Tag Archives: Technology

This Arduino-Powered Retro Handheld Is One Anyone Can Build at Home

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DIY handheld gaming has always had a ceiling for newcomers. Most builds require custom-designed PCBs, hard-to-find specialized connectors, and at least a few evenings spent with a soldering iron before anything turns on. Results from experienced makers can be impressive, but getting there has traditionally demanded an electronics background and a comfort with tools that many people simply don’t have.

This Arduino UNO Q-based handheld console doesn’t ask for any of that. Every component can be ordered from a standard online retailer and assembled without soldering, making the build about as accessible as a maker project can get. The only parts requiring fabrication are the 3D-printed enclosure and buttons, which come together using heat-set inserts for a clean, professional-looking result that doesn’t betray its module-based origins.

Designer: zalmotek

The hardware list reads like an afternoon’s shopping. At the center is the Arduino UNO Q, pairing a Qualcomm Dragonwing QRB2210 processor running Debian Linux with a dedicated STM32 microcontroller for real-time input handling. Modulino Buttons and a Modulino Joystick handle the controls, an Arduino UNO Media Carrier connects an 8-inch Waveshare touchscreen and an Adafruit speaker, and a Waveshare UPS module provides battery support.

The software side is equally well thought out. The STM32 microcontroller monitors button presses and joystick movements, then passes that data to the Linux environment, where a Python daemon converts everything into standard USB gamepad commands. RetroArch handles the emulation without any complicated setup, so loading up a game doesn’t feel different from plugging a USB gamepad into a PC.

That smoothness pays off in practice. Sitting back with a handheld you built over a weekend and scrolling through titles from systems you grew up with, everything runs cleanly with proper controls and sound. It’s a bit chunkier than a commercial device, given the module-based construction, but the feel is more polished than the trade-off might suggest, especially for a build that skips custom PCBs entirely.

There’s also room to go further than emulation. The UNO Q can run the Godot game engine, which turns the same hardware into a development platform for original games. Between that and RetroArch’s support for a wide range of classic platforms, the console covers both ends of the gaming spectrum without requiring any additional hardware beyond what’s already in the build.

The full hardware list, assembly walkthrough, and complete source code are posted on Arduino Project Hub and GitHub, keeping everything open and reproducible. The documentation also frames the build as a starting point rather than a finished product, with options like swapping the display for a different size, redesigning the enclosure, or adding a Modulino Movement node for motion controls described as natural next directions.

None of that holds together without the right foundation, and the UNO Q’s dual-brain architecture provides it quietly. The STM32 handles time-sensitive inputs without lag while the Qualcomm processor manages the emulation stack, audio, and video at the same time. A software bridge connects the two, and clean communication between them is what keeps the console from feeling like a loose collection of modules.

The post This Arduino-Powered Retro Handheld Is One Anyone Can Build at Home first appeared on Yanko Design.

Wall Chargers Are Boring, but This $36 One Has a Pixel Art Display

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Wall chargers have always been the most ignored piece of any desk setup. They sit behind monitors or under tables, doing their job without asking for attention, which is exactly the problem. As charging accessories have multiplied, so has the tangle of identical black bricks cluttering power strips and nightstands. None of them give you a reason to look twice, and most people prefer it that way.

Divoom’s Dipow 35W is a direct challenge to that indifference. Built around a 64×64-pixel LED display housed in a compact, retro diving-helmet-shaped body, it makes a case for chargers that actually earn a spot on the desk rather than getting shoved behind furniture. It’s still a proper 35W GaN fast charger, so the personality doesn’t come at the expense of the performance that matters.

Designer: Divoom

The diving helmet shape goes beyond aesthetics; it gives the charger a defined body that keeps the pixel display facing outward when plugged in. It’s a small distinction, but a deliberate one. The rounded proportions and careful build make it feel less like a tech accessory and more like a desk object that earns its place alongside everything else you’ve arranged.

The display is the obvious conversation starter, but there’s more to it than a looping animation. Through the Divoom app, you can choose from over 1,000 community-created designs, draw your own pixel art, or have it cycle through 18 different clock faces throughout the day. It lights up only when plugged in, so it behaves like an accessory rather than another screen demanding your attention.

GaN technology keeps the body compact and cool even at peak output. The single USB-C port delivers up to 35W, enough to bring an iPhone 15 Pro Max to 56% in just 30 minutes according to Divoom’s own testing. Built-in safety features cover overheating, overvoltage, overcurrent, and short circuits, so it’s doing its actual job reliably while the pixel display handles the entertainment side.

For travel, the 90° foldable pins and protective silicone boot keep the prongs safe without adding bulk. At 44.3 × 42.3 × 41.3 mm and 86 g, it slips easily into a bag, though something this visually interesting tends to end up on a desk more often than packed away. It catches a second look at a shared workspace or coffee shop table.

The Dipow 35W retails for $35.99, available in black or white. For a fast charger that also functions as a customizable pixel display, the asking price sits close to what most plain USB-C bricks already cost. It’s a small distinction that ends up mattering more than expected once the charger is sitting in plain sight with something worth showing on its screen.

