Did You Know: There Is Now an Electric Screwdriver With a Camera in Its Tail That Reads the Screw for You

HONG KONG - Did you know that there is now an electric screwdriver that looks at the screw before you do? The Arrowspace S1, from the Hong Kong toolmaker Arrowmax, has a small HD camera built into its back end. Rest it over a screw head and it works out the drive type and the exact size, then lights up the matching bit in its case. Arrowmax calls it the “world’s first AI electric screwdriver with eyes and brain,” New Atlas reported.

The trick that makes it work is mechanical. Next to the lens sits a thin metal pin that slides out with a switch. The Verge called it a “precision contact probe” that extends and rests on the surface of the screw, so the camera is always at the right focus distance. With screw heads that small, a millimeter of drift is enough to blur the shot, and Arrowmax “fixed that blur problem with a metal pin instead of more code,” Sarang Sheth wrote in Yanko Design.

Image: Arrowspace

The picture goes to a phone app, which does the reading. According to Yanko Design, the app runs a YOLO object detector that Arrowmax trained on its own collection of tens of thousands of real screw photos, and it covers 12 common head profiles today. The recognition runs on the phone with no internet connection, and TechSpot reported that the company says its engineers collected every training sample themselves. The app shows the actual image next to its verdict. “You see exactly what S1 sees,” the company says on its product page.

Screenshot: @TechSpot on X

Then the case takes over. The aluminum Smart Case holds 52 S2 steel bits and has a 2-inch color screen that displays the result. An LED next to each slot lights the recommended bit in green and an alternative in yellow, New Atlas reported. At the same time the driver sets what Arrowmax describes as a safe torque for the screw it just identified, to cut the risk of stripping it.

Image: Arrowspace

Arrowmax says the idea came from watching people work. “From our work with repair technicians and DIYers, we kept seeing the same three problems: stripped screws, difficulty identifying screw sizes, and trouble finding the right bit,” the company writes on its website.

The driver itself is a 6.7-inch aluminum stick with a small OLED that shows battery, torque level and direction. Electric torque runs from 1 to 10 kgf·cm, and when the motor runs out of strength the S1 switches to manual, rated for 30 kgf·cm by hand, according to Yanko Design. Its 600mAh battery is rated for about 900 screws or 90 minutes of work and recharges over USB-C in roughly 70 minutes. Only the identification step needs the phone. The motor, torque control and displays work on their own.

Image: Arrowspace

The campaign went live on Kickstarter on Oct. 20, met its goal within 24 hours and has since passed it by more than 10 times, TechSpot reported. By Sunday morning it had 942 backers. The Verge put the screwdriver alone at around $79 and the bundle with the lighted case at around $129, and said the S1 is not expected to ship until April 2027 at the earliest. As with any crowdfunded product, that date is an estimate.

There are limits. Twelve profiles leave plenty of screws uncovered, and Sheth wished for better handling of JIS cross-head screws, the Phillips look-alikes found in a lot of Japanese electronics. Arrowmax says software updates will widen the list. It is the same team that in 2021 made the SES Pro, a screwdriver that read a twist of the wrist to decide which way to spin. Five years later, its screwdriver reads the screw.