Light Start – Mini-beer, PhoneDrone, Nokia wearables, DoBot, and the Moon in high-res
Brett Venter
Beer and Kickstarter – Potentially a silly combo, this time it’s given us the Pico
So you like beer, do you? What a silly question – everyone likes beer. And you can make your own at home, everyone knows that. But it’s about to get easier, thanks to a Kickstarter from PicoBrew. The Pico will let you create wholly custom beer, which will brew in about two hours before fermenting for a week or so. At the time of writing you could still snag one at the early price (for Kickstarter backers) of $599 (R8,200) but that’s probably no longer the case. Still, a beer machine in your kitchen? That’s got to be worth something.
Imaginative name, right? Nonetheless, the PhoneDrone Ethos looks to be a cheaper way of getting your hands on a drone. Kinda. Depends on your phone. This project, currently funded on Kickstarter, is essentially a flying case for your smartphone which will let you convert what is a plastic shell into a full drone, drawing on your handset’s camera, CPU and wireless connectivity. It’s a cool idea but it’s not that cheap. The PhoneDrone Ethos setup will cost $275 (R3,770) – add a R10,000 phone and you’re verging into DJI territory anyway…
Up next for Nokia? It’s looking a lot like wearables
Hey, remember Moonraker? Not the Bond film, the Nokia smartwatch that never was? It might actually be, at some point. We recently thought that Nokia was getting into VR, which they did in an unexpected way. Now a collection of clues, including amendments to the company’s Articles of Association, the hiring of a Computational Biologist and listings for other related posts, and a newly surfaced collection of patents, suggest that Nokia’s next project will be to design a wearable device. Someone else will likely make it, based on their work, but perhaps we’re in for something wrist-based with a Nokia name on it soon.
We have to have a DoBot Arm – even if it’s just to pass us pencils all day
Another day, another Kickstarter. Is it just us or are these things getting better? They might be, as there’s something called the DoBot on the way, a robot arm powered by Arduino components. Correction, an industrial robot arm powered by Arduino. With a “clipper, sucker, laser head, angle sensor, Bluetooth module, pen [and] pen clipper” included, with the $500 (R6,850) rewards tier. And that includes international shipping to boot. If anyone out there is planning on getting Stuff a Christmas present, this’ll do very nicely, thanks.
Wanna see what the Moon really looks like? The USGS has you covered
Okay, so we might be a bit Nuts in Space. But the United States Geological Survey (USGS) have just released some severely detailed maps of the Moon’s surface, created using images taken from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO). The Wide Angle Camera was responsible for the image mosaic, while the LRO’s Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter has given us some very accurate topographical measurements of the Moon’s surface. Whether you’re going to find alien bases up there is uncertain – we’re pretty sure that’d be covered up by now. But we can at least confirm that there are moon “lasers” floating about. Also: super-detailed maps of our satellite.