The post Wall Chargers Are Boring, but This $36 One Has a Pixel Art Display first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Concrete Canvas Speaker That Refuses to Hide Its Wires

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Most audio equipment is designed around the premise of concealment. The drivers are hidden, the wiring is tucked away, the internal mechanics are sealed behind pristine panels of wood or brushed aluminum, and you’re meant to forget that any of it exists. You just press play and trust the box. Hagar Guri, an industrial designer, has a different idea entirely.

A-PQ 31.37 is a suspended open-baffle loudspeaker system that does the opposite of hiding. Built from concrete canvas, a flexible, fabric-reinforced material that stiffens into a rigid, curved shell when hydrated, the speaker hangs from steel cables and puts everything on display. The driver is exposed. The wiring is visible. The rear radiation surface, the structural elements, the mechanical connections: all of it is part of the visual experience, not an afterthought buried behind a grille.

Designer: Hagar Guri

The material choice alone is worth pausing on. Concrete canvas is not a typical choice for audio equipment. It is the kind of material you would expect to see in emergency shelters or civil engineering projects, not hanging in a listening room. But that is precisely what makes it interesting here. It is dense, rigid, and visually raw in a way that synthetic plastics and MDF simply are not. The curved form it takes in A-PQ 31.37 manages to look both industrial and surprisingly refined, which is not an easy balance to strike.

Open-baffle speaker design has existed for decades in audiophile circles, and the community tends to be evangelical about it. The principle is straightforward: without a closed enclosure, sound radiates both forward and backward, creating a more open and spacious listening experience that many describe as more natural. The trade-off is usually in low-frequency performance, which requires careful driver selection and signal processing to compensate. Guri addresses this through a custom control unit built into the system, incorporating digital signal processing, preamplification, and analogue controls. It is a complete system, not just a sculptural object with wires attached.

And yet, calling it a sculptural object is not wrong. The speakers are suspended from steel cables and appear almost detached from the floor, interacting with the surrounding architecture rather than sitting against it. It changes the relationship between the listener and the object. You are not looking at a box tucked into a corner. You are looking at something that occupies the room intentionally, that asks to be seen.

Exposed fasteners and typographic elements extend the material language across the system, which tells me Guri was not just thinking about the sound or the form in isolation. The details are consistent. The control unit belongs to the same visual world as the speakers. That kind of coherence at the system level is harder to achieve than it looks, and it is one of the reasons A-PQ 31.37 feels like a fully resolved idea rather than a student experiment that went interestingly sideways.

The broader conversation A-PQ 31.37 is pushing into is one the design world has been circling for a while: what does it mean to make technology honest? So much of our electronics culture is built around the aesthetics of smooth surfaces and hidden complexity. The sleeker and more seamless a product looks, the more sophisticated it is supposed to seem. Guri is suggesting the inverse: that visibility, the kind that shows you exactly how something is built and why it sounds the way it does, can be its own form of refinement.

Whether or not this becomes an influence on mainstream speaker design is genuinely hard to say. Audio equipment is a conservative category. Audiophiles are notoriously attached to conventions that go back generations. But for anyone following the intersection of material research, acoustics, and spatial design, A-PQ 31.37 is exactly the kind of project that makes you reconsider what a speaker is supposed to be. Not just something you listen to. Something you actually look at, and think about, too.

The post The Concrete Canvas Speaker That Refuses to Hide Its Wires first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Keyboards Pick Typing or Gaming, This One Swaps Its Physical Feel

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The mechanical keyboard market has quietly split into two distinct camps. On one side, you’ve got premium enthusiast boards built around sound profiles, gasket mounts, and typing feel. On the other, gaming keyboards chasing faster actuation and competitive response. The trouble is that most people don’t belong exclusively to one camp, and keyboards that try to serve both rarely pull off either particularly well.

GlowHint designed the KT75 around exactly that frustration. It’s a 75% Hall Effect magnetic keyboard with 84 keys, built on the premise that you shouldn’t have to choose between a board that feels great on your desk and one that keeps up in a competitive game. That premise goes beyond marketing language; it’s woven into the keyboard’s physical structure.

Designer: GLowHint

Click Here to Buy Now: $299 $610 (55% off). Hurry, only 88/100 left!

Traditional mechanical switches use metal contacts that only register two states: pressed or not. Hall Effect switches work differently, using magnetic sensors to continuously track a key stem’s exact position throughout its entire travel. The keyboard always knows how far each key has moved, and that continuous awareness is what enables adjustable actuation, a 0.01mm rapid trigger, and a more responsive experience overall.

Where the KT75 gets physically interesting is the Dual Mount Structure. With the gaskets installed, keystrokes feel more supple and forgiving, with a deeper sound character that suits long typing sessions well. Remove those gaskets and the whole feel sharpens, trading comfort for the firmer, more direct response that competitive gaming demands. It’s a physical configuration, not a menu setting.

