Tag Archives: safety

A 3-Part Titanium Rescue Whistle That Combines Into a 120dB Siren

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Most emergency gear has a problem that rarely gets discussed: people don’t actually carry it. A multi-tool left in a drawer or a whistle packed inside a bag at home might as well not exist. Rescue whistles, in particular, haven’t changed much over the years. They’re usually afterthoughts, built to make noise rather than to be trusted or carried without a second thought.

TriReso is Spark Cube’s answer to that problem. Rather than building a louder whistle, the team spent nearly two years designing a three-module system that borrows from the acoustic logic of emergency sirens: irregular, shifting frequencies that are harder for the human brain to ignore. Volume matters, of course, but the real focus is a signal that people actually hear, recognize, and can locate under pressure.

Designer: Spark Cube

Click Here to Buy Now: $64 $99 (35% off). Hurry, 63/200 left! Raised over $45,000.

Each of TriReso’s three modules is a fully functional whistle tuned to a different frequency. The Power Chamber sits at 3,600 Hz and 110 dB, built for open terrain and heavy wind. The Alert Chamber pushes up to 4,800 Hz at 105 dB, sharp enough to cut through crowd noise. The Echo Chamber runs at 3,800 Hz and 100 dB, adding a layered resonance to the combined signal.

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What makes the system interesting is what happens when those modules combine. Snap any two together, and you get one of three dual-chamber configurations, each with its own blended sound profile. Snap all three and TriReso reaches up to 120 dB, producing an irregular, multi-frequency output that shifts the way a siren does, spanning a range from 3,600 to 4,800 Hz.

The assembly is just as considered as the acoustic concept. The modules connect through a triple-lock structure using hidden multi-point magnets and guided alignment grooves that snap them into position quickly and securely. When threaded together on a chain or cord, the lanyard holes also merge, adding another layer of physical retention. It’s a satisfying mechanism that makes switching between modes feel deliberate rather than fussy.

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That modularity opens up something a standard whistle simply can’t do. Since each piece works independently, one TriReso system can be split among up to three people, which is particularly handy for group hikes, trail-running teams, or outdoor families. Instead of everyone carrying a separate whistle, one compact system distributes the coverage without adding meaningful weight or bulk to anyone’s kit.

Reliability was clearly a priority in the build. TriReso uses a pealess design, so there’s no moving ball inside that could freeze, corrode, jam with sand, or swell from moisture. Whether you’re hiking in wet weather, scrambling through dusty terrain, or digging it out of a cold jacket pocket in winter, it doesn’t need warming up. Pick it up, blow, and it works.

The material options are titanium and aluminum, and neither feels like a compromise. Titanium delivers strength, corrosion resistance, and a premium, machined feel, available in sandblasted gray or an optional PVD black finish. Aluminum keeps things lighter, coming in orange by default, with blue and green as options. Both bring the kind of build quality that makes a small tool feel worth keeping for years.

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Each module has a dedicated tritium slot, which means the full system can hold up to three tritium tubes. Tritium produces its own glow for up to 25 years without a battery or charge, which keeps TriReso easy to spot in the dark. It’s a handy feature for something small enough to clip to a keychain, slide onto a backpack strap, or wear as a necklace.

There’s also an optional custom engraving, which turns it into a thoughtful safety gift for a partner, a child, or a friend. It’s a subtle touch that says something about what TriReso is going for: a tool personal enough to keep close, reliable enough to trust when things go wrong, and well-designed enough to actually want to carry every single day.

Click Here to Buy Now: $64 $99 (35% off). Hurry, 63/200 left! Raised over $45,000.

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DJI built a parachute into their drones to protect the hardware… and people’s heads

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Drones fall. Sensors fail, signals drop, batteries die at inconvenient moments, and until now the consequences of that failure were left largely to chance. Obstacle avoidance technology solved one half of the safety equation, keeping drones from flying into buildings, power lines, or each other. But avoidance only works while the aircraft is still flying. Once a drone loses power or control, all that sensor smarts becomes irrelevant, and physics takes over. Even a small consumer grade drone weighing 8 or 9 ounces turns into a falling object with real force behind it when it drops from 200 or 300 feet, and DJI’s Matrice 400 is a far heavier machine flying far more demanding missions.

