Top 5 weekly: the Flipper One’s potential arrival, the coolest way to play Doom, and more

Now that IFA is well and truly done, what was your favorite announcement? If you missed it, we created a best of IFA 2024 list if you want a quick digest of everything that we loved. But, as usual, the presence of a big event did not put a pause on happening around the world, so we still saw a ton of cool things happen outside of IFA. If you’ve been so dazzled by all the new tech that you forgot to check what else was happening, here’s a quick run-down on everything you missed.

You can now cram for your exam tomorrow in podcast form

Are you a big fan of podcasts? Perhaps you like something to listen to while commuting or getting the housework done? If you’re a fan of the audio medium and you need to digest some information, Google has an interesting AI-based proposition for you. You can feed its AI your study notes, and it will generate a podcast-like audio where two hosts discuss and explore your content. That way, you can put it on your headphones and have something more fun to listen to than a monotone text-to-speech system dryly reading out your notes.

Just follow the light

If you’re anything like me, you’ll have issues remembering where exactly you put something in your huge physical collection of items. Fortunately, this smart tinkerer has created a handy system that can save us all from checking and re-checking the same spots. They hooked up their vinyl collection to an app and a row of lights, with each vinyl assigned to a specific bulb. When they asked the app to locate a specific vinyl, the system would light up the spot where the vinyl was in their collection.

I spy with my little Pi…

Don’t want to shell out for a camera system? Don’t like the idea of your data being stored on a third-party’s cloud? One inventive SBC fan got around both of these problems by designing their own Raspberry Pi-based camera system and app. Best of all, the hardware came to around $30, which is a small price to pay if you want to take control of your home security.

A Flipping brilliant announcement

The original Flipper One. Source: Flipper

Huge news for security fans – it seems the Flipper One may become a thing after all. After the success of the Flipper Zero, people were understandably curious if the company would make a sequel to it. A little while ago, Flipper brushed away the idea that they were making a “Flipper One,” stating that any documentation that suggests the opposite was based on outdated information.

Fortunately, it seems that something has changed within Flipper. The company has announced that “[its] primary focus will shift to developing a new product,” and the Flipper One has been once again thrust into the forefront of people’s minds. Will it be a successor to the Flipper Zero, or something else entirely?

It’s Doom, but not as you know it

Finally, we have this really cool project that can play Doom. It uses a volumetric display by taking a 2D panel of pixels and spinning it around really, really fast to create the illusion of colored dots hanging in midair, like a hologram. Once that was set up, the only logical next step was to get Doom running on it, and it looks fantastic.