4 and A3 paper so that the OS can scale meaningfully.

At least in this concept, we’re looking at what I believe is one of the most bizarre aspect ratios ever. This concept by Krishnavi Anand Krishnavi opts for an almost 1:1 ratio when shut, opening to reveal what feels like a widescreen 16:9 device. Both versions have their caveats – a 1:1 tablet doesn’t exist and it shouldn’t. Nobody works on a square screen, content isn’t optimized for it, heck even physical notebooks are vertical (who writes on square paper). Open it and you have a socially acceptable 16:9 device, but tablets are usually one of two things – they’re either big and 4:3 or they’re small and 16:9. Nobody makes a large 16:9 tablet because carrying it is a nuisance – you might as well just buy a laptop with a convertible design. A large 4:3 foldable tablet would fold down to a small 3:2 device, which still feels palpable, but continue reading and you’ll realize why the odds are stacked against a foldable tablet.

3. Building a massive hinge + flexible screen is cost-prohibitive

Apple’s poured hundreds of millions, if not billions into R&D for its titanium hinge. Every company has its own workaround for a hinge, ensuring durability, reliability, and the ability to conceal/remove the crease. It works well in flip phones, it’s tricky with book style foldables but companies have still come a long way in all these years. Scale that up to a device that needs a 7-8-inch long hinge and the engineering problems compound significantly. The hinge needs to uniformly open from one end to the other. Any discrepancy and the screen could stretch/tear. Any damage and the device could get stuck in a closed or open position for life. Laptops have suffered from hinge problems for years now, they’re the first mechanical part to fail on a laptop), so you can only imagine how much more work a tablet has to do – while still ensuring you can open/close it 10-20 times a day.

Not only is the hinge a problem, the screen is too. The screen used on a foldable phone is very different from the one used on you 15.6″ laptop. Companies work with suppliers to find the right kind of OLED that can take daily bending without the pixels suffering failure. The crease has to vanish when open and allow the screen to meaningfully bend when shut. A laptop display also doesn’t get touched hundreds of times a day the way a tablet or phone does. So it’s easier for a company to commission hundreds of thousands of small 6″ or larger OLED displays. Scale that up to a 12-15″ OLED display and you aren’t doubling the price, you’re quadrupling it (hold your phone to your laptop and see, four of its 6″ screens will fit in your 13″ laptop). A 4x pricier display eats up all your profits on a folding tablet.

4. The iPad Duo doesn’t have a target audience

This might be the biggest problem yet. We’re still struggling to find a mainstream audience for folding phones – so you can imagine how difficult it’ll be to find someone willing to shell out upwards of $3k on a folding tablet. The audience doesn’t exist because the use-case doesn’t exist and neither does the appetite (more on the appetite later). What would you do on an iPad Duo that you can’t already do on a laptop or a tablet? Phones need to be compact for a reason so the idea of folding your phone for easy carrying still holds up logically – folding a tablet makes absolutely no sense when it isn’t fitting into a constrained space like your pants pocket.

People buy their pants regardless of the phone they carry so the phone has to work backwards to fit into pants. With tablets and laptops, it’s the other way around – you buy a sleeve or a backpack based on the size of device you have. A larger laptop demands a larger bag, a sleeker, smaller tablet works great with a sling. Nobody buys the sling before they own the tablet. But I digress – the foldable tablet doesn’t exist because the market doesn’t. In over 10 years of working for Yanko Design, I’ve seen dozens of folding phone concepts, but even concept designers don’t work on foldable tablet concepts because there’s honestly nothing to desire there!

5. People want affordable computing, not foldable computing

This year, when Apple launched the MacBook Neo, we wrote about how it proved Apple wrong in one fundamental way. Apple’s always priced their products at a premium, thinking that they get to choose their audience – it worked when the economy was in a steadier state, when diesel wasn’t more than $6 a gallon. When Apple launched the MacBook Neo, the laptop literally flew off shelves, proving that there was a VERY strong demand for affordable computing. Especially when RAM and storage prices are already so high thanks to this AI boom that nobody asked for.