That design care carries through the rest of the construction. The KT75 uses a CNC aluminum alloy chassis with an FR4 plate and a six-layer acoustic dampening structure that includes PORON foam, a PET sound pad, and bottom dampening. The switches actuate at just 30gf and bottom out at 50gf, keeping effort light without the mushy feel that lighter switches sometimes produce.

On the gaming side, the KT75 scans every key 16,000 times per second and communicates with the computer at 8,000Hz over a wired connection. Rapid Trigger removes the fixed reset point, so movements as small as 0.01mm register as fresh inputs, and Snap Tap handles conflicting directional inputs by prioritizing the most recent one. Both are especially noticeable in fast-paced shooters where every fraction of a second counts.

For everyday use, the compact 84-key layout trims hand travel without dropping essential keys, and the macro system lets you assign complex commands to a single keystroke. The more interesting layer is depth-based behavior, where a lighter press and a full press can each trigger different actions. It’s a quietly useful feature that makes the keyboard feel more thoughtful than its key count suggests.

GlowHint built a 1.47-inch OLED smart display into the board, capable of showing status information or custom content including GIFs, pixel art, and logos uploaded through the companion software. All of that, along with per-key RGB across 16.8 million colors, key remapping, switch tuning, and macro configuration, is handled through GlowHint Hub. The switches are also hot-swappable, so the board can grow with your preferences.

The KT75 supports three connection modes: 2.4 GHz wireless, Bluetooth, and USB-C wired. The wired connection unlocks the full 8,000Hz polling rate, while 2.4 GHz handles gaming without Bluetooth latency concerns. The dual 4,000mAh batteries are rated up to 95 hours wirelessly, though that drops to around 13 hours with default RGB on, which is the more realistic figure for most sessions.

The through line across all these choices is consistency. GlowHint didn’t try to make the KT75 do everything at once; each decision, from the swappable gasket layers to the magnetic switch technology to the configurable display, adds a specific kind of flexibility that serves a different part of the same day. It ends up as a keyboard that earns its complexity without making you feel it.

Click Here to Buy Now: $299 $610 (55% off). Hurry, only 88/100 left!

The post Most Keyboards Pick Typing or Gaming, This One Swaps Its Physical Feel first appeared on Yanko Design.

7 Best Tech Gadgets of August 2026

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August arrives with a lineup that feels genuinely considered. Not every gadget this month is chasing a headline spec or fighting for shelf space. Some of the most interesting things landing right now are smaller, quieter, and more honest about what they actually do — a folding mouse that disappears into a shirt pocket, a bedside unit that replaces three devices at once, and a dual-screen E Ink tablet that finally treats reading and writing as a single workflow rather than two separate tasks competing for the same screen.

There’s also something larger worth paying attention to. Samsung is officially pulling back the curtain on the Galaxy Z Fold 8 this month, and what’s shaping up as a tiered foldable lineup could redefine the category’s identity. Meanwhile, Google has quietly slipped a new smart speaker onto store shelves for the first time in six years. August, as it turns out, rewards patience — and knowing exactly where to look.

1. piBrick Pocket-CM5

The piBrick Pocket-CM5 is one of those projects that reads better the longer you spend with the spec sheet. Built by Ahmad Amarullah on a custom PCB designed around the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5, this open-source handheld costs around $172 in parts and arrives at smartphone proportions — 80 × 145 × 19.6mm. The 3.92-inch AMOLED display runs at 1080 × 1240 and 90Hz with Asahi tempered glass over the top, which is the kind of detail that separates a deliberate design from a prototype that merely happens to work. Full-size and micro-HDMI outputs mean the same pocket device can drive an external display when a larger workspace makes more sense.

The BBQ20 keyboard with its integrated BlackBerry-derived trackpad gives the piBrick a tactile depth that touchscreen-only handhelds cannot match, and side rotary encoders plus five programmable buttons extend the input options further still. A 5,000mAh LiPo keeps everything running, NVMe SSD support in 2230 or 2242 formats handles storage, and USB 3.0 with Type-A and Type-C covers connectivity. The most quietly useful feature is USB-HID mode — plug the piBrick into any external machine and its keyboard and trackpad instantly become a functional input device, independent of the Pi entirely. For a sysadmin who shows up at a server rack without a spare keyboard, that framing changes the device from hobbyist novelty to legitimate daily carry tool.

What we like:

  • USB-HID mode turns the whole device into a USB keyboard for any external computer
  • 90Hz AMOLED at this price point and form factor is a genuinely rare combination

What we dislike:

  • Requires hands-on sourcing, PCB manufacturing, and 3D-printed shell assembly
  • The compact BBQ20 keyboard layout carries a real learning curve for extended typing sessions

2. OrigamiSwift Folding Mouse

The OrigamiSwift is a Bluetooth mouse that folds flat to 0.18 inches — thinner than most notepads — and springs back into a full-size ergonomic form in under half a second. Designed by Horace Lam and built around the geometry of traditional origami folding, it weighs just 40 grams and connects over Bluetooth 5.2, with a 4,000 CPI HD infrared sensor tracking at up to 30 inches per second. For digital nomads and frequent travelers, the appeal is immediate: full-size mousing comfort that compresses to the front pocket of a bag without any structural compromise.

