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Revolution Cooking’s R180 Smart Toaster delivers smarter, faster toasting — for a price

A lot of the past decade in smart home gadgets has been figuring out just how smart we actually want our appliances to be. In a lot of cases when it comes to cooking, the old ways are best, and smart features tend to just complicate things. The new Revolution Cooking R180 High-Speed Smart Toaster ($299.95) strikes the right balance, delivering genuinely useful tech-enabled goodies, without any of the things you don’t need in a toaster — like an internet connection.

The basics

Revolution Cooking’s R180’s most immediately apparent feature is its large, prominent touchscreen display. The screen replaces your typical hardware controls, including buttons and switches, and gives you visual feedback about the toasting process when it’s underway. This is definitely part of the “smart” of the R180’s Smart Toaster designation, but the company’s “InstaGlo” heating technology might be better described as its primary differentiator.

In terms of basic specs, this is a two-slice toaster with slots that are wide enough to accommodate bagels and burger buns pretty easily. It has selectable modes for bagels, sliced bread, English muffins, waffles and toaster pastries (like Pop-Tarts). You can choose between three different heating modes, including “fresh,” “frozen” and “reheat,” and there are seven different darkness levels for browning.

There’s a standby clock display option for when the toaster isn’t in use, and the toaster can provide reminders occasionally to nudge you to remove and empty the crumb tray.

Design and performance

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

The industrial design of the Revolution R180 is good, without being wacky or overly futuristic. It’s basically a brushed stainless steel rectangle, with a sloped chrome front face and large touchscreen display. The toaster unquestionably looks good sitting on a counter, however, and the slant of its front is a nice touch for ensuring prime visibility and touchscreen control access when you’re using it from a standing position. It’s also relatively compact and won’t take up too much room if you’re concerned at all about counter real estate.

The display is big and bright, and uses capacitive touch so it’s very responsive in terms of input detection. The nice thing about the interface is that even though it’s digital, it keeps things simple — everything you need is on one screen, with a standard cog icon hiding settings that let you do neat but unnecessary things like setting the time and choosing between an analog or digital virtual clock face for the sleep screen.

Using the R180 Smart Toaster is easy — there’s no internet connection to set up or app to install, you just plug it in and it starts up, presenting you with the bread type/browning level/heating mode selection screen. Tap the image associated with what you want to toast, or scroll left and right to reach others, select from the three modes and tap the browning level that corresponds with what color you want the toasted item to mostly closely resemble (the image above updates to reflect this) and hit the “Start” button and you’re off to the races.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

And it really is a race: The Revolution toaster is faster than most. I was perhaps expecting even faster given the company’s marketing claims, but there’s no question that it’s speedier than your average toaster. The other big claim that Revolution makes is about toasting quality, as it promises not to dry out your bread and provide better-tasting end products, even with tricky toasting situations like a combo dethaw and brown.

Here’s the thing: I wasn’t even really aware of these claims the first time I tried out the review unit they sent, but me and my partner both instantly noted how anything toasted in the R180 seemed not nearly as dried out as in our existing Breville toaster. And yet, the toasted parts were crisp and golden at the same time. Surprising as it might sound, Revolution’s claims bear out — the Smart Toaster really does make better-tasting toast.

Bottom line

A $300 two-slice toaster definitely seems like an extravagance — and to be clear, it is — but premium nonsmart toasters already stretch the limits of most home appliance budgets, and Revolution’s main claim to superiority is achieving a crunchy exterior while leaving the inside soft and not dried out, and it does this with aplomb. The touchscreen almost certainly adds to the cost, but it does provide a clear and easy-to-understand interface for setting desired toast goals, and it’s a pretty good-looking countertop clock when not in use. In short, Revolution’s Smart Toaster is just smart enough, and smart where it counts, for a smart appliance — but expensive enough that it’s worth taking a long, hard think about just how much you love toasted things.

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Aveine’s Smart Wine Aerator is a huge upgrade for wine lovers – and could create some new ones, too

You might have very good reason to be on a wine kick right now – along with plenty of the rest of the country – so it’s perhaps timely to take a look at the Aveine Smart Aerator, a gadget from a French startup that offers variable, instant aeration and a connected app platform for determining just the right amount of aeration that any particular wine you happen to be drinking requires. The Aveine Smart Wine Aerator is premium-priced, but you might be surprised at just how much of a difference it can make.

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Rocket Lab’s next launch will deliver 30 satellites to orbit — and a 3D-printed gnome from Gabe Newell

Rocket Lab’s next mission will put dozens of satellites into orbit using the launch company’s Kick Stage “space tug,” as well as a 3D-printed garden gnome from Valve Software’s Gabe Newell. The latter is a test of a new manufacturing technique, but also a philanthropic endeavor from the gaming industry legend.

