In 2012 I came found a news article talking about an issue that the UK was having finding qualified technology workers that could take the place of retiring engineers and employment demands. It was beginning to look like an entire generation would be educated for careers that would not exist by the time they graduated. While working as a tech writer I began to notice that, due to it’s relatively small population, the UK tech marker was a good indicator of things to come elsewhere. However, amid this alarming news I read that a group of people offered a solution and created the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The idea was that computers should be available to everyone, but the technology should also be on display and hackable rather than just a black box with usage warnings.
I instantly fell in love with this idea of demystifying technology and empowering people to take a more active role in our future. This also aligned with my frustration of trends within the mobile device industry of minor tech spec updates over real groundbreaking innovation. So I decided to try and become a part of the change that I could see coming and joined the Maker community.
I had experimented with electronics before and was quite familiar with building computers, but when it came to Microcontrollers, they were very expensive and not super accessible. I managed to figure out how to make useful analog logic circuits for some of my early wearable tech projects in 2005 but it was a time consuming and rather expensive hobby. Not long after I joined the Maker community I came across Adafruit and SparkFun and began to see that things had changed since my early electronics experiments. Access to advanced hardware was not only becoming less expensive, but also much easier to program with well documented languages. I dove head first into the Arduino infrastructure and set out to build my first robot from scratch. This project got me involved with Adafruit as a regular participant on their Show and Tell through Google Hangouts.
Hack-E-Bot came from a challenge that I set for myself. I began to see that building a robot was not hard, but the challenge would be to build an inexpensive robot that could work with any control hardware and could be built by a 7 year old. So the goals for this would be to build a robot that could avoid obstacles for less than $50 and it had to run on parts compatible with Arduino, Raspberry Pi, or any other control device that someone would use for a robot. This path lead me to developing relationships with manufacturers, machine shops, and fabricators to find the best parts at the lowest price. My decision to use continuous rotation servos to drive the robot connected me with FeeTech who I then passed on to Adafruit when Limor saw me using them on the Show and Tell. With a working prototype I began to look at curriculum from Lego and First Robotics to ensure that my robot could do the same things. While still working full time at Xerox, I began to pursue crowd finding to manufacture the first large batch of Hack-E-Bots. Crowd Supply helped to get me the funds for 250 of my Hack-E-Bot kits that sold to schools, teachers, and individuals. I had hit all of my goals with a $35 manufacturing price, snap together construction, and components that would work with any control device. All of the fabrication and kit assembly work was done by me and I realised that I never want to personally manufacture kits again. Since then I have worked with manufacturing companies that managed to bring the price of kits like Hack-E-Bot down lower than I could ever do on my own.
When my department at Xerox bagan to layoff staff at the end of 2014, I decided to see if I could turn my work with the Maker community into a new career. I had already worked at SoDo Makerspace to manufacture Hack-E-Bot and now I was helping to shape it into a model for STEAM education and rapid prototyping. It took us less that one year to go from relative obscurity to the most well known Makerspace in all of Washington state. Through SoDo Makerspace I got to work with amazing people and develop most of the relationships that I maintain today. In my wildest dreams I could never have imagined the places this community has taken me.
In mid 2016 my friend Nina, from Pop-Up Science, became the director of education at the Living Computers Museum. I was asked to consult with Living Computers Museum as part of SoDo Makerspace to help build out the Labs for hardware related projects. It was not long before I joined Living Computers Museum as a contractor to develop workshops and field trips for the Labs. I still maintained an active presence with SoDo Makerspace, but focused more of my resources into education development rather than the fabrication work that was my primary income to that point. I was finally able to work full time with schools and teachers to figure out how to get children excited about STEAM and Computer Science education like I originally set out to do so many years ago.
It has been a long and turbulent road, but things could not have happened any other way and I am proud of what I do and the people’s lives that I have touched. There is so much more to do and I can’t wait to get started.