Turn your Apple Watch into a dedicated Satnav for your car

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The Apple Watch is literally almost a phone. With a virtual sim card of its own, and a whole lot of other features that make it quite an independently capable device, the Apple Watch is capable of being much more than a smartwatch, and Satechi’s Grip Mount gives it another purpose, other than that of a smartwatch, and another home, other than your wrist.

Satechi’s Grip Mount for the Apple Watch allows you to attach the device (sans the wristbands) to your car, cycle, or motorbike, allowing it to work in conjunction with the vehicle, serving the purpose of a navigational device that also lets you answer and reject calls, or even control music. The fact that the Watch comes with Bluetooth makes it perfect for your car, allowing you to connect it to the car’s audio system for on-board calls, navigational guidance, or for controlling music playback. You can also use it on a bicycle, letting it run the Cyclemeter app to capture the amount of exercise you’re getting too! The Apple Watch, chock-a-block with cutting edge technology, is capable of being much more than a wrist-mounted smart-device. The Satechi Grip Mount does it a fair bit of justice.

Designer: Satechi

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Robots that pick up and sort objects may improve warehouse efficiency

Sorting and organizing may not always be the most difficult tasks, but they can certainly get tedious. And while they may seem like prime examples of something we might like robots to do for us, picking up, recognizing and sorting objects is actually...

Hands-free toilet business!

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I wonder if talking about this design makes me veritable potty-mouth, but tech in the bathroom hasn’t seen much advancement since bathroom-selfies. The Magic is a toilet frame with some true magic in it. It embeds a wide variety of controls that allow you to work the lids and even UV purify the commode without having to touch it anywhere. Everything can be operated from a control panel on the side of the toilet frame. Just don’t forget to make sure you’ve washed your hands before running the controls. Especially if you’re a leftie!

The Magic toilet frame is a winner of the Red Dot design award for the year 2016.

Designer: Dongwook Yoon

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Soft Grip Robot Fingers Can Lift Eggs without Cracking Them

I want a robot in my house that can clean, cook, and do laundry. That will free me up to watch movies and play Fallout 4. The catch is that robot hands today can’t really pick up fragile items like eggs, and if the robot can’t make bacon and eggs, it’s pretty much worthless to me.

Fortunately, scientists have created a new robot hand of sorts that can handle fragile and delicate items like eggs. It’s not the first soft robotic gripper, but it improves upon prior designs.

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Researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale De Lausanne (EPFL) developed a soft robotic gripper made using electrode flaps. The flaps are made of five components, including a pre-stretched elastomer layer with two layers of electrodes, and two outer layers of silicon of different thicknesses. When voltage is applied, the flaps curl inwards to grip. When voltage is removed, the flaps curl outwards.

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The lightweight gripper also uses electrostatic grip, this is what makes a balloon stick to a wall if you rub it on your head. The result is an ability for the flaps to lift up to 100 times their own weight and handle delicate objects without needing to know the shape of the object beforehand.

We are now one-step closer to an omelet-making robot that won’t get shell in my eggs.

[via ACTU]