Tag Archives: modular design

Modular Truck Cap Comes Off in Under 15 Minutes and Hangs on a Wall in your Garage

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Pickup trucks are one of the few vehicles people buy specifically to keep their options open. The whole point is hauling, versatility, doing whatever comes up. So it’s a little ironic that the moment you add a cap, you’ve kind of locked yourself in. A traditional hard shell covers the bed beautifully, keeps everything dry, and then asks you to commit. Removing it involves at least two people, a chunk of your afternoon, and then figuring out where a several-hundred-pound fiberglass or metal shell is going to live in a garage that already has a lawnmower situation going on.

Enrique Giner, the automotive veteran behind Modular Truck Gear, built the ADV-BOX around a fairly simple idea: a truck cap should go on and come off on your schedule, not the cap’s. So they split it into six composite panels, designed a latch system inspired by military cargo hardware, and got the whole install-or-remove process down to under 15 minutes solo. The part that earns the most double-takes is the storage. Disassembled, the panels mount to a dolly or wall rack and take up about a quarter of its assembled size, letting you park your truck inside as well. Your truck gets its cap back whenever you need it, and your garage gets its wall back when you don’t.

Designer: Enrique Giner

Click here to Buy Now: $4899 $5699 ($800 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

Giner drew design cues directly from tactical military cargo boxes and heavy-duty quick-latch hardware, and the ADV-BOX makes no effort to hide that lineage. It’s blocky, angular, and has zero interest in blending into the soft compound curves of a modern Tacoma or Ranger. The gullwing side windows swing up for easy access, the profile sits tall to maximize internal headroom, and the whole thing reads more mission-ready container than traditional topper. Giner spent over 25 years leading design programs at GM, Kia, and Ford/Lincoln before co-founding MTG, so when he says every detail has a purpose, there’s a resume behind it. The aesthetic is unapologetically tactical, and honestly, on a lifted Tacoma TRD Pro, it looks right at home.

The panels are built from DRTM composite. Dual Resin Transfer Molding (RTM) liquid resin is injected into vacuum-sealed molds lined with fiberglass and targeted carbon fiber patches, forming ultra-precise interior and exterior shells that fuse into a strong, insulated composite structure that’s lighter than traditional fiberglass and better insulated than aluminum. The whole assembled cap lands at around 175 lbs split across six panels, which means each piece is genuinely manageable solo without the usual two-person ceremony. Structurally, the modular architecture does something smart: each modular panel connects to its neighbors through patented heavy-duty aluminum latches with dual safety locks, building a rigid unified structure once everything is clicked into place. The latch design went through multiple iterations during development, allowing MTG to make its ‘removal under 15 minutes’ claim… without any tools, no less. Once locked, they hold in whatever conditions you’d actually drive through.

Position and latch the front and rear panels to the bed anchors, connect the side panels and link them to the front and rear, then drop the roof panels into place and rotate the turn latches closed. That’s the three-step install in full. MTG claims under-15 minutes solo, with no tools, and based on the design logic it tracks, because nothing in the process requires drilling, specialty tools, or anyone’s help but your own. The cap ships pre-assembled to your door with all hardware included, no more dealer visits, no more installation fees, it comes with bed anchors that serve as the mounting foundation that stay on the truck permanently, and every subsequent install gets faster. Removable roof panels are also a separate feature, popping off independently in seconds if you need to load something tall without pulling the whole cap off the truck.

Rather than relying on edge seals alone, the ADV-BOX routes water through engineered channels at every panel joint, keeping the interior dry even during bed torsion, the frame flex that happens when a truck is working rough terrain. Metal caps tend to fail this way over time, vibration loosening screws and compromising seals until water finds its way in. MTG water-tested this extensively during development and rebuilt the sealing system based on exactly where those tests revealed vulnerabilities. The commercial configuration carries an IP56 rating for dust and water resistance, the kind of spec you’d see cited on jobsite power tools. Internal volume runs about 15 percent taller and wider than traditional hard caps, and an overhead cargo net is included in the core package to help you actually use that headroom.