The MacBook Neo’s success with the Vision Pro’s silent failure proved that it’s time for tech to be democratic again. To focus less on shareholder value and more on actual consumer value. The iPhone Duo already costs upwards of most people’s salaries (globally speaking), so building an iPad Duo that would probably touch $3.5-4k in price makes no sense for a product that’s supposed to be for consumers, not enterprises. The iPad Duo doesn’t exist, and from the rumor mill, it probably won’t for the aforementioned reasons. John Ternus has proved to be an astute consumer-centric design lead, realizing what products fill the current gaps in Apple’s offerings. Speaking of which, I’m still waiting on that smarter Siri 2.0…

The post 5 Reasons why a foldable iPad Duo is a BAD Idea first appeared on Yanko Design.

How Iron Man’s arc reactor works, explained part by part

Posted on by

Robert Downey Jr. returns to the MCU on December 18 in Avengers: Doomsday, but this time he plays Doctor Doom instead of Tony Stark. Marvel fans have opinions about that, and they are loud. Before Doom takes over the conversation, it seems like a good moment to revisit the object that launched the whole franchise. That object was a glowing ring in Stark’s chest, built from scrap, powering a suit and keeping shrapnel away from his heart. Eighteen years after Iron Man opened in 2008, it is still arguably the best prop Marvel ever made, fight me.

A YouTube creator named Dianax gave that prop the autopsy it deserves. Their video is a full 3D animated teardown of the Mark 1 reactor, with every piece modeled by hand and zero AI involved. You see the palladium ring, the deuterium feed, a tiny cyclotron, and ten magnetic coils working together to hold a plasma arc in place. Then comes the fun part, which is the physics. Spoiler: a real one would need a building-sized tokamak and a very large water bill, but the fantasy holds together better than you would expect.

Designer: Dianax

How the Mark 1 reactor works, layer by layer

Dianax’s teardown starts at the center, where a ring of pure palladium sits inside the fusion chamber. Deuterium gas gets fed in and the palladium soaks it up like a sponge, priming the fuel for ignition. A miniature cyclotron, basically a pocket particle accelerator, then fires particles at extreme speed into the middle of the chamber. The gas ionizes instantly, plasma ignites, and fusion begins, releasing energy equal to roughly 1,500 pounds (680 kg) of TNT every second. That lines up with the film’s 3 gigawatts, since Stark tells Yinsen the output is three gigajoules per second. Plenty of power for a suit, a city, or a very ambitious toaster.

Magnetic containment rings run along the chamber to pin the plasma in the center, ten coils on top wrap everything in a field, and an energy converter underneath turns raw plasma into electricity with zero loss. A cooling system vents the heat out the bottom while a rugged shell locks it all together. That stacked layout gives the design a clear logic, since fuel, ignition, containment, conversion, and cooling each get their own tier. A licensed replica referencing Stan Winston Studios’ work measures about 4.5 inches (11.4 cm) across in machined aluminum and stainless steel. Rebuilding it all by hand in 3D suits a design made to be understood at a glance.

Palladium, cold fusion, and the poison in Tony’s chest

On March 23, 1989, electrochemists Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons told a Utah press conference they had achieved tabletop fusion using a palladium electrode, heavy water, and electricity. Palladium has been known since the 19th century to store hydrogen inside its metal lattice, which made the pitch sound plausible. Labs around the world then failed to replicate the excess heat, and by late 1989 most scientists considered cold fusion dead. Stark’s cave reactor reads like cold fusion’s redemption arc, finally working because a billionaire genius said so. Whether the filmmakers meant the nod or not, the echo is hard to ignore.

In Iron Man 2, Tony learns the palladium core is slowly poisoning him, and the damage speeds up every time he suits up. I love that the poisoning gives a glowing gadget a real cost. His fix is a new element, synthesized from a theory his father Howard left behind, which replaces the palladium core with something clean and safe. In the comics, the suit that kept Tony’s heart safe in Tales of Suspense #39 wasn’t embedded in his chest, which makes the glowing chest ring a much later idea. Back in the first film, Pepper Potts gives him the original reactor mounted with the words “Proof that Tony Stark has a heart,” which doubles as the franchise’s thesis.