That is the gap the AP100 Parachute was built to close. It watches its own hardware in real time, running continuous checks so it knows the instant something looks off. Backup capacitors keep the system powered even if the drone itself loses electricity, which matters because a mid air failure rarely comes with a warning. Once triggered, deployment is instant, and the parachute slows descent to under 5 meters per second, turning what would be a crash into something closer to a controlled landing. Alarms then kick in after deployment, alerting anyone nearby and helping pilots track down exactly where their aircraft ended up.

Designer: DJI

The AP100 gives pilots three separate ways to pull the ripcord, so to speak. It can trigger itself automatically the moment it detects an anomaly or a geocaging breach, meaning the drone strays somewhere it should not be. Pilots who want manual control can swipe to deploy directly inside the DJI Pilot 2 app, no digging through menus required. There is also a remote option through FlightHub 2’s FTS page, useful for fleet operators managing multiple aircraft from a central hub. Layering automatic, manual, and remote deployment together means there is rarely a scenario where the parachute simply cannot be triggered in time.

None of this exists in a vacuum. Commercial drone missions flying over cities or beyond the pilot’s direct line of sight, what the industry calls BVLOS, have to satisfy strict safety categories like C5 and C6 before regulators sign off. Surveying a highway route or inspecting a pipeline that snakes through populated areas used to mean stacking on extra precautions just to get approval. A parachute rated to meet those standards effectively does the compliance heavy lifting on its own. That turns what used to be a drawn out approval process into something considerably more straightforward for operators trying to get missions off the ground, literally and legally.

The hardware itself is built for the grind of daily operations rather than sitting as a one time safety gimmick. Pilots can swap batteries without ever detaching the parachute, which sounds minor until you are the one doing it in the field between flights. It also carries the same IP55 rating as the Matrice 400 itself, so rain or dust does not take it out of commission. Full system self checks run automatically at startup, cross referencing communication links and hardware status before the drone even leaves the ground. These are the kinds of details that matter more to the operator running ten missions a week than to anyone reading a spec sheet once.

Here is the catch, though. The AP100 is built exclusively for the Matrice 400, DJI’s enterprise platform aimed at industrial inspection, surveying, and public safety work. Your Mavic will not be getting one, and neither will your FPV drone, at least not yet. That is not entirely surprising given the size and cost tradeoffs involved in strapping a parachute system to something meant to be light and nimble. But DJI has a track record of trickling enterprise safety features down into consumer lines once the engineering matures, and a company that just built a first party parachute for one drone rarely stops at just one.

Regulators keep pushing drones toward busier skies, over highways, over crowds, over exactly the kind of scenarios where a hardware failure stops being a minor inconvenience and starts being a genuine hazard. DJI building a parachute directly into its own ecosystem, rather than leaving it to third party add ons, suggests the company sees this as a standard feature rather than an optional extra. Whether that logic eventually reaches the Mavic or Air lineup remains to be seen, but the direction feels obvious. Falling should not be part of the risk calculus anymore, and DJI just made a very public bet on that idea.

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Sealed in 10 Seconds: LifePods Changes Disaster Survival

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The year was 2011. A tsunami slammed into the Japanese coastline, killed more than 20,000 people, and set off the Fukushima nuclear disaster. For most of us, it became a chapter in the news cycle. For French industrial engineer Cédric Choffat, it became an obsession that eventually became a company.

That company is Momentum Technologies, and what they’ve built is called LifePods: a line of portable survival capsules designed for the precise, terrible moment when the infrastructure around you stops working. Not “might stop working someday.” Right now, while you’re still inside.

Designer: Momentum Technologies

The concept is bluntly simple. You climb in, pull the lever, and the hatch seals in roughly 10 seconds. After that, the pod takes over. No special training required. The entire locking sequence was inspired by vault engineering and professional security hardware, which means if you can close a bank safe, you can operate one of these.

From the outside, a LifePod doesn’t look like panic. It looks like a serious design object, the kind of thing that could sit in a garage or a garden without completely unraveling the aesthetics of the space. But the engineering underneath is built to military standards. The B-01, the land-based version, is constructed from high-strength technical steel with specialized insulation layered through it, built to resist bullets, blast pressure, and fire. The W-01, the flood model, goes further: it’s unsinkable, with a ballast system that flips it upright if it rolls, and it can hold four adults and four children. The kids, as the specs somewhat soberly note, would sit on laps.