MTG claims the ADV-BOX is the first hard-shell truck cap with a fully integrated roof rack system that attaches to the cap brackets rather than bolted on as an afterthought. The four-pillar architecture is the key here: load transfers directly down to the truck’s bed rails instead of stressing the cap shell, pushing the static capacity past 800 lbs and the dynamic load rating to 400 lbs while driving. That’s enough to support a full rooftop tent setup plus gear, and MTG explicitly designed for that via 80/20 aluminum extrusion crossbars compatible with most standard RTT mounting systems. Removable MOLLE panels attach to the sides for traction boards, recovery gear, or whatever else you want within arm’s reach on the trail. The entire rack comes off alongside the modular panels during removal, keeping the whole system logically consistent from top to bottom.

LEER, the biggest name in truck toppers, launched a modular cap of their own called the NexCap in late 2025, starting at $3,149 in precision-formed aluminum at roughly 240 lbs assembled. The fact that the dominant player in the category moved in this direction at all is useful confirmation that the modular concept has legs, but the two products land quite differently. The NexCap requires standard tools to assemble and doesn’t collapse for dolly or wall-mount storage the way the ADV-BOX does. At 175 lbs, fully tool-free, with a purpose-built dolly and wall storage system that takes the whole thing down to a quarter of its assembled size, the ADV-BOX pushes the modular logic considerably further. Giner brings over 50 combined years of OEM automotive experience to the project, which probably explains why this reads more like a second-generation product than a first attempt.

The ADV-BOX is available now directly through MTG’s website. The core package is available at a discounted $4,899 price tag with free US shipping (you can knock another $200 off the core package with the coupon code ‘211ADVBOX’), covering five mid-size 5-foot truck platforms: Toyota Tacoma (2005-2026, generations 2 through 4), Ford Ranger (2019-2026), Nissan Frontier (2022-2026), Chevy Colorado (2015-2026), and GMC Canyon (2015-2026). Add-ons include the Storage Rack at $469, two Cross Bars at $359, two MOLLE Panels at $249, and the full Rack System at $949, all with free US shipping. A 3-year warranty is included with the core package. Full-size platforms including the F-150, Silverado, RAM 1500, Tundra, and Jeep Gladiator, along with 6-foot mid-size bed variants, are confirmed for a separate future launch.

Click here to Buy Now: $4899 $5699 ($800 off). Hurry, deal ends in 48-hours!

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This Award-Winning Guitar Ditches the Strings, the Frets, and Most of the Body, and I Kind of Love It

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Look at RIFFMATE for a second and try to name what is missing. No strings. No fretboard bristling with metal wire. No solid slab of tonewood. What remains is the silhouette of an electric guitar sketched in mid-air, a skeletal frame that holds the double-cutaway outline everyone recognizes while hollowing out almost everything inside it. Those sweeping arms curving off the body trace exactly where a guitar’s shoulders and horns would sit, and then they float, framing empty space instead of filling it.

It takes real confidence to design an instrument by subtraction, and the RiffmateGT01 pulls it off with a straight face. Built by Shanghai’s Wo Tan Ni Chang Technology with industrial design from LKK Design Beijing, it collapses the guitar into two pieces, a slim touch-strip neck and a central pod holding the speaker, electronics, and acoustic chamber. The neck wears Roman numerals from I to VII where frets used to sit, and you play it by touch rather than by plucking steel. An AI layer shapes the sound and flattens the brutal learning curve that sends most beginners quitting by their fourth barre chord.

Designers: LKK Design Beijing

One-key disassembly lets the neck separate from the body, so the whole instrument folds into a small carry-on bag and clicks back together in seconds. Anyone who has wrestled a guitar into an overhead bin understands why that matters more than it sounds. The shells pop off too, which is where the personality lives, with RIFFMATE rendering in matte black, crisp white, a purple gradient, sunshine yellow, a blue-to-silver fade, and a warm walnut finish. Swapping those panels lets owners recolor the instrument or replace a scuffed part, stretching its lifespan instead of sending it to landfill. Modularity turns the guitar from a fixed object into a system that grows and changes with the person holding it.