Why a chest-sized reactor is still science fiction

The closest real machine is a tokamak, a doughnut-shaped fusion device the size of a building. It runs at up to 270 million degrees Fahrenheit (about 150 million °C), roughly ten times hotter than the Sun’s core. Holding plasma at that temperature takes magnetic coils dozens of feet across, and cooling the whole system eats thousands of tons of water. The other snag is conversion, since most power plants on Earth still boil water to spin a turbine. Stark’s zero-loss energy converter skips that entire step, which is the part of the fantasy a chest-sized reactor leans on hardest.

Helion Energy’s Polaris prototype in Everett, Washington is built to recover electricity straight from the expanding plasma through electromagnetic induction, skipping the steam cycle entirely. The company said in February 2026 that it reached measurable deuterium-tritium fusion and 150 million °C plasma. No published results confirm net power, and Polaris is a 62-foot (19 m) machine, so nobody is wearing one to the Avengers premiere. Its Orion plant, built for Microsoft, is slated to come online in 2028. Dianax’s full 3D breakdown is on YouTube, and it makes a great warm-up before Doomsday. Whatever Downey does as Doom, the most compelling thing Tony ever built is still that glowing ring, and engineers are still chasing it.

The post How Iron Man’s arc reactor works, explained part by part first appeared on Yanko Design.

BirdVue: The World’s First 4G Smart Bird Feeder Finally Lets You Watch Birds Where They Actually Live

Posted on by

The birdwatching boom of 2020 was, genuinely, one of the nicer things to come out of a rough couple of years. Millions of people discovered that birds are interesting, feeders are meditative, and there is something quietly satisfying about identifying the bird that keeps eating everything before anything else gets a turn. Technology followed the money, and a proper smart feeder category emerged, with Bird Buddy, Netvue Birdfy, and others shipping camera-equipped, AI-powered feeders that identify species and send clips to your phone. All of them, however, assume you want to watch birds from your own backyard, within range of your home router, which is a reasonable assumption for some people and a fairly annoying one for everyone else. BirdVue’s FEED 1 was designed for everyone else.

Running on 4G LTE and dual-band Wi-Fi with a built-in eSIM, the FEED 1 works wherever cellular signal reaches, which is a much larger area than your router covers. BirdVue, based in Wyoming, also added millimeter-wave radar, meaning the camera fires before the bird lands rather than after. The AI layer identifies species, logs visits, auto-generates highlight clips, monitors food levels in real time, and lets you remotely dispense seed from your phone. Dual 3W solar panels top up a 5200mAh battery, IP65 weatherproofing handles outdoor conditions year-round, and GPS tracking tells you exactly where the device is at any given moment. All of that hardware lives inside a forest-green birdhouse shell that looks considerably more at home in a garden than in a tech review.

Designer: BirdVue

Click Here to Buy Now: $179 $299 (40% off). Hurry, only 62/100 left!

The clearest advantage the FEED 1 has over its competition is where you can actually put it. It supports both 4G LTE and dual-band Wi-Fi simultaneously, with a built-in eSIM handling the cellular connection so there is no physical SIM card to source. That combination lets the feeder go wherever birds naturally gather: deep into gardens, along tree lines, beside lakes, or anywhere on a rural property with cellular coverage, rather than being pinned to your router’s range. Installation is flexible too, with a hanging hook, mounting straps, and a base bracket all included, so the FEED 1 can be suspended from a branch, strapped to a tree trunk, or mounted on a post depending on where the birds actually are. The birds decide where the feeder lives, not your router.

Millimeter-wave radar is the detection technology that changes what “capturing a bird visit” actually means on the FEED 1. Passive infrared sensors, which most smart feeders use, respond to heat signatures only once something is already on the perch, and camera-based motion detection has similar timing problems along with a tendency to false-trigger on wind-blown leaves or shifting light. BirdVue’s radar fires at millisecond speeds the moment a bird enters the detection field, starting recording during the approach and landing rather than after the bird has settled in and started eating. It also operates identically in rain, fog, and low light, conditions where PIR and camera-based triggers routinely get confused and miss the shot. The result is footage that begins with the bird in flight, not already perched.

