Home : Portfolio of Selected Projects

Car Drive-by-wire Throttle - The Cobra drive by wire throttle system was designed in Autodesk Inventor and machined in aluminum by a CNC machine shop. It fits a brushless motor into a Ford small-block V8 induction system with eight 50mm throttle bodies. The use of drive-by-wire allows more elaborate throttle control mappings, special features like rev-matching while downshifting, and smoother engine control.

Disco Dance Floor - Designed with Grant Elliott, the Disco Dance Floor is a 8' x 16' floor with 1,536 LEDs and custom controller PCBs. The floor can be controlled by a variety of software programs, including mathematically generated patterns, realtime audio visualizations, and animations.

The floor has been featured in Popular Science, Pro Lighting News, and countless internet blogs. It spawned Dropout Design, LLC.

Game of Life - The Game of Life Boards are a scalable platform for cellular automata visualizations. Each board contains 16 LEDs in a 4x4 grid, a microcontroller, and a communications and power distribution network. With the available firmware, they execute Conway's Game of Life. Boards can act alone, or can be plugged into other boards to create a larger display.

Cobra Dashboard - Designed with Jay Torborg, the Cobra dash evokes the ultimate in retro sophistication. It was planned in Photoshop and brought to life with black anodized brushed aluminum, red leather, and laser cut lettering.

Drop-safe - The Drop-safe device provides a means for rappellers to descend a long distance with minimal rope and maximum safety. The design won awards in the Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies Solder Design Competition in 2004.

NewsFlash - an ambient visualization of the state of world news. It attempts to aggregrate hundreds of articles from hundreds of news sources into an abstract pattern from which a person can, at a glance, get a feel for what is going on different parts of the world. The website is a mockup of a physical LED interface.

COPIS Megalodon - The Constant Pressure Injection System rebreather is an extremely simplified closed-circuit rebreather control system. It is designed as a robust mission-critical system for basic recreational depths.

Sensetable X - The Sensetable X hardware is intended to replace the Ellie's Enchanted Garden consumer game hardware used in the Tangible Media Group's Sensetable project. It is a complex microcontroller-based mixed-signal RF system.

Turtle Remote Observation Camera - A fully-controllable remote webcam installed off the coast of Hawaii on the a coral reef. This allows researchers to gain unique insight into the cleaning habits of endangered Green Sea Turtles.