Light Start – Meat robots, Faraday smack, Ziro bot funded, and Manfrotto drone packs

Here’s something that exists now: The MIT-created origami meat robot

Here at Stuff we love words almost as much as we love tech. It’s hard to do the job we do without both so when awesome words coincide with awesome tech, we know it’s going to be a great day. Take this, for instance: An origami meat robot, a string of words we’d expect from one of Japan’s weirder anime series. Instead it’s the creation of an MIT research team, which is designed to be swallowed by a patient. Once inside, it can be used to treat stomach wounds, release medicine and even tackle foreign matter that a person might have swallowed. It is ingested while sheathed in ice and once in the stomach is can be moved around using magnets. It’s still in test stages, though, being used in simulation stomachs, but it could one day find its way inside you. Assuming you’re still swallowing weird metallic objects, that is.

Source: via Ars Technica

EV maker Faraday Future is planning on outdoing Tesla’s vehicles

You might remember Faraday Future as the electric vehicle company with designs on some very futuristic vehicles. Faraday’s Dag Reckhorn, in a recent interview, has said that the Chinese-owned company wants to bring a car to market that makes Tesla’s look dinky in comparison. The battery is specifically mentioned, with “…a target of 20 or 30 percent over the competitor” (with the ‘competitor’ being Tesla) being their goal. Then there’s also the prototype vehicles that Faraday showed off, which has a bonkers 1000HP engine setup. That car isn’t coming to market but Reckhorn left the door open for something like it to launch. Read the full interview at the link below.

Source: The Verge

Want your own gesture-controlled robot? Here’s the Ziro (and it’s on IndieGoGo)

Build-it-yourself robots are a thing now, right? If you’re looking at crowdfunding sites, that seems to be the case. The Ziro, a modular robot kit, is just the latest of these and it’s been funded. If you’re looking at getting yourself a gesture-controlled (using a special glove) robot of your own then IndieGoGo needs to be your next stop. By far the highlight of the pitch video above is a cardboard R2D2, which hasn’t been painted in the correct colours because Disney and copyright (we assume) but it controls might the same way you’d expect R2 to work on a flat surface. If you back the project to the tune of about R3,560 you’ll get the Ziro at about half of its retail price. Delivery is expected in January 2017.

Source: IndieGoGo

If you have a DJI, you need to get this Manfrotto backpack to lug your Precious around

So you have a DJI Phantom, do you? First off, you lucky bugger. Second, you’re going to need something to keep it safe and also easily transported. Manfrotto, which makes some of the camera gear that Stuff loves to use, has announced a backpack for your precious drone hardware, called the Manfrotto D1 Backpack for DJI Phantom. It has compartments for everything, from the drone and its bits to a DSLR and even space for your notebook if you need to download footage in the field. Normally its on sale directly from the Manfrotto website, but it’s already out of stock. When it’s back in stock it’ll cost around R3,100. Unfortunately, it’s not available in South Africa yet, but we’re expecting it to sell out just as fast when it does arrive locally. So… fastest fingers first, we guess.

Source: Manfrotto