Tag Archives: Gadgets

A Round Clock That Shows the Forecast So You Stop Checking Your Phone

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Checking the time before leaving home often requires checking your phone, which carries the risk of being distracted by everything else on it. The Round Weather Clock keeps both time and forecast together on a circular screen, making it easy to know if you need to grab the umbrella on your way out. It might look like a humble desk clock, but it knows considerably more about the day ahead.

Smart displays do exist, but they’re practically just tablets or even mini televisions. They take up space, bombard you with notifications, and suggest things you didn’t even ask for. With a 3.4-inch round touch screen, this clock doesn’t have much room to fit anything other than the time, today’s weather, and the forecast for the next five days. The circle is also a more familiar and friendlier shape for a bedside table, where the display can be changed to a less information-dense analog clock style.

Designer: Josh Hendrickson (Anoraker)

When you’re half-asleep early in the morning, you can simply glance at the clock and know what’s heading your way. Switching between analog and digital faces offers a more traditional feel and a straightforward readout. You don’t have to pretend that a screen showing rain is an antique just because its case is round.

You have some choice when it comes to the enclosure, depending on the aesthetic you prefer as well as the route you want to take. You can 3D print the “Pebble” style that has a compact, gently tilted body with a bowl-like rear. It’s a shape that fits well beside a computer without looking like an extended display, providing a mix of modern design with a more classic clock face.

If you want to go the more traditional route, however, there’s the “Classic” style, a straightforward circular body with a slightly flatter back. It also comes in a variety of wood options, including walnut, maple, or cherry. It gives a bit of contrast with a warm, natural finish and a digital display. The wooden version can be bought as a finished product, complete with the clock, for $340, while the more adventurous people can grab the free Pebble 3D printable and make their own.

Despite its simple functions, you can, in theory, add a bit of your own features to make it a little smarter. You can, for example, push a message on the screen from a remote device, such as your phone, or you can display a reminder to pick up your keys or other things near your door. It also has a dim red mode to keep the display less distracting and blinding at night.

As with the enclosures, builders can choose whether to go with a Raspberry Pi with some round screen or a Waveshare ESP32-P4 that comes with its own touch screen. That said, the Pebble style is specifically made for the ESP32-P4, so that’s something to keep in mind right from the start. Either way, the DIY project kindly provides instructions for whichever you pick.

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Meta Just Turned Its AI Into a Tamagotchi and It’s Pretty Cute

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AI has plenty of serious questions to answer, from copyright and environmental costs to privacy. There’s also a more everyday hurdle: for many people, AI feels impersonal. An assistant might be useful for a quick task, but it doesn’t necessarily feel like something you’d want to carry around. Meta’s upcoming Muse Charm takes a different approach. It puts an AI agent in a tiny device and gives it a character you can get to know.

Muse Charm is a keychain-sized handheld device built for Muse, Meta’s AI agent. Rather than unlocking your phone and opening an app, you’re meant to reach for the Charm when you want to talk to Muse. You can still use the agent on a smartphone, so the device isn’t your only way in. Its pitch is simpler access: help that’s close at hand when a question or task comes up.

Designer: Meta

The Charm’s rounded-square, or “squircle,” shape gives it something of a Tamagotchi feel. In Meta’s released image, a dark screen and rounded casing frame a small beige character, while a cord hangs from the device. It looks more like a playful accessory than a miniature smartphone. That distinction matters: Meta isn’t just shrinking another screen. It’s trying to make an AI assistant feel approachable enough to bring along throughout the day.

The character is a fuzzy-looking on-screen mascot, not a plush covering for the device. Users can give it a name, adding a personal touch to an assistant that might otherwise appear as text or an abstract icon. Meta describes the Charm as a way to connect with Muse through voice, touch, and a camera. Together, the character and the small form factor turn a practical tool into something that resembles a digital companion, at least in appearance.

That cuteness is doing more than making the product photogenic. It gives Muse a recognizable identity and offers a gentler introduction to technology that some people find unsettling. Still, a friendly face is a design choice, not a solution to concerns about AI. Whether people come to trust Muse will depend less on how charming its avatar looks than on what the agent does with the access they give it.

Muse is intended to do practical work. The agent can read emails, book classes, draft documents, and make purchases, though Amazon has blocked purchases through it. Those are capabilities of Muse the agent; they shouldn’t be mistaken for a promise that every task can be completed entirely on the Charm without using another device. The benefit for users would be getting help with small jobs as they arise, rather than saving them all for a later phone session.

