I Reviewed the Most Ridiculous Gadgets from my Spam Folder

once a YouTuber hits about 25 000 subscribers their inbox is immediately inundated with weirdly sycophantic requests to review the strangest items you could possibly imagine robot vacuums RGB gaming desks and Ender 3 clones so many Ender 3 clones I get dozens of these a week and I tell them all to kick rocks because review videos are the laziest most disposable form of low effort content seriously but then I got an email that changed everything it read dear David does Tech would you like to show the hit mobile game page shattered budgets I'm like I'm Zach Friedman this is voidstar Lab look it says here right on the title card so I searched up this so-called David and what I found was a review video but this one was different you see he also gets an endless stream of free offers to test but David said yes to all of them the last time I ripped someone else's video off I ended up with a gridfinity so I cried my Knuckles cracked open the spam folder and typed up a reply send it ladies gentlemen and cyborgs we're about to build a potty mouth battlebot print out the most gorgeous gridfinity item I've ever seen and teach a tiny robot dog new tiny robot tricks we're testing 10 of the most random gizmos to end up in my inbox from the most powerful Pi competitor I've ever seen to a CNC so gratuitous I had to unbox it with a crowbar welcome to the very first review on voidstar lab before we begin allow me to introduce our very serious rating system if an item is strictly worse than any other product in its category it gets the poop of product pointlessness because why buy a worse product if it's strictly better than all of its competition it gets the chef's kiss of categorical Conquest because why buy a worse product otherwise it gets a medal of mediocrity in bronze silver or gold based on my vibes man it's fine if a product is expensive but the higher the price the higher my expectations I got all this stuff for free so my judgment is compromised don't believe a word I say however despite my best efforts none of these companies paid me I'm not following any talking points I didn't sign any contracts and no one but YouTube and my wife can veto this video 10 products zero income and that means this video is sponsored by polycam oh capitalism you so crazy polycam is the app that turns any phone or camera into a high-res feature-packed 3D scanner just walk around an object person even an entire room and polycam uses the magic photogrammetry to reconstruct geometry textures and bump maps that you can import and use in any 3D modeling tool in past episodes I use polycam Simple photos only mode to scan my Noggin and while the results were a bit lumpy they were more than good enough to make two generations of wearable computer the stupidest storage unit ever and an entire contest on things.com but if you've got an iPhone 12 Pro or higher you can unlock polycam's full power and guess who I talked into upgrading my Hardware these phones have an onboard lidar it's basically a camera where the pixels are distance instead of color polycam crunches millions of measurements a minute to capture complex surfaces and huge structures in unbelievable detail what you're watching right now is not video footage this is a 3D scan of voidstar lab that I took with this phone right here and you can explore it right now in your browser taking a scan is as easy as recording a video and you don't even need a phone you can upload photos straight off a DSLR 3D captures make heartwarming mementos and polycam itself makes a really neat gift for the 3D printing Maniac that you're stuck with if you want to unlock Pro features like automatically generated fully dimensioned floor plans use promo code Zac 20 to get 20 off a one year Pro subscription be you gotta hurry because that code expires to the end of January 2023 and this video took way too long to make now that we pay the bills let's see if any widget in this Workshop is worth your paycheck we're going to go hard right from the start because nothing is harder than Diamond this is the Diamondback 3D printer nozzle tipped with synthetic polycrystalline diamond it's manufacturer us synthetic claims it can print any material forever and I'm inclined to believe them I've been using the same Olson Ruby in my prusa since 2018 and its tip still looks brand new I can't see Diamond being any less indestructible but diamond isn't just the hardest mineral it's the most efficient thermal conductor over 20 times more effective than brass and there are only two materials on Earth with lower coefficients of friction as far as I know you can't use either for a 3D printing nozzle in the infrared camera you can see the Diamondbacks tip heat up almost immediately and in the visible spectrum note how filament almost refuses to stick your synthetic claims this translates into fewer jams smoother prints and faster jobs but there's only one way to find out let's do some torture tests and I can do the best ones because I have all the filaments first a jamming test in proto pasta CF htpla this evil polylactic acid hangs up on the tiniest defects in the filament path and is loaded with authentic carbon fibers it clogs nozzles so aggressively I actually had to use a stand-in to get enough footage for the every filament video I'm going to use that old prusa with an 0.6 millimeter Diamondback and it came out perfectly on the first try now I look like an [ __ ] for talking up this filament thanks us synthetic next a friction test some filaments just love to curl back and stick to the nozzle and they carbonize into a booger that detaches ruins a print here is the worst case scenario Fusion filaments high temperature petg which prints at 280 Celsius curls like my hair and has an unusually high viscosity like my hair for extra punishment let's switch on iron because I hate my printers the results aren't perfect this thing does have a couple of burnt blobs here and there I don't