September brought with it an avalanche of new tech. Between Apple’s Surprise and shine, Meta Connect, IFA and Dyson Unveiled, we were inundated with gadget announcements. If you’ve managed to keep up with it all, well done to you. But for anyone seeking a recap, you’ve come to the right place.

Below, I’ve rounded up all the hottest gadget announcements from September, ready for you to browse. You’ll find the most exciting of the Apple announcements, headed up by the brand’s long-awaited first foldable phone. There’s also Meta’s camera-free smart specs, which may or may not have been created in response to the unwelcome ‘pervert specs’ moniker that’s been circulating of late. Dyson’s first ever toothbrush is there, too, in all it’s wildly over-engineered glory. And that’s just the start of it.

On Oct. 1, Google plans to hitch a ride on a SpaceX Transporter 18 rideshare flight, entrusting the mission with a test satellite it hopes will prove durable enough to start doing some light AI work while orbiting in space.

This isn’t exactly putting a data center in space — a much-hyped concept that AI entrepreneurs like Elon Musk have been touting over the last year —but it’s not not doing that. The satellite, which The New York Times reports is called “MWP” and which it describes as about the size of a refrigerator, won’t be running any huge medical research studies or beaming back streaming data. It will be low-powered, running off solar power, and designed just to test the concept of AI computation in space. Google is running the test in partnership with the satellite imaging company Planet and as part of Google’s Project Suncatcher initiative, which was announced late last year.

In a blog post that includes videos showing some of the preparation Google’s research teams have done — such as making sure that TPUs (a type of AI chip) can withstand the vibration of launching into space — the company characterizes this test as a small early step in a long-term moonshot: “exploring whether space could one day host scalable machine learning infrastructure.”

In a post on X, Google CEO asked, “Can our TPUs survive and operate in space? Well, we’re going to find out.”

Finding energy for AI in space

Google explained in the post that one reason it’s going to try crunching AI data in space involves energy. Satellites can access eight times more solar power than earthbound structures, providing a potentially huge energy resource for space data centers, which could bypass the backlash facing data centers across the country.

But that could be easier said than done. Companies like Google, SpaceXAI and Nvidia are all looking to deploy their AI technology beyond the Earth’s surface, but face some basic physical challenges: Any data center satellites would need to be built to withstand radiation, extreme temperatures and the physical stress of getting there. They’d also need to avoid dangers from an increasingly crowded orbital sky filled with other satellites and debris.

Google seems to be moving fast, with plans to continue advancing Project Suncatcher with some tangible results in the next few years; that’s assuming its October test is successful, and things keep moving forward. One of its next milestone goals, for 2027, would be to start testing high-bandwidth laser links after launching two more AI satellites with Planet. Communicating with lasers, Beals said in his Google post, is a lot harder than it sounds. “Maintaining the necessary connection requires extraordinary precision, similar to hitting a coin-size target from miles away while both points are in motion,” he said.

A data center backlash solution?

One reason space data centers sound so attractive to tech companies is a massive public backlash against building new data centers or completing ones that are in the process of being built. A pro-data center PR campaign backed by tech giants may not be enough to counter negative sentiment and protests aimed at data centers that help enable data-hungry AI technology.

Protests have sprung up across the country over energy and water use, pollution and the potential physical effects on those who live near data centers, among other issues. It could also be a point of voter discontent heading into this year’s midterm elections.

Putting data centers in space, presumably, could sidestep the issue of communities not wanting data centers nearby. But it will be costly, and there’s no guarantee that the business model of data centers in space will pay off enough for tech companies to make it viable, said Mahdi Eslamimehr, executive vice president at Quandary Peak Research.

“Proving that chips work in orbit is not proving a business model,” Eslamimehr said, and it won’t lower anyone’s electricity or water bills anytime soon or replace current data center projects, even if the business of data in space proves workable. “I welcome the experiments, but I expect everyday AI services to remain overwhelmingly dependent on terrestrial facilities in 2027 and 2028,” he said.

“A promise about 2035 does not pay an electricity bill in 2026,” he said.

Omar Gallaga has covered technology, digital culture and other topics for outlets including CNET, NPR, WIRED, Texas Monthly, MSNBC, Consumer Reports, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic and the Austin American-Statesman, where he was a longtime tech reporter, editor and podcaster. He lives in the Texas Hill Country.

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ProfessorBoots has tons of experience 3D-printing remote excavators that can climb boxes, scoop dirt, and crush cans. His latest version parks a three-axis camera in the cab and wires a chair that copies the layout of a full size machine, so a look to the left turns the camera left and a pair of pedals drive the tracks. The result is a backyard digger you operate as if you were sitting in a Caterpillar, only without diesel and without twenty acres.

CADDXFPV sent him a GM3 combo in February, a 46-gram gimbal that tracked head movements using Avatar HD goggles and held a 19-millimeter camera by pitch, roll, and yaw. He installed the first unit on a wheel loader and tested the Goggles L, which cost $199. At first, gazing around simply turning his head seemed bizarre in the greatest possible ways. The articulated steering on that loader shifted the vision in ways that his head did not, and the original cab simply would not fit over the camera. He let the idea lay for a time until that larger, tougher excavator was ready.