Picture remembering an errand while you’re out, or wanting to ask a question without opening your phone and getting pulled into notifications. That’s the problem Charm is designed to address. It could also appeal to someone trying to spend less time looking at a phone, although it’s too early to say whether owning another screen would actually reduce screen time. Its usefulness will come down to how smoothly those quick interactions work in real life.

Convenience has a trade-off. To work across email, shopping, and other services, Muse may need access to accounts and personal information. Readers will want to know what permissions they’re granting and how much control they retain over the agent’s actions. The Charm’s camera also makes privacy an important question to explore, rather than something its cheerful design can answer.

For now, Muse Charm remains a forthcoming product. Meta was still finalizing its materials and components when it was announced, had not provided a price, and was aiming to ship in time for the 2026 holidays. That leaves the biggest question open: will people find it easier to use than the phone they already carry? If Meta gets that right, the cute mascot may draw people in. The everyday usefulness of Muse will give them a reason to keep it close.

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This Color E-Paper Clip Is the Polaroid That Digital Photos Never Had

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A photo you love rarely leaves the phone it was taken on, fading into a camera roll the moment the screen goes dark. TICKEY tries to pull that image back into physical space, using a 3.7-inch color e-paper panel housed in a 3.8mm aluminum shell that clips onto a bag, sits on a desk, or hangs from a badge lanyard. It’s a small object built around one simple idea: that a picture worth keeping deserves a life outside a glowing rectangle.

The panel itself is the real engineering story here. Most e-paper displays settle for a handful of muted tones and refresh rates measured in long, patient seconds. TICKEY runs on a Modos-developed driver that pushes past 48 native colors while cutting a full-quality refresh down to 13 seconds, with a faster 3-second mode available when precision matters less than speed. That gap between older e-ink hardware and this driver is wide enough to notice immediately.

Designer: ENIAC (Enilinx)

An ESP32-S3 chip handles the processing underneath, paired with Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and NFC for getting content onto the screen without a cable in sight. A companion app lets someone edit a design on a phone and push it over wirelessly, and templates can be shared between users rather than built from scratch every time. Since the firmware is open, developers get a mature platform to build custom behavior instead of a sealed black box.

Clip it to a backpack strap before a conference, and it becomes a badge showing a name, a QR code, or contact details, updated the moment plans change instead of printed once and stuck for the day. Set it on a desk, and the same hardware turns into rotating art, swapped whenever the mood calls for something new. A magnet on the back means it holds onto a fridge door just as easily as a bag.

The 45g weight matters more than it sounds on paper, since anything heavier turns a clip-on badge into something that tugs at fabric or slides out of place by midday. Aluminum gives the shell enough rigidity to survive being tossed into a bag alongside keys and a water bottle, while staying thin enough to disappear against a jacket lapel or a laptop sleeve without adding visible bulk.

None of this asks for constant power once an image is set, since e-paper only draws current while actually changing what’s displayed. A finished screen sits there fully visible in direct sunlight, legible without a backlight fighting glare, and idle without draining a battery meant to last through a full day of moving between contexts. That’s the quiet advantage e-paper has always held over LCD, now paired with color depth that used to be out of reach.

TICKEY deliberately skips video and animation, treating that restriction as a feature rather than a compromise. A static image asks less of your attention than a screen that never stops moving, sitting calm on a bag strap or a windowsill until someone chooses to change it. Photos, event badges, or a fridge note showing today’s grocery list all fit that same quiet template, an object built to be looked at rather than constantly checked.

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This Walnut Console Has Faders That Move Themselves to Match Your Lights

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Smart home hardware has a quiet, persistent problem nobody bothers fixing: physical switches and sliders forget the truth the moment someone changes a light from their phone instead. A dial stays wherever it was left, even after the bulb it supposedly controls has dimmed to nothing through a voice command in another room. One maker’s walnut console solves that mismatch directly, using motorized faders that physically move themselves to match whatever’s actually happening in the house.

The mechanism borrows straight from professional audio mixing desks, where motorized faders have handled exactly this kind of state tracking for decades. A large aluminum knob on the console cycles through banks, each one representing a different room or light group, shown on a small built-in display. The moment a new bank gets selected, all four faders glide on their own to wherever that room’s lights currently sit, no manual resetting required.

