Thoughts from the Foothills

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, and Javier Soto. Thoughts from the evening: Presence & Poise John: Why don't Angels want just look

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 of the night, "If you are a startup and you do only do one thing, what

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! Parts & Pieces ClickOnce Installer ClickOnce is a technology that allows you to install a Windows desktop

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 a friend) who has had severe cerebral palsy since birth. He is very smart (taught himself 5

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 very well. Teleconferencing software has a feature called acoustic echo cancellation or AEC for short which is

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 sensor in sunlight where IR interference often makes the sensor malfunction. We wrote a simple application to

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 work. Along with me, two pALS I've been working with were also invited - Gal Sont and

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 the collective wisdom of the Seattle startup community. Two thoughts I took away from the workshop are

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 with your eyes. Now let's look at how we do it and what's next. I'm describing a

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 -- but it was definately the biggest and most visible. Everyone in the company was invited to take

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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 young. Our local mall is in the backyard of Microsoft's main campus and has prominent Microsoft and

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 I was using Reflecta from nodejs. When I controlled RocketBot during Maker Faire, the logic was half

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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 Arduino libraries that control the Drive Base and Rocket Platform. Source code for the communications protocol (Reflecta)

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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 some form of osmosis. Photos from the San Mateo booth It was a bit awkward trying to

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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 my shop from some previous research I did looking for a power solution for a Quadcopter. These

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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 use it indoors at Maker Faires and other events and also because I want it to fit

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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 be the beginning of a multi-year project... After launching a few rockets in our back yard, I