Author: John Biggs

GBatteries let you charge your car as quickly as visiting the pump A YC startup called GBatteries has come out of stealth with a bold claim: they can recharge an electric car as quickly as it takes to full up a tank of gas. Created by aerospace engineer Kostya Khomutov, electrical engineers Alex Tkachenko and Nick Sherstyuk, and CCO Tim Sherstyuk, the company is funded by the likes of Airbus Ventures, Initialized Capital, Plug and Play, and SV Angel. The system uses AI to optimize the charging systems in electric…

This Brooklyn man makes massive robotic costumes out of junk [embedded content] One Man's Trash from We Are Films on Vimeo. Peter Kokis makes robots or, more correctly, he turns into robots. This Brooklyn artists takes parts from different things - slicers, juicers, and the like - and sticks them together to make some amazing costumes. He then wanders the streets of Brooklyn looking like an escaped Transformer. His studio site, Brooklyn Robotworks, features many of his creations including an alien-looking robot and an exosuit that looks like something out…

This hole-digging drone parachutes in to get the job done A new drone from the NIMBUS group at the University of Nebraska can fall out of a plane, parachute down, fly to a certain place, dig a hole, hide sensors inside it, and then fly away like some crazy wasp. Robots are weird. The goal of the project is to allow drones to place sensors in distant and hostile environments. The system starts on a plane or helicopter which ejects the entire thing inside of a cylindrical canister. The canister…

See you tonight in Vegas We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. We’ll have some pizza and beer and we can hit a bar after the event for some one on one time with the TC folks. The event will be held at…

See you tomorrow in Las Vegas We will be holding a small event during CES in Las Vegas and we want to see you! We’re looking to meet some cool hardware and crypto startups, so the good folks at Work In Progress have opened up their space to us and 200 of you all to hold a meetup and pitch-off. We’ll have some pizza and beer and we can hit a bar after the event for some one on one time with the TC folks. The event will be held…

Miku watches your baby (and your baby’s heartbeat) while you relax Using technology that sounds like it comes straight out of Predator, Miku is a new baby monitor that watches and senses your baby’s vitals in real time. The system not only broadcasts a secure feed of your baby’s sleep time but it also analyzes the heart rate and breathing without wearables. The system uses military technology to sense the baby’s vitals and it will store video even if the Wi-Fi goes out. The Miku Baby Monitor uses patent-pending AI…

Netgear adds gigabit routers to its Orbi mesh My favorite mesh gear, Netgear’s Orbi, has gotten a considerable speed update. The new router, called the RBK50, supports Wi-Fi 6 802.11ax technology which will send gigabit wireless speeds from router to router in your mesh. WiFi 6 is still new to the industry and there isn’t much support outside of specific hardware like this. Performance of the industry leading Orbi Mesh Wi-Fi Systems is improved by adding 1024 QAM with a 4×4 Wi-Fi 6 backhaul, increasing the speeds, coverage and capacity…

D-Link thinks 5G will cut your cords forever Network gear maker D-Link just announced a 5G router that sends high-speed Wi-Fi through your house without cables. The router, called the DWR-2010, should allow users to get massive speeds over 5G networks without running cable. Don’t expect to pick this up at the local Best Buy, however, as the 5G router will probably ship from wireless service providers. The DWR-2010 also offers customization options for service providers, making it suitable for deployment on a range of network configurations. The gateway features…

Engineers can now reverse-engineer 3D models A system that uses a technique called constructive solid geometry (CSG) is allowing MIT researchers to deconstruct objects and turn them into 3D models, thereby allowing them to reverse-engineer complex things. The system appeared in a paper entitled “InverseCSG: Automatic Conversion of 3D Models to CSG Trees” by Tao Du, Jeevana Priya Inala, Yewen Pu, Andrew Spielberg, Adriana Schulz, Daniela Rus, Armando Solar-Lezama, and Wojciech Matusik. “At a high level, the problem is reverse engineering a triangle mesh into a simple tree. Ideally, if…