Both models carry integrated CO2 scrubbers guaranteeing 72 hours of respiratory autonomy. Optional add-ons include food rations, two weeks’ worth of drinking water, a GPS tracking beacon, and an inflatable emergency raft. The pod is designed not to be your home forever, but to keep you alive and locatable until help arrives. That’s a meaningful distinction. This isn’t a bunker fantasy. It’s a bridge.

I keep thinking about who actually buys this. The obvious answer is preppers, and yes, that market exists and it’s growing. But Momentum Technologies seems to be aiming at something broader: households in flood zones, schools in earthquake regions, industrial facilities in volatile areas. The W-01 was designed for tsunamis, flash floods, dam failures, and marine submersion. The B-01 covers armed attacks, explosions, and fires. Then there’s a third model in development, the Q-01, built for seismic collapse scenarios. Together, they form a kind of taxonomy of modern catastrophe.

LifePods also sidesteps the dread that typically surrounds survival gear. No camouflage, no tacticool aesthetic, no implicit politics of distrust baked into the design language. The capsules look considered. They look engineered. They were shown at VivaTech 2026 and Eurosatory, not at a prepper expo in a convention center parking lot. That placement matters. It signals that the designers want this conversation to be mainstream, not fringe.

And maybe it should be. We’ve watched wildfires consume entire towns in hours. We’ve seen floods arrive faster than evacuation orders could. The argument Momentum Technologies is making, that preparedness should be as accessible and normalized as a smoke detector, is not a paranoid one. It’s arguably just overdue.

The price, around €26,000 for the entry model, does put it out of reach for most individuals. But the company is also targeting governments, schools, and institutions, and there’s a logic there that makes the per-person cost less jarring when you do the math. Four adults and four children in a W-01 changes that number considerably.

Is it strange that a product designed around worst-case scenarios can feel genuinely compelling from a design and engineering standpoint? Maybe. But the appeal of LifePods isn’t rooted in fear. It’s rooted in that specific human impulse to not be helpless when everything outside is falling apart. You step in, pull the lever, and the door closes behind you. Ten seconds, and you’re still here.

The post Sealed in 10 Seconds: LifePods Changes Disaster Survival first appeared on Yanko Design.

Police Officers Spent Three Years Redesigning the Lifesaver To Make It As Small As A Hockey Puck

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Rolled up, Ark Hero No.1 looks like a hockey puck with a zipper. Nothing about it announces itself as rescue equipment. Pop the shell open and a coiled yellow tube spirals inside, capped by a red hand pump that would look at home on a bicycle. Pump it for a few seconds and the coil stretches into a segmented shaft that spans shoulder to shoulder, jointed like a stalk of bamboo and wrapped in reflective silver bands built to catch headlights at 3 AM. The whole sequence takes about as long as opening a bag of chips.

That transformation, from puck to rescue tool, is the entire pitch. Ark Hero No.1 is a 2025 Design Intelligence Award Future Talents winner developed over three years by frontline police officers who kept watching the same tragedy play out from the same design gap. Traditional life rings live on piers and boat railings, tethered to places where drownings often do not happen. A car that leaves the road at 2 AM lands nowhere near a lifeguard tower. The brief was simple: build the life ring that could have been in the trunk.

Designer: wanglicheng

Losing the CO2 cartridge is the single biggest upgrade, more so than the actual innovative design. High-pressure gas kills casual storage: it expires, complicates air travel, sits inside a regulatory maze at customs, and demands specialist replacement after every deployment. Swap it for the red hand pump poking out of the case and the same ring can live in a squad car or family sedan for years without anyone thinking about it. The trade-off is a few extra seconds of pumping. Given that the alternative is often no life ring at all, that math works out fast.

Ark Hero No.1 spreads its buoyancy across a chain of joined segments instead of pooling all the air in one giant doughnut. A conventional ring holds its air in a single chamber, so one puncture compromises the whole thing. The segmented design lets a tear in one pod leave the rest of the shaft floating, which matters when the tube is scraping metal edges or broken glass after an accident. The jointed geometry also lets the tube flex around a body or drape across a car window frame during rescue. Silver reflective bands wrap every segment, doing their real work in dark water where solid yellow gets lost in glare and chop.

The hard-shell case turns the whole system into something a procurement officer can plan around. Rolled up, the coiled tube snaps into a puck-shaped shell with a full-perimeter zipper and a mesh interior pocket that holds the pump and buckle in place. The form factor standardizes storage footprint, protects the fabric from years of abrasion, and clips easily to duty belts, headrests, and boat racks. An officer can carry one on the hip. A patrol vessel can rack a dozen without eating floor space.