Scheduled for no earlier than November 15 (or 16 at the New Zealand launch site), the as-yet-unnamed launch — Rocket Lab gives all of their missions cheeky names — will be the company’s “most diverse ever,” it said in a press release.

A total of 30 satellites will be deployed using Rocket Lab’s own Kick Stage deployment platform, which like other “space tugs” detaches from the second stage once a certain preliminary orbit is reached and then delivers its payloads each at their own unique trajectory. That’s the most individual satellites every taken up at once by Rocket Lab.

Twenty-four of them are Swarm Technologies’ tiny SpaceBEEs, the sandwich-sized communications satellites it will be using to power a low-cost, low-bandwidth global network for Internet of Things devices.

Swarm prices out its orbital IoT network’s hardware and services

The most unusual payload, however, is certainly “Gnome Chompski,” whose passage was paid by Valve president Newell: a 3D-printed figure that will remain attached to the Kick Stage until it burns up on reentry. The figure, a replica of an item from the popular Half-Life series of PC games, was made by Weta Workshop, the effects studio behind Lord of the Rings and many other films. It’s both a test of a potentially useful new component printing technique and “an homage to the innovation and creativity of gamers worldwide.”

More importantly, Newell will donate a dollar to Starship Children’s Hospital for every viewer of the launch, so you’ll definitely want to tune in for this one. (I’m waiting to find out more from Newell, if possible.)

The launch will also deliver satellites for TriSept, Unseenlabs and the Auckland Space Institute — the last will be New Zealand’s first student-built spacecraft.

Rocket Lab has worked hard to make its launch platform all-in-one, so prospective customers don’t have to shop around for various services or components. Ideally, the company’s CEO has said, anyone should be able to come to the company with the bare-bones payload and the rest is taken care of.

Image Credits: Rocket Lab

“Small satellite operators shouldn’t have to compromise on orbits when flying on a rideshare mission, and we’re excited to provide tailored access to space for 30 satellites on this mission. It’s why we created the Kick Stage to enable custom orbits on every mission, and eliminate the added complexity, time, and cost of having to develop your own spacecraft propulsion or using a third-party space tug,” Beck said in the press release.

Rocket Lab recently launched its own home-grown satellite, First Light, to show that getting to orbit doesn’t have be such a “pain in the butt,” as Beck put it then.

Rocket Lab secretly launched its very first satellite, ‘First Light’

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Raspberry Pi Foundation announces the cute little Raspberry Pi 400

This is the Atari 400 Raspberry Pi 400. The Raspberry Pi Foundation is launching a new product today — and it’s a brand new device. As you can see in the photo, the Raspberry Pi 400 is a computer integrated in a compact keyboard that costs $70.

And it is the easiest way to get started with a Raspberry Pi. If you’re not familiar with the Raspberry Pi, it’s a single-board computer with a lot of connectors that is the size of a deck of cards.

You can give it to a kid so they can play around with a terminal, you can use it for your weekend projects as the computing brain or you can give it to your grandparents to replace their slow Windows XP computer that they use to receive emails.

Last year, when the Raspberry Pi Foundation introduced the Raspberry Pi 4, the foundation also used this opportunity to release a cute mouse and a keyboard. Of course, you could use these accessories with a Raspberry Pi. And your basic setup would look something like this:

Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch

Those are great goodies for Raspberry Pi fans. And yet, there are many, many keyboard and mouse manufacturers out there. Building their own mouse and keyboard didn’t really make sense.

It turns out that the Raspberry Pi Foundation had another idea in mind. The Raspberry Pi 400 is essentially the same keyboard — but with an integrated Raspberry Pi. Their next project has been sitting there right in front of us for the past year.

Raspberry Pi 400 (top) and Raspberry Pi keyboard (bottom). Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has already sent me a Raspberry Pi 400 to try out. While many of my colleagues are excited about the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series X, I was also really excited about receiving this new device.

Because, yes, the Raspberry Pi 400 (or, as TechCrunch’s Brian Heater called it, the PiStation) looks really cute. You plug in a couple of cables and you’re ready to go. As far as I can see, it’s a fanless device, so it doesn’t make any sound when it’s on.

Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch

Putting a computer inside a keyboard is nothing new. You could even say that personal computers started this way. Back in the 1980s, you could plug your computer-in-a-keyboard to your TV and get started right away.

At some point, computers became more complicated. You had to buy a computer tower, a display, a mouse, a keyboard, etc. Laptops reversed this trend by packing everything you need in one device. But laptops aren’t perfect either.