Designer: Alex Dufetel (Sacreblue Studio)

That synchronization runs in both directions, which is the detail that actually matters here. Dim a bedroom light from a phone app while sitting on the couch, and the console’s fader for that room quietly slides to match, entirely unprompted. It’s a small piece of choreography that turns a static piece of furniture into something that stays honest about the state of a house, rather than just accepting whatever position it was left in.

Four buttons sit beside the faders, handling lighting presets rather than individual brightness levels. Their assigned function changes depending on which room bank happens to be active, so a single row of buttons effectively serves every room in the house without needing a dedicated switch panel screwed into every wall. Pressing the same physical button in different rooms triggers a completely different lighting mood each time.

Building and testing all of this against sixteen actual light fixtures scattered through a house would slow any project down considerably. Instead, a compact 4×4 grid of small diffused LEDs stands in for the real thing, with each row representing one room’s bank of four lights. That miniature rig let the whole system get debugged safely on a desk before ever touching a single fixture wired into the house’s actual power.

Materials do plenty of the storytelling here too. The body is solid walnut rather than injection-molded plastic, and the rotary knob along with the fader caps came off a CNC machine cut straight from aluminum stock. Even the current painted-wood faceplate, a placeholder ahead of a planned black anodized aluminum version, already reads closer to a finished audio interface than a hobbyist circuit board bolted into a project box.

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A ‘Wolverine’ DualSense controller so feral it makes the actual game look tame

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I distinctly remember the Wolverine game hype. It’s quite literally why I bought a PS5… well, that and GTA VI. And then September rolled around, the game released, and it was instantly trashed for its patronizing game design, made to feel so sandboxed and easy that some people literally played through missions without touching their controller. The game might have been trash, the graphics and the hype definitely weren’t… and while I most certainly won’t be spending my well-earned money on a copy of the Wolverine, I would buy this controller in an absolute heartbeat!

Designed by an artist by the name of FAZ, this Wolverine-themed DualSense controller is about as unhinged as Logan in his boundless rage, slashing away at enemies without a hint of holding back. Wolverine in his peak form is pure animalistic rage, and this controller captures that while still honoring the superhero part of the equation. The controller is themed after the outfit, and rather cleverly leans into the parts of Wolverine that aren’t adamantium. There are no metal accents, fake claw motifs, or anything that would feel like maybe a visual crutch. There’s just the yellow and black, a hint of distressed fabric, a few scratches, and copious amounts of spattered blood… probably of Logan’s enemies.

Designer: FAZ Des

For the unitiated, FAZ is a South Asia-based visual designer and creative director, working primarily with an iPad Pro and boundless creativity. FAZ’s Instagram isn’t a chronicle of his work, it’s a gallery of videos showing him creating designs, taking you through the WIP journey rather than showing you the final product. In an AI slop-filled world, FAZ actually shows you the man-hours instead of the final images, and that’s refreshing. Not to mention the fact that he’s freakishly talented too, using a mere sculpting app on the iPad (Nomad Sculpt, if you’re asking), to create designs as beautiful as this Wolverine-themed controller.

The controller’s color scheme is but obvious. Even the game leans heavily into the black and yellow visual DNA that is Marvel’s Wolverine, and it only makes sense that FAZ would stick to the same palette for his controller. The yellow remains glossy, while the black parts have a corduroy-style texture on them. What I personally find highly interesting is that the controller doesn’t use the Adamantium theme anywhere, not on the joysticks, the function buttons, or even the triggers. I guess it’s FAZ’s way of saying that the indestructible metal doesn’t define Wolverine, his personality when he dons his costume does. To be honest, I could totally work with that.

The controller also has a fair amount of blood on it, added to reinforce the NSFW nature of Wolverine’s work. A good Wolverine fight doesn’t see him effortlessly destroying his enemy. It sees a struggle, it sees Wolverine taking a beating, bleeding, healing, and reaching that animalistic flow state while he fights his enemy to the death. That specific moment is what this controller captures so well – not the polish of a Wolverine who hasn’t entered the battlefield yet. Rather, the avatar of Wolverine after he’s done slicing and dicing his opponents, as the adrenaline wears down.