really understand why the diamond has a matte finish like wouldn't a polished finish keep crud from creeping its way up on the brass either way these results are phenomenal here is what happened when I ran the exact same G-Code exact same filament but through a brass Revo nozzle finally a raw speed test with boomat high speed pla I'm going to use an 0.8 millimeter volcano Diamondback 0.3 millimeter layers starting at a print speed of a hundred millimeters a second and we'll ratchet it up till something breaks the word here is flow we don't want the filament to seize even a tiny bit even though we're pushing out like 30 cubic millimeters a second I've fitted a smart filament sensor which uses an encoder to Halt the print if the filament stops moving for even an instant the results are impressively inconclusive The Tool changer's top printing speed is 200 millimeters a second and even at that rate the filament never stopped moving the flow never ended the party never stopped this Banshee took 22 minutes to make it's my personal record and if I had a core XY machine that didn't have a half pound tool head I could absolutely beat it but I'm gonna be honest I am beyond impressed with these nozzles the Diamondback is an instant noticeable upgrade set it and forget it it makes your prints look better it makes your printing more reliable and it does all this even if you never use Composites also it's pretty look at the mirror polished brass the watermark on the diamond every one of them has a laser and craved serial number even the container is gorgeous even the sticker is gorgeous our very first review gets an easy chef's kiss if a 100 Diamondback fits your budget I don't see why you would ever want anything else us synthetic also sent this cool kit with samples of brass steel Ruby tungsten and Diamond so we can see the thermal properties first hand I've decided to give this thing an entire episode because the history science and importance of polycrystalline diamond really to service more than four and a half minutes hit subscribe if you're interested and stay tuned if you're not because our next item is a big old pile of mechanical keyboard stuff this care package comes from xvx Chinese supplier whose products are sold here under the name wamir our first item is a desk mat with an ukioa inspired nautical Motif I really like the design the qualities find the printing is bold but it's got the xvx logo on it the logo is fugly and no keyboard snob would ever buy this congratulations to our first poop of product pointlessness yay next up we have not one but two sets of keycaps that are not sorted anyway why you do this to me these are low profile double shot PBT caps for MX stems in your choice of black or white with shine through Legends the spicy part is that these are an xvx's proprietary Horizon profile a swoopy cylindrical thruple baby of OEM XDA and DSA these things fit snugly the space bar is only a little bit of a banana and the Legends use a not helvetica font that makes the whole Mirage look clean and modern and they're also really really comfy I like these Keys a lot for 23 bucks you get a 100 kit with some extras like an ISO Enter key for what do we call them Europeans unfortunately xvx doesn't sell any add-ons no Novelties no spare modifiers no nothing so if your plank is any kind of exotic you're going to have to fill gaps with mismatch caps clack your hands for a very first silver medal of mediocrity finally Le pistia resistance the xbx m84 this is a 10 kilos staggered mechanical board and mine is in a splashy limited edition japonesque Livery this thing features ergablids hot swap sockets and wireless via a tiny magnetic dongle whose lifelong dream is to vanish forever into your backpack the firmware and configurator are proprietary but they don't force you to compile anything when you remap one key so that's always a plus speaking of those keys they are also made of PBT and they use a different proprietary profile simply dubbed xvx it's got an aggressive curve plump rounded sidewalls and big old spherical finger dimple I don't know if that's the term but it is now I love these Keys too they are super comfy but unfortunately they are dye subbed the printing is real fuzzy and my aggro clacking is going to wear the Legends right off also these ergablades are way too dim these are the same reverse Mount delios as my Mirage and I know for a fact this fat battery should be jamming out dump truck photons all night long these cap are mounted on buttery smooth gatorron ks9 yellow linear switches which are snapped into a surprisingly Gucci steel plate it even has pre-lubed plate Mount stabilizers surprising level of quality for a board of this class entire thing feels very solid and has a gentle subdued feel and a very muted sound if you're looking for thick thock you're going to be 98.8 percent disappointed because the only key that delivers is the space bar give me some space bar thought give me another thought to make sure the first thought wasn't an accident the m84 costs 90 and the key cron V3 one of the best rated keyboards ever made costs 85. therefore this gets the poop of pointless products also did you notice the new Mirage enclosure enclosures I redid them because the last one sucked speaking of poor planning our next product is so [ __ ] huge it arrived on a pallet and it was so hard to actually get into the workshop I forgot to film myself busting it open so here's a computer-aided reconstruction of the unboxing experience behold the carvera that's the whole name it's like McLovin the carvera by makura is desktop CNC mill that goes head to head with the snap maker from that time I tried to Mill my own circuit boards I'm gonna be honest that was soft competition the episode was a nightmare the carvera on the other hand is insanely sturdy it ships fully assembled and it weighs over 110 pounds if you live in a five-story walk-up and you buy this thing you will literally die maker has sent me the complete kit