Cool gadgets: Aguadrone, kid-friendly tablet and hoverbike

8 Jun 2015

Flike image via Bay Zoltan

This week in gadgets, a drone that goes fishing, Amazon launch their kid-friendly tablet and one engineer creates a pretty cool, but deadly-looking, hoverbike.

The Aguadrone

Some might say it defeats the entire point of fishing, but for some, there will no doubt be interest in a drone that’s not only waterproof, but designed to help the operator go fishing.

Called the Aguadrone, the quadrocopter is a newly-launched Kickstarter campaign to help fishers go further than they normally could from the shore thanks to its totally waterproof nature.

Aside from just dropping bait down on to the water like a bomb, the drone also includes sonar so that it can float on the surface of the water and ping back the location of fish below to the person’s smartphone up to 300ft away.

It also has its own camera to record it fishing while you sit comfortably at the side of the water playing with your phone…

The Kickstarter has some way to go before reaching its US$150,000 target, but could appeal to the techy fisher folks out there.

The Aguadrone

Amazon Fire HD Kids Edition

Whether they’re at home messing about on the couch, or you give it to keep them occupied while the parents try and have a peaceful dinner in a restaurant, tablets are a pretty good way of keeping the kids entertained.

Well now Amazon has released a Kids Edition of their Amazon Fire HD tablet, which keeps them away from stumbling across anything the parents might not want them to see.

It is designed to be pretty resistant to drops and tumbles, as would be expected to happen to any item owned by a toddler, and has all the features expected by parents for a kids tablet, including a time limit and the ability to set education goals for the kids to achieve.

For the spec conscious, the Amazon Fire HD Kids Edition features a Quad-Core: 2 @ 1.5 Ghz + 2 @ 1.2 GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM, 8/16GB of storage and a 6in screen.

It’s now available online at Amazon’s store for £119 (€163).

Amazon Fire HD Kids Edition

Flike, the flying bike

Now this is cool. A team of Hungarian engineers has been busying perfecting what they have called the Flike, a flying tricycle, which from its concept images looks amazing, but in its current state also looks like it could cause some accidents.

According to the website, it first came to fruition in summer of last year as part of the Bay Zoltan Applied Research Institute in the central European state.

In terms of how it actually flies, the Flike is a coaxial, Y6-layout tricopter, which creates lift with the help of six rotors, grouped in counter-rotating pairs of three axes, equally located around a circle.

It’s powered by Lithium Polymer batteries, which gives it enough power to fly for around 15-20 minutes of hover flight, which extends towards 30-40 minutes in cruise.

There’s no date for its release yet, but check out this cool video from a recent test flight.

ODiN laser projector mouse

The mouse is dead. Long live the mouse. Or at least that’s what one start-up will have you think with its ODiN mouse, which removes the mouse entirely from the picture and replaces it with a laser projection.

The company, which launched the Kickstarter and doubled its target funding, says that it offers much more accuracy than a traditional mouse, and is also a way of preventing carpal tunnel syndrome as your wrist is not arched in such a way as there is no physical mouse.

Essentially, it creates a mousepad on laptops for any table with a range of gestures available to use for content editors, gamers and regular users.

The rather cool-looking projector is all that’s required to use it, with the cheapest one available online going for US$49 (€44).

ODiN laser projector mouse

HidrateMe – a water bottle that talks to you

Tired of listening to your body telling you when you’re thirsty like it’s been doing for thousands of years? Well, fear no more, as now there’s a water bottle that will do that for you.

Called HidrateMe, this water bottle has (somehow) done rather well on Kickstarter for something which is connected wirelessly to your phone and will notify you when you should be hydrating.

No doubt appealing to sporty types, it still shows a good example of the growing power of the internet of things (IoT) in society.

If you fancy being told when to drink water, then all you have to do is shell out US$39 on the Kickstarter page.

HidrateMe

Colm Gorey was a senior journalist with Silicon Republic

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