The transparent render exposes a properly engineered acoustic cavity inside that central pod, with dedicated internal channels feeding a front-firing driver. That makes RIFFMATE self-amplifying, able to fill a room without an external amp or a tangle of pedals. The body wears a matte frosted texture over soft, rounded contours, sitting closer to a well-resolved Bluetooth speaker than to a slab-bodied Stratocaster. Those friendly surfaces read as age-agnostic, pitched at a curious ten-year-old and a lapsed forty-year-old guitarist alike. The whole object invites handling, exactly what an instrument built to lower the stakes should do.

Smart guitars have inched toward this moment for years, and LAVA did much of the groundwork by wrapping carbon fiber around a built-in touchscreen and turning the instrument into a full software ecosystem. RIFFMATE pushes that lineage somewhere stranger, questioning whether a guitar needs strings or a body at all, and joining a small wave of stringless designs rethinking the form from scratch. The honest caveat is that this remains award-stage industrial design, so we are judging intent and renders rather than a shipping spec sheet. As a vision, it lands as one of the boldest reinterpretations of the guitar to cross my desk in a while. Whether Wo Tan Ni Chang can build the object as beautifully as LKK drew it is the question worth watching.

The post This Award-Winning Guitar Ditches the Strings, the Frets, and Most of the Body, and I Kind of Love It first appeared on Yanko Design.

The Modular Cat Habitat That Turns Playful Curiosity Into Living Architecture

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What if we designed homes the way cats would design them? Not human homes with a token scratching post in the corner but true spatial systems built around curiosity, vertical exploration, territorial comfort, and play. The N Plus Magic House begins precisely at that question, reframing pet furniture not as an accessory but as architecture scaled for feline psychology. Instead of treating a cat house as a static object, this project treats it as a living spatial framework, one that evolves alongside its inhabitant.

Today’s pet owners increasingly see their cats as emotional companions rather than animals that merely coexist in domestic space. That shift has quietly created a design problem. Traditional cat houses, even elaborate ones, tend to be fixed structures. They may be visually impressive, but they impose constraints on placement, adaptability, and long-term usability. The N Plus Magic House flips that paradigm by introducing modularity as its core philosophy. Rather than selling a finished form, it offers a system of standardized units that can be assembled, rearranged, expanded, or reduced as needed. The result is less like furniture and more like a customizable habitat kit.

Designer: Taizhou Hake Technology Co., Ltd

The genius of the design lies in its simplicity. Each module functions independently yet connects securely through precision-engineered connectors. Owners assemble structures by inserting panels into slots and stacking them like building blocks. No technical expertise, tools, or installation manuals are required. This intuitive construction method does something subtle but powerful. It turns pet care into participation. Instead of buying a finished object, users become co-designers of their cat’s environment. That interaction strengthens the emotional bond among the owner, the pet, and the space.

Material choices reinforce the system’s practicality. The structure combines impact-resistant PP resin, transparent PET panels for visibility, and carbon steel mesh for structural integrity. These materials balance durability with safety while allowing owners to monitor their pets without disturbing them. The manufacturing processes, such as injection molding and automatic wire welding, ensure consistency, precision, and reliability across units. Every element reflects careful alignment with feline behavior and safety requirements.

Behind the scenes, the development team approached the project with a research-driven mindset. They studied cats’ behavioral patterns, analyzed existing products on the market, and mapped owner expectations. One of the biggest technical challenges was maintaining structural stability while preserving modular flexibility. The solution was a custom connector engineered to withstand pressure and weight while preventing slippage. Its textured surface increases friction, ensuring modules remain firmly locked during use. This small component is arguably the system’s unsung hero. It transforms a playful concept into a reliable architectural structure.