with all the trimmings though I'm not going to review the rotary axis because there is a lot of stuff to cover the accessory box is empty because I immediately dumped everything into a gridfinity I have a reputation uphold here the carfora has a built-in laser engraver air assist vacuum filtration lighting touch plate articulated arm to use an old phone as a controller wireless leveling probe and drum roll please a tool changer this is the headline feature and Makara did not half acid a laser line measures the tools as they pass by and it will stop the presses if you are missing a bit feel a swap or set yourself on a collision course unloading is aided by the spring-loaded dock that tightly grips a plastic collar and a touch plate calibrates your new tools length giggity I tested this thing with over a hundred swaps and every single one went perfectly this is a great feature it's executed really well and it makes the Carver particularly useful for circuit boards which call for Engraving drilling slots and outlines that is as long as Carver didn't screw anything else up I started with makera's tutorial project a touch sensitive lamp this has you Faba PCB miloplastic base routing aluminum electrode and finally engrave an acrylic plate all of the materials and Tool paths are included and they've thoughtfully packed spares so if you pick it up you can get a do-over if you order the PCB kit you even get to take a break part way through to roll on some UV sensitive solder mask and expose the pads with a special scraper bit the circuit board came out rough but it worked and I think I just clamped the copper clad down wrong it's a lot harder than it sounds the other parts came out super crisp even the aluminum and the whole thing works on the first try I was genuinely surprised and impressed I was suppressed before going further there is an elephant in the room and this Workshop is not big enough to hold an elephant I'm gonna kill an elephant and I'm gonna do it in the workshop Brooke bring the bucket Maker's software instructions are [ __ ] raw you get libraries for some common cam tools a third-party tool called kirimoto which works in your browser it's kind of neat and one page in the instruction manual the problem is while there are an abundance of third-party tools to prepare tool paths for CNC and laser cutters these are way harder than 3D printing it's a more technical process it punishes mistakes harder and the tools themselves just aren't designed as well as 3D slicers a CNC and a laser needs painstaking crystal clear step-by-step instructions for Milling Gerber's stl's Vector art Etc and as it stands if you don't already come into this with decent experience with these machines this is going to be a boat anchor will they improve later probably but it's not relevant I judge products not promises it's expensive at four to six thousand dollars but the hardware is excellent it's very nice boat anchor if makro tightens up the controller and they publish some better documentation I can see this getting an easy chef's kiss on the other hand this is a Kickstarter product and while the first units are shipping and updates are chugging there's no guarantee backers will get the same quality as me or anything at all pre-order at your own risk I've decided not to read it like us the weasel not only do I want to keep an eye on the product and the company to let it find its footing I would like to give this thing an entire episode honestly I just kind of want to play with it some more well it's cool between coordinating all the shipments rating the first reviews of my career and shoot shooting so much b-roll I probably put triple the work into this episode as usual do you know why I do it for the money where's my stunt dollar and I'm gonna need somewhere to put it behold the Geo grit hard sided minimalist wallet you might have seen these already they advertise in a lot of YouTube channels and they sent me one with a money clip and one with a cash strap which is nice because who isn't strapped for cash these days both of them are milled from aluminum billets anodized cold black bound together by silicone lined elastic straps and sprinkled with a heaping helping of tough guy murk and flavor geogrit needs you to know this is a manly American product made by manly American men who want other manly men to know their manly man American man man America right off the bat these wallets are not minimalist even the cash strap model starts off chunkier than my fully loaded leather incumbent my everyday EDC is a card holder made of the same plum colored Spanish Leather as my wedding shoes my wife bought me the wallet but unlike our love it's beginning to wear out I doubt the aluminum will wear at all though I am a little worried that the sharp edges will rip holes through the pockets of slobs who wear the same jeans for months on end that is certainly not a problem I suffer from no Surrey as for the wallets uh nice yeah good build quality handsome piano black finish a tremendous number of black oxide screws which I'm sure are completely necessary the usability is there these little chamfers let you ram your cards home without taking the wallet out of your pocket and this generous thumb hole makes it easy to squeeze them back out though you can't really peel off one card at a time you have to kind of shove them all out at once Geo grit makes a lot of noise about RFID blocking and while I'm a little skeptical about the threat Pro file of having her wallet skimmed they're made it's made of metal metal blocks RFID aluminum he-mansplained is metal I found you can actually push a card far enough out to switch the RFID back on which is a pretty handy hidden feature for mass transit users sadly Merck and manly men only travel by horseback F-350 Dually and airboat that last one is exclusive to Florida men who are going to get a lot less value out of the lifetime warranty to test the capacity I went to the ATM and withdrew my PPP loan I managed to