http://brentbushnell.com Main Site Sat, 21 Jan 2012 13:27:27 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For the past few months I've been mentoring kids and presenting to classrooms on how fun it can be to work as an engineer. Earlier this year I took on an apprentice via the Spark program. For 10 weeks, Alex, a 13 year old from East LA, ... http://brentbushnell.com/2011/12/13/getting-kids-interested-in-stem/ After a decade in Los Angeles, "the industry" seems to have finally got its hooks in. Eric Gradman, Dan Busby and I were cast this year representing Syyn Labs as the new on-camera technology designers! We worked with Ty, Paige, Jillian, Ed, Johnny, Michael and the rest ... http://brentbushnell.com/2011/10/13/extreme-makeover-home-edition/ Google has just launched a global science fair initiative to help encourage young kids to get involved with science and engineering. Syyn Labs spent the last few months helping to create some of the promotional materials for the campaign including a Rube Goldberg Machine made out of science projects ... http://brentbushnell.com/2011/01/11/google-science-fair/ After noticing that the GE Color Effect lights had been so completely reverse engineered by Robert Quattlebaum and Scott Harris Eric and I decided to bang out a quick Christmas Eve project to control them from an Xbox Kinect. Modified Arduino code to read color values over the ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/12/27/hacking-christmas-lights/ I've taken a few trips to China these past few years and have some favorites and tricks to share. This post is a work in progress. Always get the business card of your hotel. The language is difficult and worst case you can just give your taxi driver ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/12/07/notes-on-visiting-china/ After unending frustration calibrating an FTIR multitouch device Eric and I decided to take a different tack for a navigation game we were building. We took his giant circus ball and mounted it on casters, then pushed an optical mouse up against the bottom of it and voila! a ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/09/13/big-ball/ The Syyn Labs team had a good time helping DieHard batteries, Young & Rubicam, James Frost & Zoo Films with their latest commercials. In one video we obliterated a battery with an elephant gun and it still started a car! In the second, we turned 24 white ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/07/10/diehard-commercials/ The Spring 2010 Brewery Artwalk will be taking place in downtown Los Angeles the weekend of 4/17/10-4/18/10. Artists will have their lofts open from 11am-6pm both days. If you haven't been, the event is a blast and a fun way to see much of the eclectic offerings ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/04/10/artwalk-spring-10/ Naming companies is so difficult. The number of constraints a name must satisfy only seems to grow each year. Between the dearth of available domain names, acceptability in other languages and international markets you might go into, it's surprising we don't have more names like Zzyzx. Here are ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/03/29/company-naming-resources/ The minds (and bodies) of Syyn Labs spent the past three months building a huge, two-story Rube Goldberg machine during which a piano gets dropped and a TV is smashed with a sledge hammer. Why? It's the centerpiece for the latest music video from the band OK Go ... http://brentbushnell.com/2010/03/01/ok-go-rube-goldberg-music-video/