Skip to main content

Giveaway: If the force is with you, this badass lightsaber could be yours

Star Wars Gadgets + SaberForge Giveaway : Tech For Less

To celebrate May the Fourth, we took a look at some of our favorite Star Wars toys and gadgets in this week’s Tech for Less. Not only that, we’re giving away one badass lightsaber courtesy of our friends at Saberforge. Check out the video above for a closer look at each pick, and don’t forget to enter below for your chance to win!

LittleBits Droid Inventor Kit

LittleBits toys are aimed at giving anyone, regardless of age, the opportunity to dip their toes in building, coding, and modifying their creations. The Droid Inventor Kit follows this same philosophy, with the added benefit of looking suspiciously similar to a certain Astromech Droid by the name of R2D2. With step-by-step instructions from the accompanying app, you’ll have your completed droid in no time. From there you can begin to tinker with different pieces, completing missions, adding skills, and learning all while having fun.

Related Videos

Battle-Worn BB-8 by Sphero with Force Band

This BB-8 by Sphero, along with the Force Band, is about as close as any of us will ever get to using the force. With the band strapped to your wrist, you can control BB-8, pushing it forward, making turns, and returning to you at your will. Make an obstacle course for it to race through, program custom missions easily with an app, even set it to patrol on their own to ward off any bad guys. Every Jedi deserves a droid buddy, and BB-8 is one of the best (and cutest).

BB-8 USB Car Charger

For those of us who prefer using our wheels over our heels, this BB-8 Car Charger makes for a proper road trip companion. If fits in most cupholders, and comes with an adapter for the less common sizes. With two 2.1 amp USB ports, it’s got enough charging power to juice up two tablets simultaneously. Best of all, while you explore the galaxy, it’ll occasionally make Droidspeak with you and swivel its head from side to side to take in the view. BB-8 makes for good company when podcasts just aren’t enough to liven up the trip.

Desktop Lightsaber Lamp

Who doesn’t love a good desk decoration? This lightsaber lamp goes above and beyond that, giving you some serious mood lighting. It comes in Kylo Ren, Darth Vader, and Luke Skywalker saber designs, so choose your side wisely. At 31 inches tall, this lamp definitely isn’t going to go unnoticed. It’s also plenty bright enough to set the stage for a long gaming session, YouTube video, or just on your bedside table.

Saberforge Light Saber

Saberforge makes some of the most authentic, convincing lightsabers this side of Tatooine, and with a polycarbonate blade and aircraft aluminum, it can withstand a serious beating. These sabers are great for battling, cosplays, and just adding to your collection. They’re completely customizable, too. Using their online saber builder, you can choose your blade length, color, pommel, emitter, and so much more. There’s something extremely satisfying about wielding one against evil (or just your buddies), that words alone cannot express.

Editors' Recommendations

Optical illusions could help us build the next generation of AI
Artificial intelligence digital eye closeup.

You look at an image of a black circle on a grid of circular dots. It resembles a hole burned into a piece of white mesh material, although it’s actually a flat, stationary image on a screen or piece of paper. But your brain doesn’t comprehend it like that. Like some low-level hallucinatory experience, your mind trips out; perceiving the static image as the mouth of a black tunnel that’s moving towards you.

Responding to the verisimilitude of the effect, the body starts to unconsciously react: the eye’s pupils dilate to let more light in, just as they would adjust if you were about to be plunged into darkness to ensure the best possible vision.

Read more
Meta wants to supercharge Wikipedia with an AI upgrade
the wikipedia logo on a pink background

Wikipedia has a problem. And Meta, the not-too-long-ago rebranded Facebook, may just have the answer.

Let’s back up. Wikipedia is one of the largest-scale collaborative projects in human history, with more than 100,000 volunteer human editors contributing to the construction and maintenance of a mind-bogglingly large, multi-language encyclopedia consisting of millions of articles. Upward of 17,000 new articles are added to Wikipedia each month, while tweaks and modifications are continuously made to its existing corpus of articles. The most popular Wiki articles have been edited thousands of times, reflecting the very latest research, insights, and up-to-the-minute information.

Read more
The next big thing in science is already in your pocket
A researcher looks at a protein diagram on his monitor

Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. But that computing power comes at a price -- literally. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.

But lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. You've probably heard of this before. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer -- and often for a fraction of the cost.

Read more