cram 20 bills under the cash strap but the money clip could barely contain a mere 10 million dollars as for the cards geogrit claims this holds a dozen and well it technically does the whole package now looks like the blueberry girl from Willy Wonka here's the sand in the beach Pizza the moving parts are elastic and if any of them go slack the wallet is toast so stay tuned to the very end to see if we end up with a hot dog hallway situation I am going to preemptively give grits aluminum wallet the silver medal of mediocrity even though it barely holds enough singles for 15 minutes at femboy Hooters our next package is from Seed Studio and I don't know what see they were sending me anything oh it's a giant version of this same board I used in The Mirage I've never actually worked with Seed Studio but those episodes have probably sold so many Xiao RB 2040s this is delightful I love big versions of small things I love small versions of big things I love my dogs that's why I was overjoyed when pet toy said they would send me the Bittle the Biddle is our little robotic German Shepherd barely 10 centimeters tall that packs nine servos a custom driver board two wireless modules and good boy certification the kit should have been very easy to assemble but it took me over six hours because I didn't read the instructions and I had to start over three times pet toy markets this little guy is a science toy for kids and out of the box your vile progeny can make it walk call up a few pre-loaded tricks program in some new ones or start from scratch in Arduino like all toys of its kind you should only buy this if your kid wants to program it not just use it because out of the box it's really just a funky RC car you should also take that kid to therapy because a desire to code is not natural the controller board itself uses the easy to program but dust fartingly ancient at Mega 328p and supplements it with a pwm controller motion sensor Raspberry Pi interface and a bunch of unused Servo slots as well as these four pin Grove tail stema thing things I don't think I've ever used one of these in my life there's plenty of Headroom for modding but we are going to use this purebred powered puffer as is because pet toy made the mistake of asking me to program in some tricks one of my earliest freelancing jobs had me code up a dancing robot's New Groove and that taught me a lesson it's still relevant today robot programming tools are [ __ ] head toys skill composer is a python script so intensively janky calling it a program creates unrealistic expectations the how-to guide is word solid the workflow is baffling and it regularly locks up so they give the terminal window a good old spanking it also made my PCS case lighting flicker every time I uploaded the new trick yeah I find this whole thing charmingly hacktacular though this will make dads feel very stupid when that kid starts asking questions but once I got The Knack it only took about half an hour to teach Biddle to high five and for reference training Rob to do that took weeks the built-in gyroscope beefy servos and low center of gravity make this a very forgiving a robot to mess around with in fact it was a challenge to make it deliberately flip over on his back for Tummy Time Rob taught me that trick oh he's a good boy oh Rob's a good boy Millie's not a good boy Millie's a good girl three things disappointed me about the hardware the head has a Servo to turn it side to side but not to open and close the jaw meaning Biddle ain't fetching the tail doesn't have any motor at all and I want my robots to be happy robots finally the product picks show bittel carrying a little bone but mine did not come with one I am boneless 300 bucks bill is expensive but not compared to other toy robots it doesn't really do that much out of the box but neither do other toy robots the tools and docks are awkward so are other toy robots I'm just gonna award a poop of product pointlessness to the entire category of toy robots parents you don't need fancy science kits to turn your kids into makers put a cardboard box in the living room tell them not to touch it and by the time you finish your rose they'll have a whole Cinematic Universe next up is the 3D filament people kept asking about my last group Infinity video the time has arrived this is texonar co-extruded PLA and they sent four flavors red blue matte blue green silk purple green bronze and red green blue that's right people RGB filament has arrived witness my true form the RGB Zack a co-extruded filament creates a gorgeous gradient effect that looks like shifting holographic Hues but it's not actually chameleon filament different faces and extruder movements end up coming out in contrasting colors and it's just a stunning effect that looks great on camera I really like this silk version because it does a nice job of catching the light I ran off methylon's girder style adjustable light for gridfinity and even though you know like all silk filaments the surface quality is a little mad every facet just goes crazy with a ride of color this is without a doubt the single nicest gridfindi item I have ever seen Tex owner picked some really nice color schemes purple green copper makes anything look like glorious Art Nouveau bronze blue red matte is this dramatic Jagged late and Shadow effect RGB is the RG best and the green blue colorway adds this subtle futuristic Sheen one of the finest sheens there is if you really want a treat pick a funky infill pattern like Hilbert curve or concentric and witness the magic although the filament's fine I never jammed or Tangled though it did start to snap as I approached the end of the spool not sure if that's this brand because it also happens with other silks the color combos are bold the print qualities whatever the spools are cardboard and at 35 dollars a kilo it drinks matter hackers Quantum milkshake it's no prusionment but Persia mint doesn't have built-in bisexual lighting this is the very definition of the silver