The only real caveat here is that FAZ made this as a pure concept. Unless some third party reaches out and helps 3D print and fabricate the skins for this, there’s no realistic universe in which this controller would exist. I’m pretty sure Marvel and Insomniac Studios have resigned to the negative press Wolverine’s getting and don’t really plan on milking this particular cow anymore, especially after pouring hundreds of millions into its development. That doesn’t change the fact that this controller looks absolutely wicked, and that I’d pay a pretty penny for it, even if I don’t care too much about the game itself!

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DIY AirPower desk charges your phone anywhere on its glass top, also reminds you to drink water

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How long have you pursued an unannounced gadget; waiting passionately to see it come to life? If I speak for myself, it would be flying cars that I still wait for with childlike enthusiasm. For He Shijie, better known as He Tongxue of the YouTube channel HTX Studio, it was an AirPower, a wireless charging pad that Apple announced it had in development in 2017, almost a decade ago.

The best part of the AirPower would have been its unique charging ability. Unlike Qi wireless chargers (that required the phone to be placed in the center to charge), the AirPower would charge an iPhone no matter where it was placed on the charging pad. Patiently waiting for nine years, only to learn that Apple had discontinued the idea of the wireless charger way back in 2019, the creator got down to building his own AirPower in the size of a work desk that Apple would dare try.

Designer: HTX Studio

The desk-sized version of Apple’s now-cancelled AirPower charger is a versatile DIY creation that features a moving coil inside to charge your phone no matter where you place it on the table. The table is called the AirDesk and uses an overhead camera to locate where your device is on the desk and repositions a single moving charging coil right beneath it to charge automatically.

The entire show of the coil moving is pretty interesting. When you place a device on the table, it automatically identifies where the device is and starts to align the charging coil in that direction. An animated cat appears above the charging mechanism and it follows the coil as it moves directly underneath the phone. AirDesk can charge multiple devices also. Charging coils are placed in the corners of the table to charge additional gadgets. The creator informs that the keyboard can also be charged wirelessly when needed.

The table itself features a Mac Mini underneath the glass top. It can be connected to a monitor on top and used as a hidden workstation that your friends would envy, provided He is willing to trade it off for a fortune. Simply because what the studio has pulled off with the Air Desk is really cumbersome to replicate, and clearly there is no way of getting this one, I believe. You can try your luck ask though.

The unique desk with a transparent LCD screen is not only created to power devices. It took the creators over two months to finalize the ultimate desk, which is engineered to play animations, show tasks, and remind you to stay active when you’ve been in front of the desk for too long. The desk sits on motorized legs to transform into a standing desk when you need to change your posture. A nifty characteristic of the table is a built-in mechanism that, like the motorized coil, also pushes a cup towards the user every hour to remind him to drink water…Cool?

 

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Charging Pads Save Your Phone, BIONIC’s Also Clears Your Counter

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Every home eventually collects the same small pile near the door or nightstand, a phone, a set of AirPods, keys, maybe a pair of glasses set down without much thought. The BIONIC Valet Charger treats that daily pile as a design problem worth solving. It combines a wireless charging surface with an integrated tray, giving all of those scattered objects one considered surface to land on instead of several.

The body is precision machined from a single block of anodized aluminum, a process BIONIC uses across its entire catalog rather than reserving for one flagship piece. That machining produces a slim bar with no visible seams or fasteners, finished in either silver or black. Small production runs keep tolerances tight, letting the studio catch finishing flaws before a unit ever reaches a customer’s desk or entryway table.

Designer: BIONIC

Nothing about the shape asks for attention. At 10.43 by 2.64 by 0.79 inches and just 10.6 ounces, the Valet Charger reads as a thin, low bar rather than a bulky charging dock, the kind of object that disappears into a bedside table instead of dominating it. That restraint runs through the whole BIONIC catalog, where the guiding rule stays simple: nothing gets added without a reason behind it.

A dedicated wireless charging zone sits along the surface, ready for a phone or a set of AirPods without needing either one centered just right. Power runs through a single USB-C cable built into the base, so there’s no separate brick or cord tangling behind furniture. Set a phone down on the way out the door, and it’s topped up again before anyone reaches for it.

Beside that charging zone runs a shallow tray built into the same aluminum body, meant for the smaller things a phone charger usually ignores. Sunglasses, a house key, a wedding ring pulled off before bed, all of it lands in the same narrow channel instead of drifting across a counter. Emptying pockets at the end of a day becomes one motion, not several separate decisions about where things go.