For a project born from three years of frontline police fieldwork, the visual restraint tells its own story. No branding drama, no styling flourish, no lifestyle gadget affectation. The yellow is loud because loud yellow gets seen from a helicopter. The red is loud because red hands find red pumps in a panic. Every element exists because someone once needed it and did not have it, and that tends to end well when the equipment finally reaches the people who kept improvising without it.

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This MagSafe iPhone Grip Is Actually a Self-Defense Spray in Disguise

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Personal safety products have a design problem few people talk about. Pepper sprays and personal alarms are either too bulky to carry consistently or so visually aggressive that most people feel uncomfortable with them in plain sight. The result is that these tools end up buried at the bottom of a bag or forgotten on a shelf, making them nearly useless when they’re needed most.

Safix is a concept that tries to close that gap by attaching a self-defense spray directly to the back of your iPhone. Built around Apple’s MagSafe ecosystem, it snaps onto the phone magnetically and functions as a finger grip during normal use. The idea is that the safest place to keep your protection is on the one thing you almost never put down.

Designer: Sunghwan Cho, Sooyeol Lee, Yeongeun Park, Geontak Oh, Daero Lee, Jinho Choi, Jungwoon Im (UNICHEST)

What makes this particularly clever is how little it looks the part. Safix borrows its silhouette from the rounded, organic contours of smooth river pebbles and comes finished in warm, muted tones. Its stone-like texture positions it firmly in lifestyle territory, the kind of object you’d expect sitting next to a room spray or a small succulent on a bedside table, not clipped to a keychain.

The team calls this approach the “Gentle Arc,” a form language that puts emotional comfort on equal footing with physical function. The thinking goes that self-defense tools carry a kind of psychological weight, and that weight itself is what keeps most of them in bags and drawers rather than in people’s hands. Designing something pleasant to hold and look at is meant to change that.

On most days, Safix earns its place on the back of your phone the same way a PopSocket does: by making it more comfortable to hold. The built-in rubber band loops around your fingers, giving you a stable grip for texting, photographing, or navigating. The MagSafe connection keeps it firmly in place yet detaches easily, so it never feels like it’s fighting you.

When you actually need it, pulling Safix off the phone takes a fraction of a second. The casing opens to reveal the spray mechanism inside, and a clearly marked button handles the deployment. A safety indicator on the front helps prevent accidental discharge. The whole interaction is built for speed, the kind you’d need in a moment that doesn’t give you time to think.

Consider someone walking home at night with their phone already in hand. They don’t have to dig for anything; the Safix is right there between their fingers, always within reach. That shift from “somewhere in the bag” to “in your hand as you use it” might sound trivial, but it’s the difference between a safety tool that works and one that only works when you remember you have it.

The post This MagSafe iPhone Grip Is Actually a Self-Defense Spray in Disguise first appeared on Yanko Design.

This Chair Looks Normal Until It Needs to Keep You Afloat in a Flood

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Flooding has gone from a rare calamity to a recurring reality for millions of households. As climate patterns grow more unpredictable, the spaces people call home have become increasingly vulnerable to forces they were never designed to withstand. Most domestic objects offer no answer to this shift, and furniture has remained stubbornly indifferent to the idea that the room it sits in might one day be underwater.

That’s the gap a team of Domus Academy Milano students decided to close. Exhibited at BASE Milano as part of the 2026 Milan Design Week, AquaForma is a transformable furniture piece designed under the theme “Conflict: Human vs Nature.” Created by Valentina Algorta, Lorenzo Gennari, and Sabrina Lounis under faculty guidance, it explores how an everyday domestic object can quietly hold the capacity to save a life.

Designers: Valentina Algorta, Lorenzo Gennari, Sabrina Lounis (Domus Academy Milano)

The starting point is a familiar one: a chair. In its default configuration, AquaForma functions as low-profile floor seating with a cushioned backrest and seat upholstered in deep burgundy fabric. A white structural shell wraps around the cushioned elements in flowing, organic curves, giving the piece a sculptural quality that sits comfortably within contemporary furniture design. Nothing about it announces its other purpose.

That other purpose becomes clear when flooding hits. The piece uses modular panels, a ratchet buckle mechanism, and buoyant materials that allow it to be reconfigured into a flotation device. The modules interlock and can be reoriented, with individual components separating and reassembling into a completely different arrangement. What sits quietly in a living room can, in theory, keep someone afloat.