medal of mediocrity I compared this with Prussia mint prusa printers are orange and here's the orange pie 800 call me Dean Cayman because I got Segways for days let's point out the obvious the orange Pi 800 copied the Raspberry Pi 400s homework and didn't even change the font but being a rip-off isn't necessarily a bad thing he said in the video he ripped off as of November 2022 there has been almost a complete shortage of Linux Raspberry Pi's for over a year and the pie Foundation recently based jumped off Mount canceled by giving an honorary job to an ex-cop then blocking people who called out their jingoism folks want affordable pies but they are starting to lose their patience and the competition is getting better and better the Raspberry Pi 400 and orange Pi 800 are weird-shaped single board computers stuffed into laptop style Chiclet keyboards my Pi 400 is permanently glued into a cyber deck I wish it looked like this out of the box and I'm fairly sure I could do this with the orange pie too I'm not I won't though the x00 is a very weird form factor the idea is that like regular pies are components that you put in your projects but these things are personal computers that you like use as computers when a troll tells your kid he'll get free V bucks if he runs rm-rf Star you can just reflash an SD card and the only thing lost is your hope for an easy retirement the OPA 800 has the same magic keyboard style thing as the RPI 400 in almost the same layout on almost the same chassis with almost the same dimensions in almost the same speed holes on the underbelly the Badonkadonk is where things get badonka different the RPI 400 has two micro HDMI ports 40 pin gpio and a Kensington lock to keep British Lads from Nick in the school's Hardware the orange Pi 800 has the older style 26 pin header full-size HDMI port and oddly VGA it's kind of weird the orange pie also has a built-in speaker and a headphone jack while it's drupacious counterpart has no audio in or out whatsoever I'll tell you what's missing a mouse dual mode DisplayPort USBC and a cooling fan here's why this matters the orange Pi 800 is packing the rock chip rk3399 an all-in-one system on a chip designed for tablets that's a really solid performer if a little creaky at like six years old it's the exact same chipset as the computer I'm wearing right now and with six cores GPU and peripherals out the Wazoo it should be capable of doing most real world tasks with most peripherals but by being stingy with the ports and the thermal management Orange pie buried the Chip's spiciest features like its speed and what the ability to send power and video over one cable basically all the stuff that makes it good under this poultry set of ports in these stupid scissor switches I am selling the keyboard a bit short it's much better than it looks the orange Pi 800 has is a noticeably clickier tactility than the RPI 400s Matrix of mush really the only problem is the backspace key it feels gritty it binds up and if your finger slips you hit the power button if you're wondering you can't use these things as Standalone keyboards there's no USB device Port the USBC is just for power speaking of unlike the 400 the orange Pi 800 includes a power supply this is the way the whole use an old phone charger thing was cute but these are powerful chips unless your phone charger provides four amps the R5 is going to nickel and dime you phone would have to be the size of a surfboard the orange Pi 800 comes standard with 64 gigabytes of built-in emmc storage which comes factory installed with orange pies orange flavored Ubuntu distro in a real pencil and nose maneuver you can't open the start menu with the keyboard which is a baffling oversight for a product that's a keyboard look this thing should have just come pre-installed with Android 12. Rock chips first party distro is Zippy it's fully navigable by a keyboard which I've been doing this whole time and it can run the games you wanted the computer for in the first place it's been fun to play around with this thing but let's get down to Orange tax what's the point why do these exist it's too complex for kids it's too finicky for grown UPS you'll catch fire if you stream video it's too big to leave in your project and you need to bring your own Mouse outlet and monitor I award the orange Pi 800 and the Raspberry Pi 400 the poop of pointless products by technical knockout also what the [ __ ] is an orange pie a bread bowl full of marmalade I'd like to show you the next product but I'm running out of steam and I need your psychic energy find a comfortable place to sit close your eyes and imagine your essence like pinpricks of pure light flowing through your body gently guide them up your legs down your neck across your heart through your arm and finally into your finger as you press the like And subscribe buttons Namaste this is the crowbot bolt by Ella Crow and esp32 based RC car Robot thing elicro sent this on the condition that I show you their swag which was too weird a request to refuse so here here you go here's a notebook flaccid pen it's not the claky kind and they're laser cut logo acrylic it smells like some pretty neat decals with separate foil letters maybe this was like a stealth plug for their laser cutting service elecro has this kind of Seed Studio contract manufacturing on the cheap thing going on yeah anyways this is one of their first party products and they Market it as an educational kit for kids but let me tell you it is none of the above the curriculum is light on content and drenched in so much high density ingrish I think it was written by actual crows the whole educational bit feels like half-assed Hollow and just left a rot like an abandoned zany brainy at a strip mall also no child should ever be given anything like this and allow me to show you why all right [Music] but there are two things you need to know first the actually pretty nice laser-cut chassis holds batteries ergablids speaker gear Motors lots