HDDG 31: Solar / Optical

Come enjoy yummy snacks and bevs and hear fascinating talks by these kickass engineers.

Kitty Yeung - Tech-Fashion and the Wearables Industry
Joe Grand - Searching for the Light: Adventures with OpticSpy

Kitty Yeung (www.artbyphysicistkittyyeung.com) is a physicist, artist, maker, fashion designer and musician based in Silicon Valley, California. She currently works as a creative technologist and senior program manager at the Garage, Microsoft. Kitty’s earlier career had been focused on hardcore scientific research and academic training while pursuing artistic endeavors through painting, music and graphic novel creations. After finishing her PhD in Applied Physics from Harvard University and conducting research at Intel, Kitty found the perfect way to integrate art/design with science/technology via tech-fashion design.

Kitty's talk will give an overview of the wearables industry with demos of technology-embedded garments. She will discuss a few ideas for future development.

Joe Grand (www.grandideastudio.com), also known as Kingpin, is a computer engineer, hardware hacker, teacher, advisor, runner, daddy, honorary doctor, TV host, member of legendary hacker group L0pht Heavy Industries, and the proprietor of Grand Idea Studio. He has been creating, exploring, and manipulating electronic systems since the 1980s. Joe recently created OpticSpy, an open source hardware module for experimenting with optical data transmissions. It captures, amplifies, and converts an optical signal from a visible or infrared light source into a digital form that can be analyzed or decoded with a computer.

Joe's talk will provide a brief history of optical communications, discuss OpticSpy's development process and operational details, and give some demonstrations of the unit in action.

After the talks, there will be demos, community announcements, and socializing. If you'd like to give a 2 minute demo/ community announcement, please see the organizers when you arrive to get set up.

A community announcement includes looking for a project partner, a job, offering a project/ job, the announcement of your startup launch, your Crowdfunding pitch, etc.

We're looking forward to seeing you Thursday, June 7th, at 6:30p!

Code of Conduct (https://hackaday.io/project/28093-code-of-conduct)