Raspberry Pi Foundation announces Raspberry Pi 4 with 8GB of RAM

The Raspberry Pi 400 is a great device for kids. In many ways, it’s much more powerful than a Chromebook. You can learn a lot more about computers and you feel less restricted in what you can do.

I could see it in schools, at home in the play room or on a shelf waiting to be plugged into a display. This is a great way to get started playing around with computers.

Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch

It gets more interesting when you think about older kids. Many people have said that closed schools have been particularly challenging this year, especially because you don’t necessarily have enough computers for everyone in your home.

If your kid is old enough to get a smartphone, that doesn’t mean they have a comfortable setup for remote classes. The Raspberry Pi 400 is a cheap device that could fill that gap. Moreover, the Raspberry Pi 400 could be a good way to separate school from leisure activities (and social networks).

Now let’s talk about specifications. The Raspberry Pi 400 is pretty similar to a Raspberry Pi 4, but not exactly. It has an ARM-based system on a chip (64-bit quad-core ARM Core-A72 at 1.8GHz for those who are curious). It comes with 4GB of RAM, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.1, Bluetooth Low Energy and Gigabit Ethernet.

When it comes to ports, you get two micro-HDMI ports, which means that you can plug two 4K displays in case you really need a lot of screen real estate. There are two USB 3.0 ports, one USB 2.0 port and a USB-C port for the power brick.

Raspberry Pi Foundation launches Compute Module 4 for industrial users

Like other Raspberry Pi devices, it uses microSD cards for the operating system and to store your data. You can use Raspberry Pi Desktop, a Debian-based Linux operating system or a third-party operating system, such as Ubuntu.

There are different models with U.K., U.S., French, Italian, German and Spanish keyboard layouts. In addition to the $70 device, you can buy the Raspberry Pi 400 kit with a mouse, a power supply, a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable, a pre-formatted microSD card and the official beginner’s guide for $100. It should be available in the coming days.

Image Credits: Romain Dillet / TechCrunch

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iPhones can now tell blind users where and how far away people are

Apple has packed an interesting new accessibility feature into the latest beta of iOS: a system that detects the presence of and distance to people in the view of the iPhone’s camera, so blind users can social distance effectively, among many other things.

The feature emerged from Apple’s ARKit, for which the company developed “people occlusion,” which detects people’s shapes and lets virtual items pass in front of and behind them. The accessibility team realized that this, combined with the accurate distance measurements provided by the lidar units on the iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max, could be an extremely useful tool for anyone with a visual impairment.

Of course during the pandemic one immediately thinks of the idea of keeping six feet away from other people. But knowing where others are and how far away is a basic visual task that we use all the time to plan where we walk, which line we get in at the store, whether to cross the street and so on.

The new feature, which will be part of the Magnifier app, uses the lidar and wide-angle camera of the Pro and Pro Max, giving feedback to the user in a variety of ways.

The lidar in the iPhone 12 Pro shows up in this infrared video. Each dot reports back the precise distance of what it reflects off of.

First, it tells the user whether there are people in view at all. If someone is there, it will then say how far away the closest person is in feet or meters, updating regularly as they approach or move further away. The sound corresponds in stereo to the direction the person is in the camera’s view.

Second, it allows the user to set tones corresponding to certain distances. For example, if they set the distance at six feet, they’ll hear one tone if a person is more than six feet away, another if they’re inside that range. After all, not everyone wants a constant feed of exact distances if all they care about is staying two paces away.

The third feature, perhaps extra useful for folks who have both visual and hearing impairments, is a haptic pulse that goes faster as a person gets closer.

Last is a visual feature for people who need a little help discerning the world around them, an arrow that points to the detected person on the screen. Blindness is a spectrum, after all, and any number of vision problems could make a person want a bit of help in that regard.

As ADA turns 30, tech is just getting started helping people with disabilities

The system requires a decent image on the wide-angle camera, so it won’t work in pitch darkness. And while the restriction of the feature to the high end of the iPhone line reduces the reach somewhat, the constantly increasing utility of such a device as a sort of vision prosthetic likely makes the investment in the hardware more palatable to people who need it.

Here’s how it works so far:

This is far from the first tool like this — many phones and dedicated devices have features for finding objects and people, but it’s not often that it comes baked in as a standard feature.

People detection should be available to iPhone 12 Pro and Pro Max running the iOS 14.2 release candidate that was just made available today. Details will presumably appear soon on Apple’s dedicated iPhone accessibility site.

Microsoft Soundscape helps the visually impaired navigate cities

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Jackery’s solar generator system helps you collect and store more than enough juice for off-grid essentials

Portable power is a very convenient thing to have on hand, as proven by the popularity of pocket power banks for providing backup energy for smartphones and tablets. Jackery’s lineup of battery backups offer an entirely different, much greater level of portable energy storage, and when combined with the company’s durable and portable solar panels, they add up to an impressive mobile solar power generation solution that can offer a little piece of mind at home for when the power goes out, or a lot of flexibility on the road for day trips, camping excursions and more.