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Fitting the gimbal required a significant expansion of the cab. He imported the camera model into CAD, cloned the previous cab, removed the most of the floor, and created a new frame with a hint of design. Because the video transmitter warms up enough to potentially burn skin, he added a printed enclosure to keep a fan above it rather than beneath the lens. An aesthetic bar across the front was supposed to clip the camera when tilted, but it didn’t work out, so he ripped it out, checked clearance, and reprinted the part. The FPV gear draws power from the same battery as the excavator and operates independently, thus the same camera works on both the ESP32-robotic and the conventional radio versions.

First-person view made some jobs much easier, like being able to glance down and see the pins instead of guessing from across the yard while coupling a bucket or thumb certainly sped things up. In reality, he drove the machine to a neighbor’s card shop with a $10 payment and a handwritten message simply because he could. Nobody answered the door on his first visit, but a later knock ultimately got him in. Many RC builders do not get to compose sentences like this.

Even with the handheld transmitter, he felt like he was playing with a toy. He desired swing and dipper on the left stick, boom, bucket, and thumb on the right, and footprints on his feet. Early on in the project, two ESP32 boards communicating via ESP-NOW accomplished this without the need to hack open a radio. Early joysticks were simply assembled from a game controller with some printed extensions and springs purchased from Harbor Freight. The joysticks were dead in the middle, making fine motions clumsy, and the springs were simply too soft overall. He rebuilt the sticks with 10K potentiometers and bearings, superglued down the handles, and replaced the soft springs with firmer ones. The code now samples the resting point at boot-up and sets it as the center, so worn pots and printed parts that shift slightly over time do not cause problems.

Pedals began with a basic potentiometer pivot that allowed for proportional speed control. What happened next was a bit of a hack: both feet lifted the entire base off the ground. Then he added a printed lock, moved the spring supports further out to enhance resistance, and replaced the soldered wires with tidy plugs, allowing the entire pedal unit to be easily removed from the chair. It turns out that the signal dropouts he was seeing were caused by a residual board setting from the Bluepad32 days. Swapping the sketch to a standard ESP32 development board significantly reduced the lag. Later, a small custom PCB arrived and resolved the tangled wiring by mounting everything on neatly organized terminal blocks. He also added a fuse, battery mounts, and a power switch to prevent anything from being soldered directly to the chip.

The chair’s PLA began warping in the summer heat, pulling a spring plate completely out of shape. So he recreated the chair pieces in PETG but preserved the existing pots and bearings. Not long after, he created a desk-mounted version with the same controls, but without the office chair. Yeah, it turns out you can build the entire thing for about $60, assuming you already have an excavator and a chair. To be honest, he prefers the cheaper Goggles L more than the costly pair he purchased later. The pricey ones leaked light and required some printed shims to fix.

The ESP-NOW has a somewhat lesser range than a typical radio, but it nevertheless managed to control the machine in the yard from indoors. The problem was that it only worked for about thirty minutes before becoming clogged with dirt. His brother tested the chair and reported that it felt similar to a real excavator. Later, he used the same goggles to check under a porch to see if a neighbor’s cat was hiding; he had to tape a headlamp to the goggles to get a good look. Voltage sag killed the feed on the first pass, however fresh batteries fixed it no trouble. Unfortunately, that particular location wound up on a shortlist alongside crawl spaces and wasp nests.

Meta showed off a bunch of new things coming to Muse at Connect 2026 earlier this week. If some of those features caught your attention, you might not have to wait for the wider rollout to try them. Meta has opened an early access program for upcoming Muse features, and signing up is very simple. All you need to do is ask Muse.

The company shared a prompt on X that users can send directly to the AI assistant: “Can you let the Muse team know I want to be part of the Muse early access program?” Send that message, and the team will receive your interest in joining the program. That doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll immediately get every new Muse feature Meta is developing. But it does put you in line to potentially try some of them before they’re released more widely.

There’s a lot coming to Muse

The timing makes sense, given just how much was announced at Connect. One of the more unusual additions is a digital avatar, which will let you have an actual video conversation with the AI instead of being limited to text or voice. But the bigger changes are about what it can do for you. More shopping partners and connectors are on the way, while the Mac app will soon be able to interact with your computer and complete tasks on your behalf. The idea is to make the assistant feel like something you can give a job to and leave it.

And you won’t necessarily need your phone or computer to use it, either. Muse is also headed to Meta’s AI glasses, where a wake word will be enough to get its attention before giving it a command. Put it all together, and it’s a pretty substantial expansion for an AI assistant that only arrived earlier this month.

Meta wants the AI crowd to try it first

Early access programs are nothing new. What makes this one a little more interesting is who Meta seems to be looking for. Instead of testing these features with a random group of people, the company is inviting users to put their hands up themselves. That naturally attracts people who are already curious about AI, probably use several different assistants, and have a pretty good idea of what works and what doesn’t.

That could be particularly useful when you’re trying to catch up in an increasingly crowded space. We’ve already seen how Muse compares with ChatGPT and Gemini in areas like AI image generation. Getting upcoming features in front of that same AI-savvy crowd could give the team genuinely useful feedback before everyone else gets them. And if you happen to be part of that crowd, there’s no complicated sign-up process to worry about. All you have to do is ask.