angelinvesting Pitch Practice with Seattle Angel Conference Another Seattle Angel Conference, another pitch practice. We invited Seattle's local startups to come and practice their pitch in front of three seasoned Angel investors to get their feedback; John Sechrest, Elaine Werffeli,
angelinvesting PR for Startups On June 20th, I attended the Seattle Angel Conference Meetup "PR for Startups", a round table by Kevin Pedraja of VoxusPR and Bill Hankes, Founder & CEO of Sqoop. Best questions
wheelchair Wheelchair Design I've talked a little bit about the hardware bits -- how we get the wheelchair to move at the computer's request. But what else is behind the wheelchair app? Let's take a look!
How do I get started with Eye Gaze? I received an email the other day, paraphrasing: I was very intrigued by the attached file article in this morning's New York Times. I have a good friend (22 year old son of
Making a Skype or Beam call using a synthesized voice So you want to make a Skype call or Beam into a remote location and you're using your computer to generate your voice. You try it out and you find it doesn't work
Eye Gaze Outdoors, Wear a Baseball Cap This week at the Microsoft Ability Summit 2015, we held another hackathon to work on technology for people with disabilities. The team I worked on focused on the problem of using Tobii's EyeX
pALS in a Workshop I was invited to the ALS Association / Prize4Life Assistive Technology Workshop last week to discuss the work the Microsoft Research Enable team is doing along with about two dozen other people doing similar
3rd generation wheelchair interface Prelude: Seattle Hardware Workshop I recently attended Seattle Hardware Workshop and learned quite a bit. Thank you @marcbarros for considering our work here in Microsoft Research a 'startup' so we could benefit from
wheelchair How: To drive a wheelchair with your eyes (Generation 2) In my previous post, I covered how Microsoft found the motivation to help create technology for people living with ALS and how we started our first project: creating a wheelchair you can drive
wheelchair Why: To drive a wheelchair with your eyes This summer, Microsoft hosted a company wide hackathon called //oneweek. This wasn't the first hackathon here at Microsoft -- I had already participated in three over the past few years just myself --
ibeacon iBeacon Warfare Today I took my three and six year old daughters out to a local mall in Bellevue, WA to buy shoes, eat frozen yogurt, and scan for iBeacons. You have to start them
programming Quick diversion: how to use ngx-queue In my last blog post, I noted that I was working on Reflecta which is a communications protocol for talking from a PC to an Arduino. I also alluded to the fact that
robots Much work on RocketBot and Reflecta I've been busy updating the source code and design documentation for Rocket Bot. You can now find: Design files for the base plates, pneumatic system, and electronics on Github. Source code for the
robots RocketBot at Maker Faire 2012 RocketBot made appearances at Maker Faire San Mateo and Seattle. The audience was great fun, especially the occasional 10 year old whiz kid who seemed to just have learned robotics and electronics from
robots Adding the launcher electronics Time to wire everything up. My first challenge was working out how to turn on the 12 volt 10 amp air compressor from an Arduino. I have some Power MOSFETs, STP55NF06L, sitting in
robots Putting the pneumatics together While our project's genesis started from the Make Compressed Air Rocket design, I have a couple of design changes in mind. The launcher needs to be miniaturized -- both because I want to
robots In the Beginning: Paper Air Rockets Two years ago, we gave my son Joshua a compressed air rocket launcher kit from Make Magazine. You wouldn't think that a bicycle pump, some PVC pipe, and a water sprinkler valve would