Soft-click buttons and a smooth, consistent glide make it discreet in quiet environments, and the triangular origami structure that enables the folding mechanism also gives the frame enough rigidity to absorb daily use without flex. Battery life is a genuine standout — one USB-C charge lasts up to three months, which removes the disposable battery cycle from the equation entirely. At $85, it sits in a price range where compromises tend to accumulate, and the sensor performance, weight, and build quality keep most of them from appearing. It works across Mac, iPad, Windows, and Android without additional drivers, which keeps the setup frictionless wherever you end up working.

Click Here to Buy Now: $85.00

What we like:

  • Three-month battery life on a single USB-C charge is genuinely exceptional for a wireless mouse
  • 40 grams means you stop noticing it’s in your bag until the moment you actually need it

What we dislike:

  • 4,000 CPI ceiling may not satisfy users working on high-resolution or multi-monitor setups
  • Stock is currently very limited, with only a few units available in the shop

3. Divoom FlowToo

The Divoom FlowToo costs $99.99 and replaces three things that have been quietly cluttering nightstands for years — a Bluetooth speaker, a white noise machine, and an alarm clock. It runs through a 10W amplifier with a 45mm full-range driver, which is enough to fill a bedroom at a respectable volume without the sound becoming harsh at the high end. More than 90 built-in sounds cover the categories people actually reach for at night and during focus sessions, from rain and ocean ambience to forest and calming tones, and the Divoom app handles everything from alarm scheduling to sound selection directly from your phone.

The 2.26-inch smart display is the part that makes the FlowToo feel like something designed with some care rather than assembled from a parts list. It cycles between multiple clock faces, music visualizers that react to whatever’s playing, sleep scene animations, and mood lighting depending on the mode and the time of day. The wake-up sequence replaces a jarring alarm tone with natural sounds that build in volume while the display gradually brightens — a small change that makes a real difference to how the first few minutes of a morning feel. Available in White and Black, the form is clean, rounded, and scaled well enough to sit beside most beds without dominating the surface.

What we like:

  • A 10W full-range driver makes this a real speaker, not just an alarm clock with Bluetooth bolted on
  • The gradual light-and-sound wake sequence is a meaningfully better way to start the morning

What we dislike:

  • Dedicated white noise machines and standalone speakers will each outperform the FlowToo in their respective categories
  • Full feature access requires the Divoom app, which adds dependency to a device built around simplicity

4. Portable CD Cover Player

The Portable CD Cover Player brings album artwork back to the physical center of the listening experience at a time when streaming has reduced most music libraries to a scrollable grid of thumbnails no larger than a postage stamp. The form factor is slim and designed to echo the proportions of a CD sleeve — built for the kind of listening that happens away from a desk, on a commute, in a hotel room, or anywhere else a record player cannot reasonably follow you without significant planning.

There is something the CD format offers that streaming still hasn’t managed to replicate — intentionality. You chose this album. You put it in. You listened front to back, the way it was meant to be heard. The Portable CD Cover Player leans into that ritual rather than treating it as an inconvenience to be engineered away. At a moment when cassette players and vinyl decks have staged a credible commercial comeback, there is a real and growing audience for physical music hardware that does not apologize for existing in 2026. For anyone rebuilding a CD collection or looking for a reason to use the one they never threw out, this is the device for it.

Click Here to Buy Now: $199.00

What we like:

  • Restores album artwork as a physical, tactile part of the listening experience rather than a compressed thumbnail
  • The intentionality of the CD format is something streaming genuinely cannot replicate

What we dislike:

  • The price requires an existing or rebuilt CD collection to justify the investment
  • Stock is tight, with only a few units currently available through the Yanko Design shop

5. Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8

Samsung confirmed the Galaxy Z Fold 8 Unpacked event for July 22 in London, and what’s taking shape is arguably the most architecturally ambitious foldable lineup the company has attempted. Three models appear to be in play — the standard Fold 8 at 4.1mm unfolded, the wide-format Fold 8 Wide at a remarkable 3.9mm, and the Fold 8 Ultra, which is where the S Pen is making its return after being stripped from the Fold 7 to achieve that device’s headline thinness. Reports point to a titanium-plus-carbon-fiber construction for the Ultra, a material combination that works more naturally with the digitizer layer the stylus requires than the pure titanium backplate the Fold 7 used.

The Ultra is the model worth watching most closely. A 5,000mAh battery — the largest in the Fold line since the third generation — marks the first meaningful capacity upgrade the series has seen in years, and the S Pen’s return shifts the Fold 8 Ultra from a premium hardware story into something with actual software depth for power users. Samsung is also reportedly developing a digitizer-free stylus solution for future generations, which would eventually decouple S Pen functionality from physical bulk entirely. If the Ultra ships as the leaks describe, it becomes the first Z Fold that stops treating its own productivity features as a problem to be engineered around, and starts treating them as the reason the device exists.