of sensors Bluetooth and Wi-Fi and it even includes this little infrared remote second this entire kit is 35 this is a lot of stuff at a disposably cheap price to test this I turned the bolt into a mini battle bot and I armed it with the most vicious weapon of them all mean words your face looks like a butt I splaced a sound effects board onto the crow tail header futs around a little in audacity and coated it up fun fact the esp32 lets you assign any interface to any pin so this can use Hardware serial this wasn't hard by the way the firmware for this thing is just one monstrous Arduino sketch I call her trolling Thunder thank you so if you already know what you're doing the bolt is an unexpectedly solid starting point for any sort of mobile Internet of Things type thing I award the crowbot bolt the silver medal of mediocrity contingent on elecro not increasing the price by one nickel I'm watching you so is my little friend here's my laser-cut acrylic ass you know it but yeah as an educational kid this gets the poopiest poop no the second poopiest poop this is an optional accessory sold separately batteries not included and it actively makes the bolt worse not only is it uncomfortable obnoxious and expensive elecrow picked the wrong capacitor and now the CPU resets whenever the wireless turns on so it can't even do the one thing it was designed to do elecro has a fix on their site you solder on a 100 microfarad surface mount capacitor which is an absolutely unreasonable ask like no who knows how to solder surface mount capacitors I didn't even know they made 100 microfarad caps this small I just stack up five ceramic caps like a bunch of squirrels in a trench coat trying to assassinate Mr Peanut why not just recall and rework the product even after all that [ __ ] Ella Cruz Ella crappy ellicode continuously vibrates and beeps this doesn't just get a poop this gets one of those foot long poops that leaves like a big smears that spirals down the bowl literally the only good thing I can say about this is the transparent gadgets are cool and even that is just a sloppy segue into our next product here this is the sharjik Storm 2 a translucent USB power bank that looks like Adam Jensen's tallywacker but wait there's more this is the Storm 2 slim with fewer ports and a lower capacity but the storm slim Sports is felt silhouette for slipping into smaller spaces why do I keep writing these scripts like this with 25 and 20 amp hours respectively either model packs enough electrochemistry to spend an entire round trip to Hawaii playing the most demanding steam deck title I could find Fallout New Vegas the label says flight safe but you would have to be out of your mind to bring this bum looking ass footbucker in your carry-on I also want to point out before I get angry comments that this is not the Char geek this is the charge eek look at The Branding the regulatory text even the cables a company is called charge like when you try to charge but you poop a little as for the sure cheek Storm 2 and 2 slim I mean they're power Banks they save powerful later and they charge you if that's what you're in the market for and you're okay paying an 80 cool guy tax you're going to be a happy camper both model charge and discharge up to 100 goddamn watts and can negotiate with devices over power delivery quick charge or two resistors and a dream they maxed out my steam deck my pinzel soldering iron and even my miniware mdp XPS Palm size power supply that's particularly Persnickety about its power the only thing it wouldn't charge full speed is my iPhone but that has nothing to do with sharjik that's up to Steve Jobs rotting corpse that's still sitting in a golden Eames chair I think it makes Apple Maps work I don't really know the lore but if you came for the gimmicks things were about to go way downhill the most important fact of any kind of Bank power investment piggy spank is how full it is if the only part of this big colorful screen to show how much juice is in it is this dinky ass icon with this unreadable percentage it's not even a [ __ ] bar graph it's color coded this is the only piece of information you need it should be like gigantic and tell you how many hours you have till your cells go flat whole swaths of real estate are are reserved for power meters in and out although neither model is supposed to charge and discharge at the same time and I know this for a fact because I plugged them into each other to see what would happen and it gets worse both storm 2s have Nifty utilities like battery balance timer and for the storm to not slim a barrel Jack that outputs an adjustable DC voltage that is a unique and highly spiffy feature though it requires a male male Barrel Jack and I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court is going to make those illegal the only problem is that this whole interface all these features is controlled by one single button to use these features you have to click click hold click hold click hold over and over and over this product's user experience design is so doofy I have got to ask charges accountant what kind of genetically modified turbo weed they're letting their employees write off at 230 bucks for the Storm 2 and 200s for the Storm 2 slim these are pricey products but they look cool they start conversations and they do the thing as well as the thing can be done all the other features are just Frou Frou and while they don't make the product worse per se they shouldn't turn a maybe into a yes I hereby a word the Storm 2 and Storm 2 slim the bronze Medals of mediocrity which I will upgrade to Silver if sharji can sober a developer up enough to redo that interface oh God they sell a solar panel add-on in a Pomodoro Timer get me out of this crazy place our penultimate product is my first Arduino kit from Arduino genuino llcino Massimo Senpai noticed me says girly shriek in the script the idea here is to ease yourself into the basics of circuitry as you construct a bloop synthesizer