The ratchet strap across the midsection does more than hold the piece together; it’s the key mechanism that allows components to be tightened, secured, and adjusted depending on the configuration the piece needs to take. This kind of dual-purpose hardware thinking keeps the design grounded in practicality. There’s no single feature here that’s gratuitous, with everything pulling double duty between the domestic and the emergency.

What makes AquaForma particularly compelling is how invisible its emergency function is in everyday life. You wouldn’t sit on it and think about rising water, and that’s precisely the point. Resilience embedded in ordinary objects doesn’t announce itself until it needs to, and that restraint is what separates a clever concept from a genuinely useful one. The designers didn’t design for a crisis; they designed around it.

AquaForma was shown as part of the UNFOLD exhibition at BASE Milano during Milan Design Week 2026, a student showcase that puts emerging design ideas at the center of one of the world’s most design-saturated weeks. It’s the kind of project that’s easy to underestimate at first glance. A chair that becomes a flotation device sounds like a design school exercise until you remember how often people need exactly that.

The post This Chair Looks Normal Until It Needs to Keep You Afloat in a Flood first appeared on Yanko Design.

HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle

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Most smartphones weren’t designed with construction sites or hospital wards in mind. They crack under a single bad drop, struggle with wet or gloved fingers, and can’t survive a pressure wash. Yet these are exactly the environments where reliable communication matters most. Frontline workers are often stuck choosing between powerful devices that can’t take a beating and durable ones too basic to be of any real use.

The HMD Terra M tries to close that gap without overcomplicating things. It’s a compact, ultra-rugged feature phone designed to handle the kind of punishment that leaves most consumer devices in pieces. Beyond just surviving harsh conditions, it’s built to actually work well in them, with features tailored for people who spend their shifts outdoors or in places where a dropped call simply isn’t an option.

Designer: HMD Global

That starts with its credentials. The Terra M carries both IP68 and IP69K ratings, handling full submersion at 1.5 m for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets at up to 100 bar and 80°C. It also meets MIL-STD-810H military standards, withstands drops from 1.8 m, and resists gasoline, industrial solvents, and medical-grade sanitizers, covering just about every hazard a field environment can throw at it.

Surviving the job site is one thing, but staying useful there is another. The Terra M has a textured, non-slip grip and large physical keys that work with gloves on, which matters when you’re in the middle of a job and can’t afford to fumble. Its 2.8-inch display reaches up to 550 nits, sits behind Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and responds to both wet fingers and gloved hands.

Communication is where the Terra M earns its keep. Two programmable keys on the side give users instant, one-touch access to Push-to-Talk apps or custom shortcuts without digging through menus. The loudspeaker pushes up to 100 dB, and the microphones come with echo and noise cancellation, so you can be heard clearly even on a loud construction site or in a warehouse with heavy machinery running nearby.

The 2,510 mAh battery is rated for up to 10 days of standby, so field workers don’t have to hunt for a charger mid-shift. Better yet, the battery is user-replaceable on-site without any special tools. Pre-loaded apps include a barcode scanner, a note taker, a sound recorder, and a web browser, among others, meaning the Terra M is genuinely ready to work straight out of the box.

For organizations deploying multiple devices, an optional stackable docking station uses magnetic pogo-pin connectors to charge up to 10 units simultaneously, which suits logistics depots and shift-based teams well. Fleet management runs through Mobile Device Management, with remote OS and security patches delivered via HMD FOTA (Firmware Over The Air). HMD has also committed to five years of quarterly security updates, reducing the overhead of keeping a large deployment current and secure.

The Terra M isn’t trying to compete with the latest flagship smartphones. It’s a practical replacement for the aging two-way radios many frontline teams still rely on, offering modern 4G connectivity, eSIM support, and a proper touchscreen in a form that can take a beating. Priced at £179.99 and available through HMD Secure in select markets, it’s designed for people who simply can’t afford for their phone to fail.

The post HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle first appeared on Yanko Design.

HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle

Posted on by

Most smartphones weren’t designed with construction sites or hospital wards in mind. They crack under a single bad drop, struggle with wet or gloved fingers, and can’t survive a pressure wash. Yet these are exactly the environments where reliable communication matters most. Frontline workers are often stuck choosing between powerful devices that can’t take a beating and durable ones too basic to be of any real use.