What we like:

  • S Pen returns on the Ultra alongside the line’s largest battery to date
  • A tiered lineup lets buyers choose between thinness-first or capability-first without compromise

What we dislike:

  • Splitting S Pen support exclusively to the Ultra positions it as a premium within an already premium product line
  • Three distinct SKUs risk diluting the design identity that made the Fold recognizable in the first place

6. Google Home Speaker

The Google Home Speaker is the company’s first new standalone smart speaker since the Nest Audio launched in September 2020. Nearly six years is a long time to leave a product category untouched in consumer electronics — Apple refreshed AirPods three times in that window, Sonos shipped new hardware, redesigned its app, and broke it, and still found time to come back. Google’s return is framed almost entirely around Gemini, now built directly into the speaker and positioned as the primary reason to put it on your kitchen counter rather than any particular advancement in audio engineering.

The hardware reads clean — small, rounded, and available in the kind of understated colors Google’s design teams have always been good at selecting. It features 360-degree audio, faster processing for more fluid conversational responses, and a new light ring that signals when Gemini is listening, thinking, or responding. Whether this launch represents a genuine recommitment to the smart home category or simply Google finding Gemini another product surface to occupy is a fair question to ask. The speaker is back on the counter after six years. Whether the company chooses to stay in the room this time is the harder and more important question.

What we like:

  • Gemini integration makes this the most conversationally capable Google speaker the company has ever shipped
  • Six years of hardware and processing advancement mean the gap over the Nest Audio should be substantial

What we dislike:

  • Google’s well-documented history of deprioritizing smart home hardware makes long-term software support a legitimate concern
  • The launch narrative frames the speaker as AI infrastructure first, and as a designed product second

7. Inkleaf Foldable Dual-Screen E Ink Notebook

The Inkleaf is a foldable dual-screen E Ink tablet with two 10.3-inch Carta panels that open side by side — one for reading, one for writing, simultaneously. That single feature solves a problem researchers, students, and writers have been navigating awkwardly for years, usually by propping a tablet next to a paper notebook or toggling between apps and losing their place each time. Designed by Kameron Yu, it closes to 8.4mm and 480 grams, thinner than a standard paperback, and each open panel measures 4.2mm — slimmer than the reMarkable 2 at 4.7mm, the Kindle Scribe at 5.4mm, and the Boox Note Air4 C at 5.8mm. None of those fold.

The cast aluminum body and precision-machined hinge barrel lay perfectly flat at 180 degrees when open, tactile page-turn buttons sit exactly where your thumb expects them, and the pressure-sensitive stylus ships in the box with no subscription fee attached. Android handles the OS with support for PDFs, EPUBs, MOBI, and TXT files, and an AI-powered handwriting search can surface any phrase across every notebook you’ve filled. First units are expected to reach founders in August 2026. At around $450, it is a serious financial commitment, but one the form factor and the problem it actually solves manage to earn.

What we like:

  • Dual-screen setup genuinely resolves the read-and-write-simultaneously problem that every comparable single-screen device ignores
  • 4.2mm per panel open is thinner than any single-screen E Ink device currently on the market

What we dislike:

  • The price point requires a real commitment to the E Ink workflow to justify
  • Android on an E Ink display still carries limitations in app responsiveness and screen refresh speed

August Belongs to the Gadgets That Get Out of the Way

August’s lineup doesn’t follow a single theme, which is part of what makes it worth paying attention to. The piBrick and the Inkleaf both treat computing as something that should fit your actual workflow rather than just your desk. The OrigamiSwift and the FlowToo make the case that the best everyday tech is the kind that removes something from your bag or your nightstand rather than quietly adding to it. The Portable CD Cover Player is a reminder that intentional listening never actually went away — it just needed hardware worth using again.

The bigger stories — Samsung’s Fold 8 and Google’s long-overdue speaker — tell you something meaningful about where two of the industry’s largest companies have landed on the question of what smart hardware is actually for. One is restoring capability it arguably should never have removed. The other is making up for six years of silence with an AI pitch and hoping nobody checks the calendar. Both are worth watching this month, for very different reasons.

The post 7 Best Tech Gadgets of August 2026 first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Laptops Mute Your Camera in Software, This One Cuts the Wire

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The privacy conversation around laptops tends to happen entirely in software. Operating systems add permissions dialogs, apps get granted or denied microphone access, and browsers warn about tracking cookies. All of that matters, but it operates in a layer that can be undermined by the hardware underneath it. A microphone that’s turned off in software is still physically connected to a circuit that could, under the right conditions, be activated without the user’s knowledge.

The Purism Librem 16 treats that gap as the actual problem worth solving. It’s a 16-inch Linux laptop built around the premise that hardware security has to be literal, not just promised. Two physical kill switches on the body electrically disconnect the camera and microphone as one group and the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radio as another. Not toggled in software, not muted through the operating system, but physically disconnected from the board.