BirdVue’s forest-green birdhouse shell is the most deliberate design decision on the FEED 1, and it reads very differently from anything else in this category. Most competing products look like outdoor security cameras that somehow acquired a seed tray, with angular plastic bodies and an aesthetic that screams “technology that ended up near birds.” The FEED 1 uses a pitched roof silhouette with dual solar panels flush across the surface, a wide perch tray at the base, and the camera lens centered below the roofline like a front window. At 7.8 by 7.9 by 8.8 inches and 3.8 lbs, it is proportioned like a real birdhouse, and the dark green finish reads as garden furniture rather than gadgetry. It is the kind of aesthetic effort that takes real work to pull off in a product this technically loaded.

Species identification is the floor, not the ceiling, of what the FEED 1’s AI actually does. It identifies species in real time and flags rare visitors separately from regulars, sending push notifications when something unusual shows up. The app tracks behavioral patterns, recording what each bird does at the feeder: feeding, spreading their wings, even fighting for perch space. It monitors signs of illness in visiting birds, which is genuinely the last feature I expected to find in a bird feeder spec sheet but makes complete sense once you think about it. A built-in AI Bird Story Engine assembles the best footage into curated highlight reels, auto-removes low-quality captures, and organizes everything into a searchable bird journal with seasonal trend tracking.

The dual-bin enclosed feeding system keeps seed fresh, prevents mold, and lets you manage the feeder entirely from your phone. Each bin is monitored independently, with the AI detecting food levels in real time and alerting you when a chamber runs low. You can trigger a manual dispense remotely with one tap, or let auto-feed mode release seed based on detected bird activity. The enclosed design solves a hygiene problem that most smart feeders simply ignore: open trays collect moisture and develop mold faster than most owners realize, which affects bird health and return frequency. A community feature in the app also lets you browse highlights and activity from nearby BirdVue feeders, which keeps things interesting on the days your own birds are apparently somewhere else.

Dual 3W solar panels across the pitched roof charge the 5200mAh internal battery, with an optional 10,400mAh removable backup battery available for extended cloudy stretches or harsher winters. IP65 weatherproofing and an operating range of -4°F to 140°F (-20°C to 60°C) cover nearly every outdoor environment. GPS tracking lets you locate the feeder in the app at any time, which is particularly useful once the unit is strapped to a tree well away from the house. The 3MP camera shoots 2K video at 1440p with both local and cloud storage options, and seed capacity sits at roughly 2.3 cups across the two bins. BirdVue also produces the TRAIL 5, a companion trail camera rated IP67, for field monitoring that extends beyond the feeder setup entirely.

The FEED 1’s strongest case is made to anyone whose best bird activity consistently happens outside router range: rural property owners, birders with forested or lakeside land, nature photographers who want passive automated capture in locations they cannot babysit. The radar trigger, behavioral AI, remote feeding, and off-grid power system also give it a meaningful feature lead over Wi-Fi-only competitors even for straightforward backyard use. BirdVue also produces a companion trail camera, the TRAIL 5, rated IP67, for field monitoring that extends beyond the feeder setup entirely.

The Birdvue FEED 1 is available starting at $179, discounted from its $299 MSRP. The device ships globally in November 2026.

Click Here to Buy Now: $179 $299 (40% off). Hurry, only 62/100 left!

The post BirdVue: The World’s First 4G Smart Bird Feeder Finally Lets You Watch Birds Where They Actually Live first appeared on Yanko Design.

The $146 Await camera brings back the disposable with 24 photos per roll, so every shot counts

Posted on by

Your camera roll holds 14 near identical photos of the same pasta dish, and you will never open a single one. We call it documenting our lives, but it looks a lot more like feeding a landfill. Every tap of the shutter adds another bag, and nobody has ever gone digging through the pile for a good memory. We take more pictures than any generation in history and look at almost none of them, which is a funny way to treat the things we claim to care about. Await, from Swiss company Rolling Square, is the intervention.