A full-grain leather pad sits inset into the tray, available in black, gray, or brown, warming up what would otherwise be an all-metal surface. Cow leather like this tends to darken and soften with handling rather than wear out, picking up a patina that a synthetic pad never quite manages. Paired with the cool aluminum shell, it gives the object two textures instead of one flat surface throughout.

The Valet Charger isn’t a standalone experiment either. Priced at €240 (about $260), it sits inside a wider BIONIC catalog built on the same small-batch approach, where aluminum, leather, and glass get chosen for how they age, not how they photograph on day one. It’s designed to pair with the brand’s existing Valet Tray, letting a desk or entryway grow its own system of matching pieces over time.

A Corning Gorilla Glass panel caps the charging zone, adding a hard, scratch-resistant surface right where a phone gets set down and picked up dozens of times a day. Months in, the aluminum keeps its finish, the leather deepens in color, and the small pile by the door quietly stops being a pile. It becomes the one spot where a phone, keys, and glasses already belong.

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Cricut’s New Machine Actually Makes Custom Stickers in Minutes

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I have a drawer, and if you are the kind of person who understands sticker addiction, you already know the drawer I mean. Okay fine, it’s several drawers. And boxes. It is stuffed with washi tape, sticky notes in colors I will never actually use, and at least dozens of half-finished sheets of custom stickers I ordered online and forgot about because they took two weeks to arrive. That wait is the actual problem. Custom stickers, the kind with your own photos or artwork on them, have always meant either a bulk order from a print-on-demand site or a trip to a drugstore kiosk, and neither option works when the idea hits you at 9pm on a Tuesday and you want it in your journal by Wednesday.

I journal daily and I will die on the hill that good stationery makes the habit stick, pun fully intended. So when Cricut announced StickerPix, a line of machines built specifically to turn your camera roll into stickers and photo prints at home, I paid attention in a way I don’t usually pay attention to product launches.

Designer: Cricut

Here is what it actually is. There are two machines. StickerPix Print is the simpler one, and it prints onto pre-cut sticker sheets, so your shapes come out set but the color and image are entirely yours. StickerPix Print + Cut goes further. You design your own layout, and the machine prints and then kiss-cuts around your actual artwork, so you get custom shapes instead of preset ones. Both use dye-sublimation printing and laminate the sticker as it prints, which means the finish is water, scratch, and fade resistant without you doing anything extra. No Cricut Access subscription is required to run either machine, which matters more than it sounds like it should, because plenty of hobby tech quietly nudges you toward a monthly fee the moment you want to actually use it.

The materials are proprietary, Cricut’s own sticker sheets and photo paper in 4×6 and 4×7 sizes, and that is a fair trade-off to be honest about. You are not going to run random cardstock through this thing. But the payoff is that you skip the entire ordering pipeline. No uploading files to a third-party site, no minimum order of 50 when you needed 5, no waiting for a mail carrier. You take a photo, open Design Space on your phone or desktop, and a few minutes later you are peeling a laminated sticker off a machine sitting on your desk.

What actually impresses me is who this is built for. It is not aimed at professional crafters who already own a full Cricut cutting setup and a separate printer. It is aimed at the person who wants a fast, pro-looking result without learning a new skill, which is most of us. Reviewers testing it early have pointed out that the Print + Cut model handles small, detailed designs well, and that the photo printing option is genuinely useful on its own, since plenty of people have thousands of photos trapped on a phone and nowhere to put them.

I am not going to pretend a sticker printer solves anything urgent in the world. But it solves a small, specific, recurring annoyance for people who like putting their own images on their own belongings, whether that is a journal, a water bottle, a gift tag, or an envelope that deserved better than a plain white label. That is a bigger group of people than it sounds like, especially with junk journaling and scrapbooking having their own quiet resurgence across social media over the past couple of years.

Price sits in the $150 to $380 range depending on the bundle, which is not nothing, but it is roughly what a few months of ordering custom sticker sheets online would cost anyway. For someone who already treats their stationery drawer like a small shrine, that math checks out. For everyone else, it is at minimum a genuinely clever answer to a problem most people did not realize had a name until they saw a machine built to fix it.

