The First Annual Cornell Startup Fair was Star Wars-Themed
Yesterday was Cornell’s first annual startup career fair. Given Cornell’s recent winning of the NYC Tech Campus Bid (with which I was also heavily involved), the startup fair was very well timed. About a year ago, while meeting with some members of Cornell’s Career Services Offices, I was expressing my dismay at the fact that the ordinary career fairs at Cornell are all for huge companies, students must dress up, and you don’t really get the opportunity to connect with the companies you might be interested in working for. So, after a few months of planning by lots of amazing people, we made the startup career fair into a reality! Approximately 40 startup companies (mostly from the NYC area) attended to recruit amazing Cornell talent. During the course of the fair, I managed to simultaneously work as a volunteer and as a recruiter representing MakerBot Industries (I consult for them part time and worked for them last summer). The fair was a huge success, with thousands of students packing the engineering atrium for about 5 hours. Checkout the local news coverage below (I was featured in the piece), and this article from the Cornell Daily Sun (in which I was quoted).
I’m very proud to announce the release of the 3rd Generation MakerBot 3D Printer – “The Replicator“. I’ve been working for MakerBot, designing the all-new electronics for the Replicator for several months now, and it’s very exciting to see it finally released. The team that I’ve worked with at MakerBot has been absolutely amazing, and their hard work truly shows.
As always, the machine is completely open source, and all the schematics, firmware, etc, will be available soon for all to enjoy! Once that happens, I’ll be sure to do a follow-up explaining all the electronics, and why they are so amazing (in this humble engineer’s opinion). For now, enjoy a demo of it in action below, and check out all the press it’s been getting!
This is one that I’ve been excited about for a long time. When element14 asked me to put together a holiday special, I knew just what to do. This episode is the most technically complex so far; it covers non-inverting op-amp circuits, low-pass envelope detection filters, buffers, power management, and some clever programming. Because of the complexity of the project, fellow Cornell Engineer, Brian Schiffer (whom you might remember from this article where we were both featured) co-hosted this tutorial with me. The end result is pretty spectacular – a chain of 50 LEDs reacting dynamically to music. The twist, however, is that the chain propogates color information from the center, resulting in a temporal visualization of the music. The schematics, programs, and parts list are available for download below:
Back in October I was invited to speak at Cornell University’s first annual TEDx event. The theme of the evening was “rethinking our society”, so naturally, my talk focused on how open source concepts could be used to re-imagine how our world works. Be sure to check out the video below, and visit my TEDx portfolio page or flickr to see some photos from the talk.