from a pile of Parts I've been soldering and arduining my entire career so I'm just not qualified to test this but I have a wife and a bottle of Prosecco you know because it's Italian the build your Uno kit uses videos 3D tutorials and Hands-On hacking to teach soldering circuits code and all-around makery first Brooks solders a keychain no circuits just dummy parts and empty pads then she builds a little debugging board which is based just an LED on a stick these pre-project projects are low pressure ways to build muscle memory and confidence before plunging into the meat constructing an Arduino Uno the most intricate of the four and finally topping it off with an audio Shield since every stage leaves Brooke with a working Standalone project she gets multiple hits of success and multiple exit points if she needs to drop everything to make me a sandwich Burke found the whole experience low stress and just a lot of fun until disaster struck I soldered this instead of this Brooke misread the instructions and accidentally soldered the atmega chip right into the board backwards no one who buys this kit will ever be able to fix this I could undo the damage but I have a desoldering gun a bunch of Chip quick and like thousands of hours of experience if all you have is a 10 fire starter and some solder Wick the only way to get this chip out is to snip each leg off and pull them through one by one Arduino didn't pack a spare so you're still why did Arduino use a socket if they didn't include any spares there's redundancy for like everything else with a three dollar micro really break the bank come on Massimo play [ __ ] [ __ ] together I don't know how to say in Italian this tutorial should have warning after flashing bold red warning to make it unambiguously clear hey Jack hole you this one particular step up your game is over remember that this kit is for beginners if someone quits halfway for any reason they may never touch a soldering iron again in fact they may never DIY anything again they might be scared off from the entire field of making forever mistakes are gonna happen so the footprint should have colossal through holes and Mammoth thermal breaks so even you know that classic garbage light blue solder sucker can have a shot of extricating this chip Brook also pointed out that even though this has text visuals and video none of them has the complete picture the instructions are distributed across them and while the copy and the 3D visuals are fine the videos are not I'm a professional Video Creator if you couldn't tell I make video content for makers full time and let me tell you it's so diabolically difficult to make an adequate entertaining tutorial I don't even try Arduino needs to shred this footage hire a new studio and start over on top of this all the information should be in text and video and 3D demo form anyways that way the user can pick the one they have the easiest time following there's also a huge Omission here that just there's no excuse for it the kit wants you to bring your own soldering tools but how could a total beginner possibly know what to buy what's worse is that one of the items on the checklist is soldering tin but if you look this up in America you get tin lead solder which is neurotoxic if this were some Rinky Dink piece of Tindy I would just roll my eyes but this is Arduino LLC that should say 0.25 inch silver bearing lead-free solder if your IP address is in America I think this kit has potential the four project structure is really clever the fit and finish are just Top Notch as usual for Arduino and the synthesizer itself is a really good choice and a lot of fun to use audio projects are great for beginners because they get big feedback without getting hung up on the complexity of graphics and motion but at the end of the day this is a 65 kit with twenty dollars of components the value is in the tutorial which is just not good enough I give this kit a gold medal of mediocrity though that is more an indictment of how absolute trash every other electronics kit is if those Italians tighten up a few lines of text add a few minutes of video put a line or two in the bill of materials this will be the Undisputed best entry point to DIY electronics at the end of the day Arduino is the biggest best brand in the business and I expect better don't buy this for someone unless you can desolder a 28 pin dip Arduino our final item is a late edition in part because it's so good it capsized my entire entire November and December schedules I built a wearable around the cottus edge V I have it right here and the idea was to show you how I did that to wrap up my octagon project but caught us themselves ruined everything when they released a product so good it would be irresponsible to not start over Kata specializes in high spec full-featured single board computers and the edge fees power and size made it a really good choice for a wearable but then they sent me their new Edge too and it's smaller easier to use and so much more massively powerful than its predecessor I my hand was forced on top of that it ditches the pi form factor it gets rid of the gpio opens gets rid of the ethernet port caught us could carve The Edge 2 down to one of the thinnest Dev boards available and that dead weight matters because the edge V is a coast to coast traffic jam of components this belt Mount enclosure had to be enormous because it had to encapsulate the whole shebang headers ports heatsink and all but the edge 2's wafer thin sockets and mid-mount Jacks let you make a case so thin the heat sink can stick out the top where it works better because it's a heat sink I do have to dwell on that heatsink for a bit because made a few wacky The Edge V could run passively cooled it wouldn't like it it would throttle the hell out of itself but at the end of the day it was the same tablet PC chip as the orange Pi 800 but the Edge 2 uses Rock chips brand new rk3588 a fire breathing monster Beast that absolutely requires active