I’m a dedicated maker with a long history of making things,I do electronics,high voltage, SW, welding, mechatronics, pneumatics, flame , pyrotechnics, and Internet of Things.  My philosophy can best be summed up by this piece done by my good friends at Ogilvy .

Or a TedX talk I did on the importance of Play

or this very lame rap song I did

Here are some projects I’ve done in the last few years:

• • Colony Builds: Several maker projects from the Discovery series ‘The Colony i was in… . Some are documented here .. many more if you Google John c colony discovery)

• • Pumpkin King:Giant radio controlled pneumatic pumpkin robot (co-built with Homer Wells

• • Timecycle: Giant carousel mobile art car for Burning man(co-built with Homer Wells) (movie here) (I’m a burner.. the ultimate Maker experience !)

• • Veremin –   I made this Visual Theremin (Veremin) with the help of my friend Va  using Tensorflow Posenet,  and TensorJS. You can try it yourself here https://veremin.mybluemix.net from your phone, tablet or laptop
    
  • Pink Elephant  here’s a touch operated pink smoke blowing clay elephant that I helped build for my friend Mike G to give to Barbara Eden of “I dream of Jeannie”.. It’s demonstrated here by Mike’s daughter Tessa
  • Drone movie of our house – using my friend Henry’s drone, we made this cool movie of our house .
  • Season of the Roundest Moon This is an interactive collaboration I did with my friend Jenn Karson for the Illuminated Forest . It’s a 3D sensor attached to a small hanging sculpture. A projected 3d image rotates as viewers spin, tip and pay with the hanging sculpture.
  • Play Machine – consulted on and curated this project run by Ogilvy around IBM’s tumble page see http://ibmblr.tumblr.com/post/102458202346/the-play-machine-its-alive-the-targets-been  This was a device that physically showed social media activity in a fun visual and physical way. It used some of our IBM infrastructure.  Here’s a summary video that Ogilvy did https://vimeo.com/127095937 we won a Webby for this work in 2016 !
  • FIRE !  I love anything related to fire and have built many flame effects include this Reubens Tube. this Cremora and Pyrodex smoke ring
  • SPORT – chemo-port protector for sports. I designed this with my friend Jake Blend to help our young friend Storm as he works his way through Leukemia. This device which is 3d Printed from carbon fiber reinforced PLA allowed Storm to play baseball and basketball while getting treatment .
  • Astronomy – i’m an avid but very amateur astronomer with a celestron 8″ Schmidt-cass . Here’s a movie I made of a partial solar ecplise in our back yard.. well.. actually the solar eclipse itself was a bit further away than that, but you know what I mean 🙂
    
  • Eel: I lead a team that built a 30 foot touch sensitive light-up keyboard for Mike Gordon, the Bass Player from Phish. I designed and co-built the device for the Mike Gordon band which toured it around the US in the spring of 2014 . You can see write-ups on the piece in Wired, here, and on my blog.
    
    I then helped my freind Colin  with a new version called the Reel… you can see it here.
  • Floorish: A team of us created an interactive light up floor piece called “Floorish”  for the City of Burlington Firehouse Gallery  as part of the User Required Makers show.   . It uses two Kinects to track folks movement in light and allow them to play games like Pong with their feet. You can play with Flourish here http://floorish.mybluemix.net (thanks to Nick Perez for help on the Gui !)
    
  • Lakebrite– http://www.echovermont.org/lakebrite – i helped initiate this project .. and consulted in this big data visualization project unveiled in December 2016 at the ECHO museum in Burlington Vt  . The work was supported by a generous 100k$ grant from Google. We’re going to make the interface of this open to data scientists and artists   . here’s a simple early test vid we did https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpo-OifPXas you can see a simulator to Lakebrite my friends created here.
  • Stampo: i helped rebuild of this Rube-Goldberg contraption for Ben Cohen of Ben and Jerry’s . The device mechanicals were built by a firm in California, but never worked. I lead a small team to redo all the mechantronics. Ultimately it was rebuilt by a team of professional automation guys from Ben and Jerrys.
    
