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).

National Engineers Week Foundation is a group that works to encourage students to get excited about studying engineering and technology- a cause that I strongly identify with. Their new “College Edition” competition recognizes third-, fourth- and fifth-year engineering students. A single winner is chosen from each of the participating professional engineering organizations. I’m honored to announce that I was selected as the first annual “New College Face of Engineering” for IEEE-USA (The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers). Don’t expect to see my face plastered on any billboards anytime soon, but it’s still exciting to be recognized by such a prestigious organization – I’m proud to call myself a member of IEEE.

Read the press release on the IEEE-USA website, or download a PDF version.

Yes, that’s me with the Arduino Team at Makerfaire!

If you follow me on twitter, then you’ll certainly know that I spent last weekend in New York City for the 2nd Annual Open Hardware Summit and the 2011 World Maker Faire. I covered the Open Hardware Summit for element14 Electronics (hence the copious tweeting). You can read all about my time at the open hardware summit on my element14 blog. Check it out! In addition to covering the summit, I was also there to enjoy all the amazing talks, and to demo my sudoglove controller, which is naturally all open source.

Makerfaire took place the following weekend, and was equally amazing. I spent much of the time “geeking out” at all the booths, and trying to check out as much amazing technology as I could. I got the opportunity to meet several people in person with whom I had previously only communicated online. On Sunday, I worked at the Makerbot booth, demoing our exciting new MK7 Extruders. It was great to finally show these off, because I had been working with them for much of the summer. I could talk on and on about all the amazing things I did, but you’re probably better off just checking out the photos I took. A slideshow is embedded below, or you can view them on flickr.

Wait… one more thing. Arc Attack, a group that makes music using lightning and tesla coils, performed the Doctor Who theme song. I filmed it and put it up on my secondary youtube channel. You do subscribe to my secondary youtube channel, right? Click Here to Watch the Video.

Conveniently, the towel rack in my apartment recently broke right off the wall. My first thought was: “I can fix this with a Makerbot!” After the initial excitement subsided, I made a quick model in google sketchup using some measurements I had made with a pair of calipers. As the pictures below show, my first two attempts didn’t quite work (the green and orange prints). I couldn’t figure out the size that I needed for the rod opening, since I was measuring the broken bracket and not the rod itself. I also quickly discovered that the wall retainers for the screws were not flush with the wall, and that I would need to add a cut-out in the rear of the bracket to fit them. But, I eventually figured it out and I now have a working towel rack again.

You can download the design files for this piece on thingiverse, though they probably aren’t very useful to you unless you have the same towel rack as me…

view slideshow

I hope all of you celebrated Earth Day this past Friday! Last week was Earth Week at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum in New York City, and I headed down there for 3 days with other members of Cornell University’s Sustainable Design Team to teach kids about ways they could be more sustainable!

Since our group consists mostly of engineers and architects, we put a “modular building” spin on our exhibit. We built a huge modular structure that the kids could play in, and we brought gumdrops, marshmallows, and toothpicks to allow the kids to build their own modular structures! It was a tremendous amount of fun, and I had the opportunity to teach hundreds of kids about sustainable engineering, and how engineers can help to change the world. People are often quick to assume that going green means using renewable energy, but there are many other aspects to being sustainable. One other important aspect of being sustainable involves using more environmentally-aware building techniques, which is what we tried to emphasize.

On the third day, we led several workshops on composting, recycling, and planting. I was really impressed by how excited all the kids were to play with compost, find earthworms, and to identify which items could be recycled or composted. Each of the kisd got to pot their own plant and take it home with them.

The entire weekend was a great experience, and I can’t wait to do more things like this in the future!

Tons of pictures and more info are available on CUSD’s website. Check them out!

A few weeks ago, I discovered the totally awesome Amp Hour Podcast. I even blogged about its awesomeness! Anyways, they have a segment on the show called workbench of the week, and I figured I’d send in my workbench photos. Let me give you a little background… The photo gallery after the break shows the electronics work area in the Computational Synthesis Lab where I work at Cornell. I’m involved in two projects: Machine Metabolism, and Stochastic Modular Assembly (Programmable Matter). I worked on Machine Metabolism heavily up through last year (and submitted a paper to IEEE Robotics that is currently pending acceptance to the next issue), but am currently focusing on the programmable matter project with Jonas Neubert. Scattered around the bench you can see a whole bunch of flex circuit boards that I’m currently in the throes of assembling. I’m using the toaster in the background of the images to “bake” the components onto the boards using solderpaste applied via a lasercut stencil. These flex boards will fold up to form the “building blocks” that you can see on the stochastic modular assembly page of the CCSL website. This corner of the lab has been my home away from home! Check out the pics after the break.

view slideshow

The talented Jonas Neubert, an associate of mine from Cornell’s Computational Synthesis Lab, as well as the organizer of Ignite Ithaca, has been kind enough to edit and upload the video of the Ignite Presentation that I gave about a month ago. Watch the video below to learn what it really means to be an engineer (the answer may surprise you!)

Be sure to check out the other ignite talks too!

Enlighten Us. But make it quick!

That’s the motto of the Ignite Speaker series. The premise is that a bunch of presenters go up in front of an audience, and talk about something cool. Each person gets 5 minutes, and 20 slides that automatically advance every 15 seconds. This Saturday will be the second Ignite event in Ithaca, NY, and I’m going to be a presenter! The title of my talk is “Building an Engineer”.

Here’s my blurb:

Engineers are responsible for solving some of humanity’s greatest challenges, from space travel to poverty. Engineers spend their days building robots, firing lasers, and crashing test cars into walls. Clearly being an engineering is freaking awesome, and yet America is falling behind other countries in our supply of national engineering majors. In an age of disposable cell phones, non-user-serviceable cars, and alarmingly small quantities of legos, kids simply aren’t being exposed to an engineering education as early as is necessary to generate interest. I will talk briefly about how I created my own engineering experience growing up, how I try to educate prospective engineers, and how open source hardware and software could help spur a new fix-it generation.

If that sounds even a little interesting (and you’re over 21… it’s in a bar), be sure to come by the Pixel Lounge this Saturday (November 6th, 2010) at 6PM to check out Ignite Ithaca! If you can’t make it, don’t fear – all the talks will be filmed and put up online.

You can get more info at the ignite ithaca website, and you can RSVP on the facebook event page.

Hope to see you on Saturday!