Await is a pocket digital camera that treats a roll of film as a rule instead of a nostalgia trip. It gives you 24 shots per roll, no preview screen, and a tiny OLED that counts down your remaining frames like a nervous accountant. Sync it with the free app and the whole roll gets “developed” through a vintage film filter, then you decide whether to order 6×4 prints. It first showed up at CES 2026, and we covered that debut back in January when details were still thin. Now the full picture is here, from the translucent shell to the xenon flash, and it’s more thought out than the disposable-camera look suggests.

Designer: Rolling Square

Click Here to Buy Now: $100 $145 (31% off). Hurry, only 37/625 left! Raised over $85,000.

A frosted shell, visible circuitry, and a magnetic face you can swap

The body is frosted translucent plastic with the circuit board visible through it, a look that goes straight back to the clear Game Boy Color and the original iMac. It measures 3.86 x 2.68 x 0.59 inches (98 x 68 x 15 mm) and weighs 3.27 ounces (92.7 g), which puts the footprint about 44% larger than a credit card. That is small enough for a jeans pocket and light enough that you will forget it’s there until you want it. The front plate is magnetic, so the color is a snap-on decision, with blue, pink, teal, green, and yellow on offer. Orange buttons pop against the frosted plastic, and I’m a sucker for that contrast.

A wrist strap ships in the box, and a longer neck or crossbody strap comes as an add-on. Both are orange and Await-branded, and each clips on through a small cord buckle threaded into the side loops. A threaded tripod mount sits on the base, which pairs nicely with the 10-second self-timer for group shots. Torx screws on the back mean the shell can be opened, and Rolling Square describes the design as expandable for future add-ons. I love seeing screws on a device like this, since it signals a camera meant to be kept rather than tossed.

Eight megapixels, a real xenon flash, and two buttons

An 8MP Sony IMX179 sensor sits behind a fixed f/2.0 lens at 2.8 mm, roughly a 26 mm equivalent in full frame terms, with a field of view around 65 to 72 degrees. That is a classic point-and-shoot wide angle, wide enough to fit a dinner table into the frame. Eight megapixels sounds modest, but it is plenty for a 6×4 print. Framing happens through an optical viewfinder, a plain window that draws no power. The xenon flash is a real gas-discharge tube, the same technology found in classic film cameras and studio strobes, and it gives the hard, frozen look an LED cannot fake.

Only two buttons run the whole camera. The shutter button fires the shot, and holding it for three seconds powers the camera on or off. The function button on the back toggles the flash with a tap and the 10-second self-timer with a 1.5-second hold. Everything else lives on the OLED, which shows battery level in four bars, flash and timer status, rolls remaining (3/3 means three fresh rolls), and shots left on the current roll. A small buzzer gives shutter, timer, and system sounds. Power comes from a 1000 mAh battery charged over USB-C, with Bluetooth 5.2 and Wi-Fi handling the sync.

From sync to print, and what it all costs

Fill a roll and the camera hands everything to the Await app, which is free on iOS and Android with no subscription. Rolling Square says the filter comes from a study of vintage photographs and was tested across thousands of pictures and dozens of lighting conditions. The sample shots carry an orange date stamp, which tells you exactly which decade it’s cosplaying. The camera holds up to three rolls, or 72 pictures, and a sync empties it for the next outing. To skip the filter, connect the camera to a PC or phone over USB-C and grab the original files, uncompressed and untouched. Files pulled through the app are converted, and the originals no longer exist there.

Automatic mode queues each finished roll for 24 hours, giving you a window to skip it, then prints at $8.99 per roll plus shipping from $4.99. Manual mode prints on demand at $9.99 per roll plus shipping, and either way you only pay when a roll goes out. Each roll delivers 24 prints at 6×4 inches. The camera costs €129 (about $146), with early pricing from €89 (about $101), and a full kit with both straps and two extra faceplates lists at €157. Orders are open now on Kickstarter, shipping is expected from December 2026, and the page lists a 2-year warranty with 30-day returns. Fewer photos, better odds that one ends up on your fridge.

Click Here to Buy Now: $100 $145 (31% off). Hurry, only 37/625 left! Raised over $85,000.

The post The $146 Await camera brings back the disposable with 24 photos per roll, so every shot counts first appeared on Yanko Design.