cooling yet there's nothing in this box except a pair of antennas cottus has a heat sink and fan kit but it's sold separately why to get you to cough up another 25 dollars that's a real scumbag move for 250 dollar board if you forget the heatsink your new toy is worthless and before you say that anyone that sloppy deserves what they get you should first off have a little decency to your fellow humans and second off know that caught us the company that makes the product forgot the heatsink that's why I couldn't feature this earlier once the Edge 2 stops ruling its silicon this is is the smoothest sailing I've ever experienced in a single board computer The Edge 2 doesn't come pre-loaded with an OS instead it's got this self-provisioning tool called oo what's this well you plug in a monitor plug in a keyboard type in the Wi-Fi pick an OS I think it's your choice of Ubuntu armbian or Android and Oho automatically downloads on packs flashes and updates to our selection then goes away this utility makes it even better to not ship with an OS pre-installed and that processor holy macaroni rockship has been milking the rk3399 which was when it released a mid-range processor for years and then out of nowhere they drop a flagship Market leading chip with triple the power triple the efficiency double the GPU double the RAM and stacked to the sky with peripherals like 500 megabit Wi-Fi and Ai coprocessor and like a hundred high bandwidth interfaces Android 12 absolutely flies on the Edge 2 and out of the box is thinking the most Play Store games for lunch as for ports you get two USB 3 and 2 displays since it's still one of the few boards to have dual mode DisplayPort the symmetrical layout is really clever they're all mid-mount it means everything is going to fit on the edge instead of gpio pins you have flat Flex sockets and these let you add three more cameras two more displays over 60 gpios and even more it's got Pogo pads on the bottom to break out power USB and I squared C so you can make like snap-in expansion modules the price is very high the documentation is very low and I'm still waiting on important add-ons like the Lipo charge controller that said if you are not a low-level developer and you just want a tiny PC that gets big numbers I still feel comfortable giving what I'm seeing here the gold medal of mediocrity and that's it if I haven't talked you out of buying these products I put all the links down below if you want your product featured in the future well you shouldn't but if you insist contact Partnerships voidstarlab.com let me tell you I had an absolute blast making this episode but I gotta know if you enjoyed watching it do you want more Shiny Toy Reviews or should I stay in my lane and get back to making 3D printing videos flap your fingers down in the comments section thanks again to polycam for sponsoring this episode and I implore you to try the app yourself at the link below you will be delighted remember to use the promo code Zac 20 for Pro discount but Mega thanks to the voidstar lab patrons like lab scientist Callan Christensen Ike and Robin Handelman who keep my lights lit while I bite the hands that feed me the dental dam between my lips and corporate ass starts with our collaborators the suits ruined our fun come around at Alan Reiner command what the Chuck Caster the catboy creality online store and schleppy the schwagster I hid their names somewhere in this gigantic episode I don't even remember where I put them snort out your nose for our quote unquote hysterically named lab assistant supporters azundo wielder of iron Eater of shrink powerful CCH Granville Schmidt Eddie Joshua dovin sunburnt cat one handful and I have to speed this up no one gives a [ __ ] about this part one handful of beans Cameron's swords Birds aren't real wake up sheeple bernad SXP Kyle Fisher Matt and reach together forever so whoever varka dempsers a cornbread [ __ ] my dog is a bear ghost of breadstormer period clock Thomas B Myers Danny devoid of Life Cole Don good lady nap queen of lemons Victor of the great Citrus Wars the jelly Bob dobbington Ashley Coleman Colin J Webb is the only name on this list that makes me go toy boat toy boat toy boat storm bee designed Dimitri Lair the colorful fish Lydia K Ethan Gomes oral Neta bump tickly 69 Zach but spelled wrong quantum foam king shaming Wireless 603 quantumly Tangled vicarious nerdgasms Marxism the benevolent misanthrope stabs babington oh you're trying to pull a fast one on me Boulder Creek yard James cats Emma the great trans rights Onyx plague little Bobby table's Michael Roche Michael regular Ryan Gooler Trump did nothing wrong scroto saggins Danny McGee call sign carrot Stephen six foot six figure six-pack Schulte Max luck says they'll teach you Epson Talent Democratic Socialist in a pretty righteous dude Kevin DeGraff Clifton Henning the under ball oh burundoc 3 Iron rain Rusty flute [ __ ] nugget Roger Pinkham of the great star theaters and foreign isakaya of my hero Chan Dax Earl very fine dumpster fire protagonist Bill schooler Jonathan Levy Nathan Johnson and my name is Nate but I'm curious to see the maximum length of a patreon display name specifically to mess with Zach Friedman thanks for watching I hate you all and I hope to see you in the future oh damn it I forgot about the wallet it did go a little flaccid but that doesn't seem to have affected its ability to hold cards the bottom elastic strap seems to be made of stronger stuff than the sidewalls yeah my gut check is that this is not durable enough for a decade of service but I've made a mental note to report back in 2023.

Channel: Zack Freedman

Views: 1,280,929

Keywords: DIY, zack friedman, zach friedman, zach freedman, voidstar lab, voidstar labs, 3d printing, diy projects, unboxing, reviews, tech review, amazon tech review, stupid gadgets, dumb gadgets, weird electronics, aliexpress review

Id: tkuppWvICLM

Length: 47min 13sec (2833 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 28 2022