Developed in Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, between July 2023 and November 2024 and later exhibited internationally, the N Plus Magic House represents a broader shift in product design thinking. It signals a move away from static ownership toward adaptive systems, objects that respond to changing needs over time. In a world where personalization defines modern consumer expectations, this approach feels less like a novelty and more like a glimpse into the future of domestic product design.

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Bring The Touch Bar Back… And Maybe Put An Intelligent Siri Or Gemini On It

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Sounds radical, doesn’t it? The Touch Bar was such a waste of space on the MacBook Pro when it was first introduced exactly a decade ago in 2016. It shipped with a lot of potential but barely any real-world use, and Apple even considered swapping it out for a slot that housed the Apple Pencil back in 2021. While that feature never really came to pass, something else happened in 2021 that blew everyone’s minds – OpenAI’s Dall-E. For a lot of people, this was the first time you could just ‘tell’ an AI to make an image for you and it would. It was the birth of generative AI, and only a year later, OpenAI would break the internet with ChatGPT.

This is also around the time that Apple quietly killed the Touch Bar, but here’s my opinion… bring it back. Maybe not on the MacBook, but the Touch Bar definitely deserves a place on any independent wireless keyboard. With AI LLMs, progressive web apps, widgets, and vibe-coding going mainstream, a Touch Bar on a keyboard finally makes sense. It’s a place for your AI agent to live, alongside tasks, shortcuts, toolbars, and widgets. Apple pioneered the Touch Bar, but one could argue they were way too early to realize its potential. Now, a concept keyboard by Eslam Mohammed and Ahmed Yassen shows how the Touch Bar should be resurrected.

Designers: Eslam Mohammed & Ahmed Yassen

Mohammed and Yassen’s LUMO x700 keyboard comes with a few tricks up its sleeve. Sure, it sports a sleek, metal-forward Magic Keyboard-inspired design, but the thing also packs an end-to-end Touch Bar that’s about as tall as your standard key, making it a lot more usable than the actual Touch Bar, which was just as slim as the function key row. However, that isn’t all there is to this. A snap-on module turns the keyboard into a music player so you aren’t listening to tunes on your iMac or laptop’s fairly tinny speakers. All in all, this turns your keyboard into something a little more versatile than just ‘something you type on’. It now has an identity of its own, and can channel a level of productivity you’d only get with an Elgato-style accessory.

But wait! That modular soundbar isn’t just keyboard-dependent! It works independently too, allowing you to place it underneath the monitor or anywhere else on your desk for a wireless sound experience. The dual speakers fire stereo audio, buttons and a knob help tweak volume and playback, and the part that attaches to the LUMO x700 keyboard, well, there’s a hidden light-bar there to give your desk some ambient lighting. It’s all cleverly designed to ensure the module isn’t useless on its own. However, that Touch Bar is my predominant focus.

Why does a Touch Bar matter now more than ever? Well, we’re all multitasking, we’re all looking for extra real estate for displays, and almost all of us are running agents of some kind to automate tasks. That’s what this Touch Bar is for. Shortcuts to apps live in the center, widgets on the left, and maybe an AI chatbot on the right that you can deploy to talk to, ask questions to, or delegate tasks to. Claude just debuted a desktop-controlling agent called Claude Cowork that can run tasks and perform duties on your desktop on your command, and the infamous OpenClaw’s been taking the internet by storm for doing pretty much the same thing too. Obviously, such an AI will need to be vetted, and probably contained by a set of restrictions so it doesn’t go around leaking your data on a ‘Reddit for AI Agents’ or spending your cash (as OpenClaw has done in a few instances).

The rest of the Touch Bar experience goes on as originally intended. Active programs can reside within the bar, like a recorder interface, the player for music or video apps, allowing you to seek to different parts of a song/video, or even the emoji keyboard that lets you easily cycle through emojis before pasting them. The potential is endless, and while independent Touch Bars like this one exist, we need to design one for an era of AI agents, applets, shortcuts, and widgets. It really is about time.

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