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REACH Is a Modular Sports GPS Computer Built to Snap Into Any Sport

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Athletes who used to buy a separate walkie-talkie, action camera, and wind meter for different pursuits are looking at a much lighter hardware bill these days. Motion Rivalry’s REACH folds all three into one modular sports GPS computer, snapping on whichever accessory a session calls for instead of stocking a shelf of standalone gadgets. The same unit adapts across cycling, rowing, kayaking, canoeing, and paragliding, with hardware you reconfigure instead of replace as training shifts from one discipline to the next.

The mechanism behind that swap is a single open-source connector at the top of the unit, accepting hardware modules in seconds rather than minutes of fumbling with tools. Instead of buying a new device for each need or sport, REACH treats its body as a base you keep building on, sport after sport. It’s less a finished gadget, more a foundation designed to grow alongside whatever discipline has your attention this season.

Designer: Motion Rivalry

Click Here to Buy Now: $359 $599 (40% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $122,000.

Two of the four available modules handle situational awareness. The Walkie-Talkie module lets a coach on the riverbank stay in contact mid-session, working across 0.6 to 1.2 miles (1 to 2 kilometers) of line-of-sight range with multiple channels. The Radar module covers what’s coming around you, using 24GHz mmWave sensing to detect objects between 16 and 98 feet away across a 100-degree field of view.

The other two lean into documentation and conditions. A Camera module records 1080p video at 60 frames per second from a rotatable, splash-resistant housing mounted where the head unit already sits, skipping a separate action-camera bracket. A Wind Meter module adds live wind speed readings down to 0.1 meters per second, along with humidity and temperature, numbers that matter more than they sound once you’re airborne.

Rowing, kayaking, and canoeing put REACH’s fastest sensors to work. A 10Hz multi-constellation GNSS (most sports GPS units run 1 to 5Hz) locks position ten times a second, catching velocity changes within a single stroke rather than average splits over a lap. A 200Hz 9-axis IMU tracks heading drift, turning a wandering line into a number a coach can correct. REACH folds both into a Stroke Quality score, and Legacy Mode keeps it comparable to existing benchmarks.

On a bike, REACH estimates cadence and power without external sensors. It tracks linear and angular acceleration from the pedaling motion, then fuses and normalizes those readings to amplify the unique signal of your stroke while filtering out road noise. The result is a stable cadence reading without the need for extra hardware, precise to about 4 inches (10 centimeters) of elevation change.

The 3.5-inch display lays out speed, gradient, distance, and training stress score in a format built for glancing down mid-ride. Power estimates follow that same sensor-fusion approach, translating the normalized motion signals into a wattage figure without ever needing a crank sensor or power pedal bolted to the frame, one less accessory to charge, pair, or lose track of before a ride.

The same unit that tracked stroke rate on a river can be strapped to a flight harness by afternoon. In paragliding mode, REACH runs a dedicated vario for climb and sink rates, layers terrain maps adjusted for wind, and predicts landing zones from live wind direction and speed. Every reading here works toward one goal, keeping a pilot ahead of conditions that shift by the minute.

Catching a thermal updraft mid-flight is one thing; marking it for next time is another. A single press on REACH saves that exact location to the map, ready for your next pass, future flights, or anyone else in the flying community using the same site. Fly the same ridge enough times, and what used to be guesswork turns into a precision heat map built entirely by pilots who’ve actually flown it.

That Legacy Mode feature earns its own mention outside of rowing, too. Coaches who’ve spent seasons building benchmarks around specific equipment don’t want new hardware that outputs numbers in an unfamiliar format, no matter how good those numbers are. By matching its readings to formats already in use, REACH slots into existing programs instead of asking a team to relearn how it measures progress.

That data doesn’t stay trapped on the screen. The dedicated companion app on iOS and Android pairs over Bluetooth LE for route planning, reviewing a session, and Over-the-Air firmware updates once you’re back on solid ground. Sessions export as .FIT, .GPX, or .CSV and sync directly to Strava, so switching to REACH doesn’t mean abandoning platforms already in use. With 24GB of onboard storage, five sports’ worth of sessions won’t fill it.

Every one of those features lives inside a 5.5-ounce (156-gram) shell wrapped around a 3.5-inch display that stays legible in direct sunlight. An IPX7 rating handles rain, spray, and cold, while a 2,900mAh battery delivers up to 26 hours per charge. A programmable RGB strip along the base, assignable to stroke rate, split, or heart rate, glows green when you’re in the zone and a different color when you drift out, proof that REACH treats hardware as just another surface for good design.