    
  • Lake craft: I help drive a project with friends Nina and Nick (who did the code)  to map the Lake Champlain Basin into  Minecraft for kids to explore. You can read about it here
  • High Speed Video: Here are some cool high speed videos that my son Gabe took using an Edgertronics camera i borrowed.
  • I love fire ! .. Here’s a Rubens tube flame sculpture  I built a few years back
  • Water Paintings:Dynamic ‘water paintings’ metal and my computer controlled LEDS for an upcoming exhibit at the Burlington Firehouse Gallery show which is bringing together Makers and Artists
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  • Collaboration with my friend Prof  Mike Morrill of University of Pittsburgh. I wrte a program to create 10,000 shapes of cosntant area, Mike chose his favorite 10 then laser cut them out of heavy aluminum plate. He then  painted them. They were on exhibit in the CMU Art gallery.
  • LED Hoops: Computer controlled hula hoops – (see pics in this blog post)
  • SMS triggered flame thrower (see pics in this blog post)
  • Musical Tesla coil – I LOVE TESLA COILS ! My friend Scott is the master builder who helps me put these together.. early vid here
  • LED headbands: Early instructables version of LED headband
  • and many, many others
    
• I’m a huge supporter of the Maker movement.. and would love to help your project in any way i can either on or off camera.,
  • My kids were raised on Make Magazine..!
  • I am a founding board member of Generator. Burlingtons’ first Public Makerspace.
  • I co-created Vermont’s first Makerspace ,Vermont Fablab at the University of VT here I’m an Adjunct Prof.. VT Fablab opened in Jan 2012. We now have a Dimension 3d printer, epilog 60 W laser, nextengine 3d scanner, electronics benches, etc.
  • I co-created of Vermont Makers., the states rapidly growing maker meetuo community
  • I’m a veteran attender of Makerfaires inn San Mateo and NYC and helped organize and lead maker recruitment for Vermont’s first minimaker faire this past year.
  • I’m the MC for Vermont’s FIRST robotics competition
    
• I’m a passionate promoter of engineering, science and art
  • I’ve spent the last 20 years promoting engineering and science in schools, museums and civic groups via my traveling ‘Jolts and Volts’ electricity show. I’ve done extensive volunteer teaching in elementary schools. middle schools, high schools undergraduate and graduate ,You can see varies coverage of that here
  • I have been using social media to help promote engineering, science and the maker ethos.. even to the point of making regrettable rap videos 🙂 see here.. (.I know my singing sucks !)
  • Recently I’ve done lots of public speaking promoting engineering and science careers . You can see links to a few of those talks here
    
• I have 37 years of high tech Industry Experience
  • I’m a senior (so they tell me 🙂 technical expert (I though I don’t always feel like one) in the field of Information Technology. I’m one of 90 IBM fellows from a company of 220,000 technical people (450K total employees) ,
  • I do lots of media work around technology and engineering careers for my company (see here) My company has been very generous supporting my outreach work, and would likely be very supportive of any role I might have in helping you. Even though I would be doing it on my own time, not in affiliation with IBM.
  • I have approximately 60 patents issued or pending and have written/contributed to 4 books n the field of design automation
  • I have an undergraduate electrical engineering degree from MIT (81) and a PhD in computer engineering from CMU (91)
    
• I have a fair bit of media experience with lots of on camera work
  • Play !: I often do public speaking  on the importance of Play.
    • here’s a short vid on some science play i did with ogilvy https://youtu.be/AnjFgSvj3vU 
    • here’s a tedx talk i did 2 years ago on the importance of play ..  https://youtu.be/I-NT1-BdOvI
    • Here’s a piece on play and science i did with Ryan  Miller of the band Guster https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1J1z7dzZzp8
    • And a lame attempt at rapping (I’m so embarrassed)  here.. 
  • in 2009 I costarred in a Discovery Channel technical reality show called “The Colony” 10 of us spent 59 days locked in a warehouse in LA. While the unscripted show was pretty goofy, it did have lots of maker content. I was called “john c” or “the professor” and was responsible for most of the shows more technical builds. The show did well on TV and has been in reruns for several years. . However lame the show was, I still get a huge amount of pleasure from the many emails and city street ids where folks tell me they dug the technical content of the show . I was also invited back to the shows second (and final) season as a technical advisor. The second season was really, really lame 🙂
  • I’ve done a fair bit of on camera media work for my job including this series on my IBM’s Smarter Planet project, this press piece on Internet of things, this prime time IBM TV commercial (filmed in Grand Central Station)
• … I even look like a scientist !
  • A women drew this picture of me during a talk I was giving.. can you believe it ?
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