The HMD Terra M tries to close that gap without overcomplicating things. It’s a compact, ultra-rugged feature phone designed to handle the kind of punishment that leaves most consumer devices in pieces. Beyond just surviving harsh conditions, it’s built to actually work well in them, with features tailored for people who spend their shifts outdoors or in places where a dropped call simply isn’t an option.

Designer: HMD Global

That starts with its credentials. The Terra M carries both IP68 and IP69K ratings, handling full submersion at 1.5 m for 30 minutes and high-pressure water jets at up to 100 bar and 80°C. It also meets MIL-STD-810H military standards, withstands drops from 1.8 m, and resists gasoline, industrial solvents, and medical-grade sanitizers, covering just about every hazard a field environment can throw at it.

Surviving the job site is one thing, but staying useful there is another. The Terra M has a textured, non-slip grip and large physical keys that work with gloves on, which matters when you’re in the middle of a job and can’t afford to fumble. Its 2.8-inch display reaches up to 550 nits, sits behind Corning Gorilla Glass 3, and responds to both wet fingers and gloved hands.

Communication is where the Terra M earns its keep. Two programmable keys on the side give users instant, one-touch access to Push-to-Talk apps or custom shortcuts without digging through menus. The loudspeaker pushes up to 100 dB, and the microphones come with echo and noise cancellation, so you can be heard clearly even on a loud construction site or in a warehouse with heavy machinery running nearby.

The 2,510 mAh battery is rated for up to 10 days of standby, so field workers don’t have to hunt for a charger mid-shift. Better yet, the battery is user-replaceable on-site without any special tools. Pre-loaded apps include a barcode scanner, a note taker, a sound recorder, and a web browser, among others, meaning the Terra M is genuinely ready to work straight out of the box.

For organizations deploying multiple devices, an optional stackable docking station uses magnetic pogo-pin connectors to charge up to 10 units simultaneously, which suits logistics depots and shift-based teams well. Fleet management runs through Mobile Device Management, with remote OS and security patches delivered via HMD FOTA (Firmware Over The Air). HMD has also committed to five years of quarterly security updates, reducing the overhead of keeping a large deployment current and secure.

The Terra M isn’t trying to compete with the latest flagship smartphones. It’s a practical replacement for the aging two-way radios many frontline teams still rely on, offering modern 4G connectivity, eSIM support, and a proper touchscreen in a form that can take a beating. Priced at £179.99 and available through HMD Secure in select markets, it’s designed for people who simply can’t afford for their phone to fail.

The post HMD Terra M Can Do What Flagship Smartphones Can’t Even Handle first appeared on Yanko Design.

This $99 Water Jet Remotely Cleans Your Car’s Backup Camera Without You Leaving Your Seat

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Reverse driving accounts for just 1% of all driving time, yet it’s responsible for roughly 25% of all accidents. A dirty backup camera in winter, mud season, or on dusty country roads is not a hypothetical inconvenience but a genuine safety liability, one that most drivers have resigned themselves to either living with or solving by stepping out of the car every time. Mike Klein, a Vermont-based tinkerer with a characteristically no-nonsense approach to annoying problems, got fed up enough to build a solution in his garage. What started as a Ziploc-bag-and-zip-tie prototype strapped to his license plate has turned into the Lens Lizard, a compact, self-contained, remote-controlled backup camera washer that just hit Kickstarter and has absolutely run away with its funding goal.

The concept is beautifully blunt. Lens Lizard mounts behind your license plate, sandwiched discreetly between the plate and the bumper using your car’s existing screw holes. No drilling, no wiring, no running tubing through door gaps or under trim panels. The whole install takes under five minutes with a standard screwdriver, and once it’s on, it’s invisible. The unit itself houses a fluid reservoir, a battery pack, and a high-pressure nozzle that you aim at your camera once during setup and then never have to touch again. When your backup camera gets caked in snow/ice or road salt on a grey January morning, or buried under a slush splatter from the truck overtaking you on a Vermont highway, you press a wireless remote button from inside the car and a jet of washer fluid blasts the lens clean. Sort of like a lizard or a chameleon striking its prey with a sharp, swift flick of its tongue. Except this time, it’s a concentrated jet of soapy water. Maybe a Pokémon reference would work better but I don’t want Nintendo’s lawyers sending me a cease and desist.

Designer: Mike Klein

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $149.99 ($50.99 off) Hurry! Only 5 days left.