Designer: Purism

The machine runs Intel’s 13th-generation Core i7-13620H, with ten cores, 16 threads, and a peak frequency of 4.9GHz. Two DDR4 RAM slots support up to 64GB, and two M.2 slots can take the storage configuration all the way up to 16TB. Four USB ports cover the connectivity side, split evenly between two USB-C ports running USB4 with DisplayPort alternate mode and two Type-A USB 3.2 ports, alongside HDMI, Ethernet, a headphone jack, and a microSD reader.

The Intel Management Engine, a separate embedded processor that runs independently of the main CPU and operating system, is disabled. This component exists on most Intel-based systems and can operate even while the machine is off, a characteristic that privacy-focused hardware communities have objected to for years. Disabling it removes the most significant piece of hardware the owner never had direct control over.

Firmware comes in the form of PureBoot, Purism’s implementation of Coreboot combined with the Heads open-source security framework. This replaces the conventional UEFI BIOS with a verified boot process that can detect whether the firmware has been tampered with since the last known-good state. An optional Librem Key USB token works alongside PureBoot to verify that nothing has changed between sessions, providing tamper detection at startup.

The operating system is PureOS, a Debian-based GNU/Linux distribution that ships with only free and open-source software. Purism also offers an optional anti-interdiction service, a supply chain inspection process that adds physical tamper-evidence measures before the laptop ships, for buyers who want assurance that the hardware hasn’t been compromised in transit.

Aesthetically, the Librem 16 carries the understated design language that runs across the Librem lineup. The lid has no branding, the ports have no identifying icons, and the only visible label appears above the keyboard indicating the model. The aluminum chassis keeps the profile clean, matching the design intent of a machine meant to disappear into its owner’s workflow rather than announce itself.

The base model starts at $2,899, with a 32GB/2TB configuration at $4,199 and a fully maxed-out 64GB/16TB version at $9,799. Given that the premium is paid for hardware-level privacy architecture rather than raw performance specs, that price range is exactly what the machine’s philosophy leads to.

The post Most Laptops Mute Your Camera in Software, This One Cuts the Wire first appeared on Yanko Design.

Humanoid Robots Don’t Fit in Store Aisles, So Robbyant Fixed That

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Service robots have been making steady progress in controlled environments, but deploying them in real commercial spaces has always come down to one stubborn problem: most indoor spaces weren’t built with them in mind. Supermarket aisles, retail corridors, and home hallways run narrow, and rebuilding or widening them to accommodate a humanoid robot isn’t a cost that any business would willingly absorb just to install one.

The Robbyant R2 approaches that problem from the chassis up. Built on a 455 mm rectangular base with a body width equal to human shoulder span, it can navigate 650mm aisles smoothly, making it the first wheeled humanoid robot to clear that threshold. Its 360° omnidirectional mobility and precise obstacle avoidance mean it can operate in tight commercial and residential spaces without any layout changes to the space itself.

Designers: Yupeng Hu, Mingwei Zhang, Qi Huang, Yuxuan Liu, Zhewen Wu

The arm system is where that compact footprint pays off most concretely. Dual arms with seven degrees of freedom, each capable of lifting up to 5kg, give R2 enough reach and dexterity for sorting stock, moving items between locations, and handling everyday objects that typically require human hands. The range of motion this unlocks is considerably closer to a natural human arm than a conventional industrial manipulator.

Working alongside people in a shared space also means communicating in ways that don’t make them uncomfortable. R2 does this through a binocular depth camera, a 360° microphone array, a speaker, and dynamic lighting that shifts in sync with its movement. Facial expressions and coordinated body language allow it to signal intent in real time, giving people around it the kind of readable cues that make shared spaces feel manageable.

Safety is built into the physical structure rather than treated as an add-on. Flexible anti-pinch joints along the body and arms prevent fingers or objects from getting caught in moving parts without slowing autonomous operation. A honeycomb structure across the chassis handles impact buffering and heat dissipation simultaneously, and automatic locking brakes engage in emergencies to stop the robot before a situation can escalate into something worse.

The chest houses a modular interaction platform that changes R2’s function depending on where it’s deployed. Slotting in screens, NFC readers, barcode scanners, or lighting modules lets the same hardware shift between home service, retail, and industrial settings without structural changes. Replacing individual modules instead of the entire unit keeps ownership costs lower over time and reduces the amount of electronics that gets discarded when requirements change.

The structural logic extends to manufacturing efficiency. A symmetrical body design cuts the number of molds required in half, reducing material waste and production overhead from the start. The signature Mocha Whisper finish, soft fabric accents, and warm CMF palette give R2 a noticeably different presence from the plain white industrial shells that most service robots wear, making it less intrusive in home and retail environments where aesthetics matter.

The post Humanoid Robots Don’t Fit in Store Aisles, So Robbyant Fixed That first appeared on Yanko Design.

