Things I've Created


Fuzzy Logic is my answer to what electrical engineering education could be like.
It's the most intuitive circuit-play kit you can find.
Each plush piece has a socket for an electrical component, and giant magnetic connectors making it easy and fun to build circuits.

Thanks to the Life Long Kindergarden Group at the MIT Media Lab.


I built a waterproof strobe light and added it to my shower.
Now it rains discrete droplets that hover in midair before your eyes.
Tuning the strobe makes the drops flow backwards into the shower head.


I built this pair of glasses with a speaker for a lense, to train myself to echolocate.
By listening to the reflections of sound off nearby objects, I can perceive things using my sense of hearing. The glasses are my training program.


Worked on POV bicycle wheel displays at MonkeyLectric LLC. Shown here featuring an image from the movie Sita Sings the Blues.


I'm welding with a stick welder I made. It's built out of old microwaves.
Tim Anderson and I built it together. Here's how you can build one, too!


I built this pink chopper bike using my homemade welder, and ride it in Boston's chopper bike gang, SCUL.
The doll on the front probably gets the most comment -- she came from Ipanema Beach in Brazil, and is hence the Girl from Ipanema (after the song by the same name).


This is a wind powered battery charger I made while working at Makani Power, a clean wind energy startup.
The propeller provides electricity and charges a set of LiPoly batteries.
I designed the boost converter circuit to convert the low voltage AC input to 12V DC.


I created this reactor for mixing vaporous ethanol, water, and nitrogen, for the MIT Biomolecular Materials Group.
I gas-tight TIG-welded it out of 3/16" stainless.
The idea is to see if the material we're growing can turn any hydrocarbon (gasoline, ethanol, what-have-you) into hydrogen fuel,
which would eliminate the need for hydrogen refueling station infrastructure for the cars of the future.


I made these powered skates in an afternoon. The next morning, I woke up and found my project on Wired, Make, and Engadget.


I wanted to play with persistance of vision, so I made these microcontrolled LED POV Pasties.


I made a sunshine alarm clock to wake me up with natural light like the sun during the dark cave-months of the Massachusetts winter.

It's shown unfinished here, but involved an Atmega48 microcontroller and a whole stack of solid state relays
so I could wake up to modes like sunrise-fade-on, mad flickering, or replays of my favorite games of Snake.


I added a simple amplified voice recorder to my toilet, so that whenever the toilet is flushed, a pre-recorded message booms out.


I cast my hand for a stick-shifter knob in my sweetie's car so he could hold my hand no matter how far away I am.


Not enough friends coming over? Try a new doormat!
This was a very interesting case study in usability and design. And delight.


Mark Tobenkin and Alex Hornstein play with the 3D blackboard
MIT's Experimental Study Group sponsored me to build, where it's
currently in use as a multivariable calculus instruction tool.

By drawing curves on the three different planes, one can very easily visualize surfaces.

I got the idea after hearing my multivariable professor complain about being
unable to satisfactorily draw 3D shapes on normal blackboards.
Made with a lasercutter.


I put this on my dorm room door so people would know at a glance whether or not I was contained inside.


I made this little robot out of part of an old fiberglass windsurfer mast.
It rolls on velcro tracks on my ceiling and creates abstract line drawings.
I call it "Robjot"


I made this outdoor fireplace/stove out of an old propane tank, some pickaxes, and an office chair, with Tim Anderson. The instructable is here.

 
These are two FIRST robots I helped design and build, in high school.

Do you like what you see here? I encourage you to

Non-hardware



I love waking up to music, and youtube has more of it than my own harddrive does.
So I wrote the YouTube Alarm Clock webpage. You can wake up to music too!


The Flashbulb Memory Project is a collection of the vivid, indelible memories that appear
like a scene frozen in time, known to psychologists as "flashbulb memories".

You can read them on the site, or send yours in!


I wrote a perl script to handle looking up process IDs to give to the unix utility "kill", so I don't have to.
It's a little more subtle than killall, which is why it's useful.

I call it murder [download].


Also check out my instructables! (Projects I've documented online).