Click Here to Buy Now: $359 $599 (40% off). Hurry, only a few left! Raised over $122,000.

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This $249 Clip-on Device Shines ‘Invisible’ Infrared Sunlight On You To Boost Your Mood

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Amsterdam gets around 1,600 hours of sunshine a year. Los Angeles gets close to 2,500. Anne Berends spent years feeling that difference, which is a very common Dutch experience and a very uncommon reason to start a hardware company. She was a nanomaterials scientist, so rather than buying a lamp she asked herself, “What if I could mount a piece of the sun on top of my laptop, which I spend roughly 8 hours in front of everyday?” The answer was near-infrared, the invisible band that shoots out of your TV remote. Turns out, at the right wavelength and focus, it provides a similar physiological experience as being in the sun. Berends built a webcam-ish device that sits on top of your laptop/desktop screen, giving you that dose of “sunlight” you wouldn’t get in most northern countries between September and March.

I have had a unit from IFA 2026 clipped to my screen for roughly twenty days now. It is a 120 gram puck, 83mm across, aluminum and plastic, USB-C powered, with three LEDs running at 850nm. A presence sensor confirms you are between 30 and 100cm away and cuts the light the moment you leave the desk. Berends co-founded SunLED with lighting industry veteran Ayhan Siriner, out of the Amsterdam research lab Seaborough. It sells for $249 and carries a 2026 iF Design Award in Medical and Healthcare.

Designers: Dr. Anne Berends & Ayhan Siriner (SunLED Life Science)

SunLED did not start with a clip-on gadget. The original plan baked near-infrared into ceiling fixtures, so whole rooms got a dose without anyone changing habits. That idea collapsed under basic physics, since near-infrared only works on skin, and light scattered from three meters up wastes itself on the walls. Berends summed up what the ceiling version would require in one blunt line: you’d need a nuclear plant, basically. That is not a metaphor she reached for lightly. The whole product shrank from architecture down to arm’s length, landing on the surface everyone stares at for eight hours a day.

The product does not do anything you can perceive, which is the strangest part of the brief. No warmth, no glow, no hum. At MWC, SunLED’s team had to hand journalists a special viewer just to prove the beam was there, since 850 nanometers sits outside what human eyes register. Most companies faced with an invisible feature would have cheated and added a soft status light for reassurance. SunLED skipped that. What you get instead is a presence sensor that checks your distance, and an app that logs weekly exposure after the fact.

On the desk, the SunBooster reads less like a wellness gadget and more like a webcam that wandered off from a video call. That is deliberate, since it never screams self-care at anyone glancing at your monitor mid meeting. Compare that to the SAD lamps this category grew up on, glowing slabs you sit in front of like you are serving a sentence. Or compare it to red light panels, which mix visible red with near-infrared and demand a timed session standing in front of them. SunBooster skips the ritual and the spectacle both.

The science leans on a study from the University of Groningen, double-blind and placebo-controlled: participants reported better mood after a single day, most pronounced in winter, and more energy after four weeks. A separate UBC study found near-infrared exposure improved emotional stability under demanding cognitive tasks. None of that is nothing, for a category that usually runs on vibes over citations. I will admit upfront that I live somewhere the sun works unpaid overtime year round, so whether this does anything for a hypothetical Dutch February version of me, I genuinely cannot tell. What I can report is that it has never once made my desk feel cluttered, which is more than most wellness gadgets manage.

The standalone device might not even be the real plan here. SunLED has shown concept hardware alongside it, including a phone case with the same LEDs built in and a laptop with near-infrared woven into the display housing. The company is licensing the tech to monitor and laptop makers, and Berends has pitched it as adding roughly the cost of a Netflix subscription to a device’s bill of materials. If that lands with even one major laptop brand, the object on my screen stops being a product and becomes a proof of concept that shipped first. That is bigger ambition than most $249 gadgets carry.

Winning an iF Design Award for a wellness gadget is not rare anymore, the category has gotten crowded with panels and pods chasing the same jury. What sets the SunBooster apart is that it never asked to look like medicine. It looks like hardware, sized and finished the way a camera accessory would be, sitting on a bezel instead of a bathroom shelf. If SunLED pulls off the licensing play, this unit gets remembered less as a product and more as the pitch deck that worked. Until then, it sits on my monitor, doing something I will never see, for a winter I will never have to survive.

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