Interviews from the past year at Hackster.io

Allow me to present six of the most talented humans I’ve ever met. It’s been my immense pleasure to interview these people about their work over the past year; I hope you enjoy these just as much as I did. Presented in order of appearance on the Hackster video channel, because I could never presume to rank them. :)

Jean Rintoul, Spectra (🐦 jeantoul)

Jean is an insightful innovator who works on hard problems, including in the biomedical realm. …

My retroreflective dress is a canvas for light art — and provides a bit of privacy, as well.

A couple years ago, I was playing with some leftover retroreflective fabric with Andy Lee. He’d ordered it from Alibaba to make garments, and we also used some of it to cover our tent while camping. (With headlamps on, we could spot it from hundreds of meters away!) After the trip, that fabric was fairly dusty, but I was entranced by it and didn’t want to throw it away… so into my stash it went.

In March of 2018, I dug it out and made a dress for a light art salon held by my friend Jonathan Foote. I copied the shape from a pair of lightweight wrap dresses that I’d bought in Bali, which are designed to be layered. After some crude machine sewing, this became the Ghost Dress. The retroreflective fabric sends light directly back to its source — so if you place your eye (or a camera) next to the flash, you get quite a show… here’s how it looks with a diffracted green…

This totally counts as pie.

We christened the Hackster.io Glowforge a year ago with Insta-Grahams, and we’re back with another terrible food idea!!

This year, since Pi Day is also a Throwback Thursday, I decided to go old-school with a reference to the Apple Newton. We happen to have these deceptively sugary snacks in the office:

…basically hipster Newtons. And of course, we have them in Apple Cinnamon flavor! So it’s clear what must be done:

I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Mark Frauenfelder and Kevin Kelly on their podcast, Cool Tools — which is exactly what it says on the tin. We ended up with a focus on livestreaming tools, which I use to broadcast video to Facebook and YouTube 3–4 days a week for Hackster.io.

Since a half hour only lasts so long, here are some more sweet upgrades for your maker toolbox!

Tools

Disk Inventory X: I use this all the time, to find out what’s eating up my hard drive. Working with video leaves me with lots of large files; the graphical interface and simple, robust controls help me track down the culprits. …

Yuri’s Night is the annual celebration of Yuri Gagarin, the first person in space! According to Adafruit, this is recognized by the UN as International Human Spaceflight Day, as established in 2011… but I have embarrassing pictures from a year before that.* (The About page indicates that Yuri’s Night has been going since 2001.)

My favorite part of Gagarin’s legacy is this quotation, which is roughly:

“Orbiting the earth in my spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and foster that beauty, and not destroy it.”

How to Celebrate?

Check out the interviews and citizen-science opportunities from my 2016 September in Space project. I talked with Shawna Pandya about being an astronaut candidate, and Brad Kohlenberg about the exciting future of 3D printing in space. …

This is part of a series about last week’s eTextile Spring Break, held in Wassaic, NY. I sponged up a ton of knowledge about integrating electronics and textiles, including thermochromic pigments, soft interfaces, radio technology, and more! Here are my notes from the first workshop I attended.

We had a three-hour workshop on each of the first few mornings (with 2–3 options each time). I chose one on audio tech, taught by Adrian Freed and Martin De Bie. We worked with SparkFun’s Lilypad and Adafruit’s Gemma M0.

We got acquainted with a few Arduino libraries that Adrian has…

Groannnnn.

We just got a Glowforge desktop laser cutter! (More specifically, I got a Glowforge and prayed to the gods of company reimbursement.) Someone was selling her Basic model locally, since she got a discount on a Pro.

Both models will cut/etch the same materials — wood, fabric, leather, paper, and more — but the Pro goes faster and has a pass-through slot so you can cut loooooooonnngg things. We don’t need a ton of throughput, in either sense, so the Basic’s fine.

Out of wrapping paper for last-minute gifts? Use mine! I made this custom, snowflake-inspired design in OnShape.

The DXF files below should be compatible with most laser cutters, but you can also export your own from OnShape (use the sketch, or the simpler drawing). Just set the laser to “etch” or “score” and tile the design. (Note that a densely-packed design may take a while to cut.) Looks great on plain brown paper!

Beautiful | Simple

(Major props to the andybot for using his laser!)