The engineering philosophy here is aggressively practical. Klein explicitly designed the Lens Lizard for Vermont winters, which means sub-zero temperatures, aggressive road salting, heavy snow, and the kind of freeze-thaw cycling that destroys lesser materials. The housing is sealed and built from automotive-grade materials, and the battery and fluid reservoir are sized to last four-plus months between refills and recharges, meaning you top everything up roughly once per season.

Maintenance is a non-event: open the latch, refill with washer fluid, charge via USB-C, close it back up. Klein’s origin story is worth noting too, because it gives the product a satisfying internal logic. He tried hydrophobic lens covers (they peeled), ceramic coatings (they did essentially nothing), and eventually decided to just build a scaled-down windshield washer system for his license plate. The first prototype was, by his own admission, ridiculous. But it worked, and that was enough to tell him the idea had legs.

Lens Lizard works with any vehicle where the backup camera sits above the license plate, which covers 99% of cars on the road, pickup trucks very much included. The product ships with assorted license plate screws to handle different fastener sizes, and the adjustable nozzle lets you dial in the spray angle for your specific camera position during initial setup. After that, the unit lives its entire life tucked behind the plate, completely out of sight. The wireless remote is puck-shaped and lives wherever you keep it in the cabin, a glove box, a cupholder, the center console.

The Lens Lizard starts at just $99 for the entire kit as an early bird discount off its $149 price tag. A dual bundle costs $189 if you’ve got two cars, and all bundles include the Lens Lizard unit, a wireless remote, a battery pack, and an assortment of screws to help you install the gizmo on your car. Given its specific design (and that every nation has a different license plate), the Lens Lizard only ships to the US and Canada for now, although I’m sure a more universal version is in the works. Production is slated to begin in April 2026, with shipping to backers planned for May. For drivers in cold-weather states, high-dust regions, or anywhere that sees serious road grime, it’s a hard value proposition to argue with. Certain premium vehicles have had integrated camera washers for years, quietly tucked into the bumper plumbing. Klein has simply figured out how to give everyone else the same result for under a hundred bucks, no dealer visit required.

Click Here to Buy Now: $99 $149.99 ($50.99 off) Hurry! Only 5 days left.

The post This $99 Water Jet Remotely Cleans Your Car’s Backup Camera Without You Leaving Your Seat first appeared on Yanko Design.

Someone Finally Made a Nail Holder That Won’t Smash Your Fingers

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Hammering a nail is one of those tasks that sounds simple until you miss. The strike lands on a knuckle instead of the nail head, and a two-minute hanging job becomes a few minutes of genuine regret. It happens to beginners more than seasoned carpenters, but experience only reduces the odds rather than removing them entirely. That gap between “simple enough” and “actually safe” is what the Nailmate concept is set out to bridge.

The premise is quite simple, really. Nailmate is a hand-held positioning tool made from ABS plastic with a TPU rubber gripping head. It holds a nail upright while keeping the user’s fingers well below the impact zone, with no springs, clamps, or adjustable parts to configure before the first swing. The elongated form puts meaningful distance between the hand and where the hammer lands.

Designer: Hargun Kaur

Existing nail-holding solutions have real shortcomings worth naming. Small plastic holders keep fingers close enough to still be at risk. Plier-style holders work but are bulky enough that most people leave them in a drawer. Magnetic holders struggle with heavier nails and offer no guarantee against slipping. Nailmate addresses all three failure modes by doing less mechanically and more through considered geometry.

The tool comes in three variants, each color-coded for different working conditions. The red Stable version is built for flat, open surfaces like wooden boards or wall panels, where the hammer has a full vertical swing. The teal Expanded version has a wider horizontal head that supports a nail from multiple contact points, for situations where a perfectly vertical swing is not possible. The yellow Precise version handles curved, rounded, or edge-based surfaces where standard positioning gets awkward.

The color distinction is practical rather than decorative. On a cluttered workbench, making each variant visually distinct reduces the small but real friction of grabbing the wrong tool. The TPU head grips the nail shaft without scratching it, and the angled body sits naturally in the hand while maintaining a clear line of sight to the nail tip. A hanging hole at the base keeps it on a hook near the toolbox rather than lost in a drawer.

Where the design raises questions is around the TPU head’s durability after repeated use. It sits close enough to the nail that a slightly off-center hammer strike would occasionally land on it, and how the material holds up over months of regular work is something only extended testing would confirm.

The post Someone Finally Made a Nail Holder That Won’t Smash Your Fingers first appeared on Yanko Design.