Hi, I'm Alan

My latest project is the BeepLab One, a tiny portable music looper that you can program yourself.

BeepLab: make music, learn software, and have fun.

Some other things I've built:

• A user interface for operating 80,000 pound autonomous excavators.
• A safety science platform and wearable device used by package handlers at several of the world's largest companies.
• A social wearable device that’s sparked conversations at a conference with over 1,500 attendees.

Photo: Nick Chelyapov.

Let's meet

I do freelance development work every now and then, and I would love to talk about your project. Email me at aargondizza@gmail.com to get in touch!

Other ways to say hello:

• Linkedin
• Instagram
• Twitter

I live and work in San Francisco, CA. If you're in the area, say hi!

Autonomous Excavator UI

Yeah, I know, the UI is blurred. But it's the secret sauce, OK? This me running a live teleoperation demo at CONEXPO 2020. Photo by Erol Ahmed / Built Robotics.

Built Robotics upgrades off-the-shelf heavy equipment with AI guidance systems that make them fully autonomous. I led the team that developed the first customer-facing user interface for running and managing these robots. The interface connects a modern web front-end to a complex autonomous system.

This is the UI, no secret sauce.

I led the project since its inception; my roles included product definition, system architecture design, and software development. I also provided design critique, code review, and team management and mentorship when the project grew beyond myself.

For more information, see www.builtrobotics.com.

Alike

Photo: Marcelo Coelho Studio.

Alike is a wearable device that brings the power of social networks to the physical world. Each Alike device holds a unique user profile. When two people come into close proximity of each other, their devices exchange information and glow to indicate if they are a match.

3D model of wristband enclosure as designed for injection molding. The enclosure is made of two identical parts - each half is capable of mating with itself – to cut down on mold costs.

From development kit... to alpha release! Left: a hacked radio SoC development kit prototype. Right: the resulting PCB I designed, used for product deployments and user testing.

Final product ready for deployment. Enclosure shown above is final injection molded enclosure.

Alike was used by attendees of O’Reilly Media's Solid Conference held in San Francisco, June 2015. We manufactured over 1,200 wristbands for the conference in partnership with ProtoLabs, ANT, Formlabs, and Seeed Studios.

Alike is a product of Marcelo Coelho Studio. My roles on the project included firmware development, PCB design, mechanical engineering, design for manufacturing, and interaction design.

Resolution

Photo: Marcelo Coelho Studio.

Resolution is an interactive light installation where physical pixels are round units, rather than squares. Each pixel is magnetic and can be moved around on a steel wall. Colors change as you touch the pixels, cycling through warm and cool palettes.

To build this piece, we used design and manufacturing techniques commonly used to produce consumer electronic devices. An injection-molded enclosure held components together; the printed circuit board inside was professionally fabricated and populated. I was responsible for the mechanical design and assembly management of the piece.

Photo: Marcelo Coelho Studio.

I presented the studio's work on Resolution to graduate students at the MIT Media Lab as a part of a course called Hands-On Foundations in Media Technology. The course provides exposure to basic skills needed to perform research at the Media Lab; my presentation was part of the Design and Fabrication module. The video can be viewed here, along with videos from the other modules in the course.

Presenting the studio's work on Resolution at the MIT Media Lab. Here I'm showing some of my early sketches from the brainstorming process.

Resolution was commissioned by the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, where it is permanently installed.

See the Marcelo Coelho Studio website for more information.

Life Cheat Sheet

When I have too much stuff I want to do, I try to turn into a computer program. I had this idea one summer when I was working two jobs. I called it “Life Cheat Sheet.” The idea was you could just look at this thing and know exactly what to do next. Eventually it would be a piece of software, but it could be prototyped in paper.

The goal was to make sense of a set of things I'd like to do regularly: abstract statements like “I would like to do underwater yoga more often.” Ok, great, sounds wonderful. Classes are two hours long. How often will I go to class? I’ll say every week, or a period of seven days. But then I make a new years resolution to read a new book every week, and that takes another few hours out of my week somewhere, but where?

I think the golden feature was to be able to press a button and find out if it would actually be impossible to do all the things I wanted to do. I’ve since calmed down a bit. These days I’m more “I’ll eat when I’m hungry” than “I’ll eat with period 1/3 days for 30 minutes each instance.” Regardless, it was a fun design project to work out. The full-res photo is on my Tumblr.

Custom Skateboards

I've been riding, building, and dreaming about skateboards since high school. Before I was even interested in engineering, I saw a friend's board and thought "hey, I could probably make one of those." So I did.

The first board I made was inspired by a Sector9 shape. I traced the shape from a folded paper design, used a jigsaw to cut it out, and rounded the edges with some rough grit sandpaper. It was pretty clunky.

Since I built my first board, I've refined my process. I use a router and template to get smooth edges that I can endlessly reproduce. I’ve built a number of skateboards for myself and for friends.

Hydraulic Hexapod Robot

A proof-of-concept robot demonstrating the feasibility of combining McKibben-style artificial muscles with a hydraulic system to provide actuation for a small mobile robot.

The robot sports an onboard low pressure hydraulics system sold by MTH in Austria. The hydraulics system is designed for powering a model aircraft's landing gear; we thought it would be cool to power a robot with it. In the video above, a fishing line gives the robot a weight reduction of approximately 300 grams, to compensate for an oversized battery and hydraulic reservoir.

This was developed for a design project in Cornell University's Laboratory of Intelligent Machine Systems. Special thanks to James Paulos, Michael Meller, Rashi Tiwari, and Prof. Ephrahim Garcia.

Hopping Robot Simulation

For a class in legged locomotion taught by Andy Ruina at Cornell University, I wrote a matlab script that simulates a hopping robot. The control algorithm was developed by Marc Raibert, founder of Boston Dynamics.

The matlab simulator solves the equations of motion in three separate flight phases, then joins them together to form one smooth trajectory for one gait cycle. It passes the final velocity and height from the first gait cycle to the second, and so on, adding the new trajectory data to the old data.

The problem setup and problem statement show how the three phases of flight are defined. Simulation results show that the controller is capable of stabilizing the motion of the hopping robot.

Problem Statement(PDF)

Matlab Simulation(text file, save as m-file to run)