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The Level Bolt and Level Touch smart locks are a cut above the competition in design and usability

Level is one of the newer players in the smart lock space, but with a design pedigree that includes a lot of former Apple employees. The company is already attracting a lot of praise for its industrial design. I tested out both of its current offerings, the Level Bolt and the Level Touch, and found that they’re well-designed, user-friendly smart locks that are a cut above the competition when it comes to aesthetics and feature set.

The basics

Level’s debut product, the $229 Level Bolt, works with existing deadbolts and just replaces the insides with a connected locking mechanism that you can control from your smartphone via the Level app. The newer $329 Level Touch is a full deadbolt replacement, including the faceplates, but unlike most other smart locks on the market it looks like a standard deadbolt from the outside — albeit a very nicely designed one. The Level Touch is available in four different finishes, including satin nickel, satin chrome, polished brass and matte black (the latter two are listed as “coming soon”).

Image Credits: Level

The Bolt is similar in concept to other smart lock products like the August lock in that you use it with your existing deadbolt, which means no need to replace keys. It also leaves the thumb turn intact, meaning from all outward appearances it isn’t obvious that you have a smart lock at all. Installing it is relatively simple and basically amounts to a lock mechanism transplant. Level includes different cam bar adapters that fit the vast majority of available deadlocks, so it should be something most homeowners can do in just a few minutes. The Bolt offers access sharing via the app, auto lock when you depart, auto unlock when you arrive, an activity log, temporary passes and a built-in audio chime. It also works with Apple’s HomeKit for remote control, voice control via Siri, automation and push notifications.

Image Credits: Level

The Level Touch takes everything that’s great about the Bolt, and adds in some super smart additional features like a capacitive external deadbolt housing, which allows an amazing touch-to-lock/touch-to-unlock feature, and NFC that allows you to use programmable NFC cards and stickers to issue revokable passes to unlock your door. On top of all that, it’s probably the most attractive deadbolt I’ve ever owned or used, which is saying a lot in a field of smart locks where most offerings have unsightly large keypads or large battery compartments.

Design and features

The Level Bolt’s design is clever in its ability to be completely invisible when in use. The deadbolt itself is the battery housing, holding one lithium CR123A battery (included in the box, offers over a year’s worth of use). Installing the Bolt was as easy as unscrewing my existing deadbolt, removing the internal deadbolt mechanism, picking out the right adapter for the cam bar, and then inserting it into my door’s deadbolt lock and screwing back together the external face plates. It took under 10 minutes, start to finish.

Setting up the lock was also simple. You just download the app and follow the instructions, and you’ll be able to control your app in just minutes, too. Using the app, you set up a home profile for your lock or locks, and you can also invite others in your household to share access (they’ll have to install the app and get a profile to do so). You can also set up HomeKit if you have an Apple device and a HomeKit hub (this could be an Apple TV or an iPad) and instantly unlock a lot of features including remote unlocking and locking control when you’re away from home.

Image Credits: Level

Even without HomeKit, you can set up Level to automatically lock once you leave a certain geofenced area around your home and to automatically unlock once you return within that perimeter. It’s a fantastic convenience feature that works great and offers tons of benefits when it comes to things like coming home with armfuls of groceries or large packages.

With the Level Touch, you get all of the above, plus a feature I’ve come to find indispensable: touch control. The metal exterior of the Level Touch’s outside cylinder has capacitive touch sensors, which means that like your iPhone’s screen, it can detect when it’s touched by a finger or skin. You can activate a touch-to-lock feature that will allow it to lock whenever people leave and hold their finger to the deadbolt cover, and you can even set it to unlock when it detects a touch combined with immediate proximity of your phone for identity verification purposes.

To me, this is even more useful than auto-lock/auto-unlock, and yet still much more convenient than fumbling with keys or even using the app to manually lock/unlock. It’s one of Level Touch’s unique advantages, and it’s a big one.

As for installation of the Level Touch, it’s also very easy — no more difficult than installing any deadbolt you might buy at the hardware store. Like the Bolt, it uses a single CR123A battery loaded right into the deadbolt itself that should give you enough power for over a year of use.

Bottom line

Smart locks have become a lot more prevalent over the past few years, but they also haven’t really progressed much in terms of functionality or design. Level has upended all that, bringing the best of convenience features and miniaturized hardware technology to smart, modern design that leapfrogs the competition.

The new August Wi-Fi Smart Lock is now available, and it’s the connected smart lock to beat