DIY Writing Devices Get Expensive Fast, So This One Costs Almost Nothing

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The writerdeck movement has one recurring irony: devices built specifically to cut through digital distraction have a tendency to get expensive. Custom keyboards, purpose-built screens, and precision-machined enclosures can push a DIY writing build well past the cost of a regular laptop, which rather defeats the point. The more interesting entries in the space tend to be the ones that solve the accessibility problem, not just the distraction one.

The Whale Writer is an open-source, foldable, DIY writing device designed to be as cheap and portable as possible. It’s the second writerdeck design from its creator, after Bee Write Back, built specifically to address the two most common criticisms of the first: it didn’t fold, and it cost too much. Both problems are solved here through a combination of 3D-printed parts and off-the-shelf electronics.

Designer: Simon Shimel

Folding is what separates this from most of the writerdeck category, where non-folding chassis designs are common. When closed, the Whale Writer flattens into a form that can travel in a bag without a full keyboard and screen sticking out at different angles. A device that sits on a café table can fold up and slide into a jacket pocket for the commute.

Central to the hardware is an unusual display choice. Rather than a backlit LCD, the Whale Writer uses a Waveshare RLCD, a reflective liquid crystal display that reads using ambient light instead of a power-hungry internal backlight. The result is a screen that mimics paper readability and extends battery life considerably, with an ESP32-S3 microcontroller already built into the module so no separate computing board is required.

The keyboard is the most accessible component here: a standard cheap Bluetooth keyboard is fully disassembled, and its PCB, key matrix, and flex cable are repurposed inside a custom 3D-printed chassis. Four printed parts complete the build: a base plate with a print-in-place hinge, a locking plate that holds the keyboard in position, a battery cover, and a screen bezel with three button cutouts.

Power runs from an 18650 battery cell, and builders have two configurations to choose from. The simpler path keeps the keyboard’s original battery running independently from the main cell, requiring no soldering. The more involved route splices the keyboard’s power input directly to the RLCD board’s output, running everything off a single 18650, which means one battery to charge instead of two.

Software is deliberately left open. A basic word processor was built as a functionality test using an AI coding assistant, but the creator frames the Whale Writer as a hardware platform, not a finished product. The ESP32’s onboard Wi-Fi and Bluetooth leave the door open for everything from a minimal plain-text editor to a wireless draft-syncing terminal, depending on what firmware the community eventually writes.

None of what the Whale Writer does is entirely new, and it doesn’t try to suggest otherwise. The category already knows what it’s supposed to be: a device that only lets you write, without anything else competing for the same moment. What this build adds to that premise is a sincere attempt to make the experience available to people who want it but have been priced out of building one.

The post DIY Writing Devices Get Expensive Fast, So This One Costs Almost Nothing first appeared on Yanko Design.

A $69 Pen-Shaped Electric Screwdriver Just Might Save Your Laptop’s $1000 Repair Bill

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Have you noticed everything wants to rent itself to you now? Your car has a subscription for heated seats, your printer snitches on you for buying off brand ink, and your phone battery is glued in so tight that replacing it feels like defusing a bomb. Somewhere along the way “buying” a gadget quietly turned into “borrowing it under manufacturer supervision,” and it’s kind of exhausting when you sit with it for more than five seconds.

One small, unglamorous way to push back is just learning to open your own stuff again. Which brings us to the Cladist Titan, a pen sized electric screwdriver that treats torque control like a religion. Sixteen calibrated settings take you from featherlight to seized bolt strong, plus a manual mode for when you want to feel every last millimeter of that final turn yourself. Not a revolution. Just a screwdriver that respects what you’re working on.

Designer: Cladist

Click Here to Buy Now: $69 $119 (42% off) Hurry! Only 219 of 2100 left. Raised over $393,700 USD.

None of this would matter as much if new gear were still cheap, but it isn’t, and it’s getting worse on purpose. AI data centers have been eating up memory chips so aggressively that analysts at Gartner are projecting combined DRAM and SSD prices could climb roughly 130 percent by the end of 2026, dragging PC prices up around 17 percent and phones around 13 percent. IDC has phones rising about 14 percent on average this year. Nintendo raised the Switch 2’s US price by fifty dollars and pointed straight at memory costs as the reason. Where sticker prices have stayed flat, plenty of manufacturers have just quietly shipped less RAM and worse cameras instead. So the device you already own is doing more financial work for you than it used to, whether you asked it to or not.

The whole point of the Titan’s torque system is that it stops when it should, not when you notice. Fifteen numbered gears run from 0.05 to 0.65 N·m in small, even steps, each one governed by a mechanical clutch that physically disengages the moment the preset resistance hits. There’s a sixteenth mode too, a dedicated high torque setting that runs continuously up to 0.8 N·m for the stuff that’s actually seized shut, using an electronic cutoff instead of a clutch because that job needs sustained force rather than a polite click. Two different problems, two different solutions, which is honestly more thought than most tools in this price range put into the question at all.

What that range actually buys you is coverage across an absurd spread of stuff you own. The gentlest settings handle eyeglass hinges, watches, and AirPods, the sort of screws that strip if you so much as think about them too hard. Step up and you’re in Switch Joy-Con and SSD territory, then camera bodies and MacBooks, then full PC builds and mechanical keyboards, then small appliances that just need a firm hand. It’s one tool quietly pretending to be six.

Torque means nothing if the bit slips, so there’s a low runout chuck keeping everything centered through 230 RPM of steady electric spin. Wobble is the actual villain in most botched repairs, not lack of power, and a bit that drifts off center is how you turn a clean fix into a scratched housing.

For the moments electric power isn’t the answer, the drivetrain switches over to manual, giving you up to 3 N·m of hand torque and the kind of tactile feedback you genuinely want on that last careful quarter turn. There’s also a separate manual rod tucked into the kit, with its own magnetic bit holder, for angles the powered body simply can’t reach.

The 48 piece bit set is where this starts to feel a little pointed. Alongside the usual Phillips and hex sizes sit pentalobe, tri point, and security Torx down to T6, the exact screw shapes companies use specifically to keep casual owners out of their own devices. Handing you those bits, color coded and organized in a pop up aluminum case, is a small but deliberate act of putting the lock pick back in your hands.

Four LEDs ring the tip for shadow free light in tight enclosures, and a 500mAh battery gets you 700 to 1,000 screws per charge over USB-C, rated for 500 full cycles before it drops to 80 percent capacity, which is a long runway for something the size of a pen.

The Titan itself is currently listed at $69 as an early bird pledge, 42% off a $119 MSRP, and comes with just the screwdriver and 48 bit set. Step up to the $109 Ultimate Kit, 47% off a $206 MSRP, and you add a carbon fiber pry set, a camera care kit, and a magnetic repair mat. Estimated delivery is September 2026, shipping is available worldwide, and Cladist backs the Titan with a one year limited warranty.

Click Here to Buy Now: $69 $119 (42% off) Hurry! Only 219 of 2100 left. Raised over $393,700 USD.

The post A $69 Pen-Shaped Electric Screwdriver Just Might Save Your Laptop’s $1000 Repair Bill first appeared on Yanko Design.

Most Laptops Seal the Battery In, Dynabook’s New One Lets You Swap It

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AI on laptops has created a new kind of battery problem. The promise of on-device AI processing, where the work stays local rather than routing through a cloud server, is genuinely useful for anyone handling sensitive data. But running a neural processing unit alongside everything else a laptop already juggles accelerates battery wear in ways that weren’t as much of a concern three years ago. The battery that comes with a new laptop today degrades faster than the hardware around it.

Most manufacturers solve this by designing the battery to be inaccessible. The result is that when a battery eventually loses capacity, it’s either a service center visit or a new laptop. Dynabook’s 2026 fall and winter lineup takes a different position by making the battery user-replaceable in two of its Panther Lake models, the 14-inch XP9/XP7 and the 13.3-inch X9/X7. A sliding panel lets owners swap it themselves without tools or a technician.

Designer: Dynabook

The reasoning is spelled out plainly in the press release: heavy AI use accelerates battery degradation, and forcing users to choose between repair costs and a full replacement creates unnecessary financial pressure and waste. A replacement battery sold separately as an optional accessory means the rest of the hardware, which is still perfectly functional, gets to stay in use longer. It’s a longevity argument that happens to line up with right-to-repair expectations at the same time.

The XP9/XP7, a 14-inch Copilot+ PC, comes in at 999 g, while the X9/X7 at 13.3 inches checks in at 948 g. Both run Intel’s Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake processors. The X9/X7 claims up to 17 hours of video playback and up to 32.5 hours at idle, which is a considerable buffer for a machine that doubles as an on-device AI workstation. Both models pass MIL-STD-810H military-grade durability testing.

Connectivity is genuinely comprehensive for an ultra-light design. Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 Gen 1 Type-A ports sit on both sides of the chassis, alongside HDMI output, a LAN port, and a microSD card slot. That’s a full professional port layout without a dongle in sight, which matters for anyone who has spent time hunting for the right adapter in a conference room. Dolby Atmos handles audio on both models.

The on-device AI processing is the capability that sits behind the user-replaceable battery feature in a practical sense. Running local AI keeps private and sensitive data from leaving the machine, which the press release frames as a concrete advantage over cloud-dependent workflows. The AI privacy assist feature also detects attempts to view the screen from unintended angles, adding a physical layer to what would otherwise be a software-only privacy story.

For those who want the same 13.3-inch form factor at the lowest possible weight, the G9 comes in at 899 g with the same Panther Lake processor and MIL-STD-810H certification. It doesn’t include the user-replaceable battery design, but it undercuts the X9/X7’s weight by nearly 50 g, which matters when the laptop travels daily. All models launched in Japan on August 7, with no global availability confirmed yet.

The post Most Laptops Seal the Battery In, Dynabook’s New One Lets You Swap It first appeared on Yanko Design.