New Piece: Limitless Bad Advice

2025

Acrylic, 3D printing, Raspberry Pi, LCD monitor, various electronics

Limitless Bad Advice confronts our contemporary faith in artificial intelligence by leaning into the dubious nature of its advisory capacity. Rather than offering solutions, this piece provides deliberately flawed counsel on three aspects of human existence: desire, creative expression, and finance. The device feeds a compulsive need for guidance while acknowledging the challenge of authentic advice from systems incapable of genuine understanding.

Operating on local infrastructure via a Raspberry Pi running Google's Gemma model through Ollama, it deliberately abstains from the vast networked intelligence of cloud-based systems. This technological isolation serves both practical and conceptual purposes: greatly reducing environmental impact while creating a closed system that can only recombine its limited training data in increasingly absurd configurations.

Step up and press a button, this device has got Limitless Bad Advice for you.

Fall 2024 Analog and Digital Class Projects!

I can't hold back the variety of designs I get from my Analog and Digital classes at LWHS. The main project is to build (Bluetooth) amplified desktop speakers. Students start with essential electronics prototyping and printed-circuit board design, and in my mid-semester, they are designing a 20-watt amplifier board with a partner. The final step is to build a unique enclosure using primary digital fabrication (laser cutting, 3D printing, CNC cutting). My colleague Jeff jumped in to teach one of the sections this year. Here's a sampling of the final projects from our classes. This set includes Talia, Nola, Matthew, Lily, Stuart, Marcel, Lucy, Kaelyn, Avery, and Safiya.

Adaptive Technology Club

I wanted to share some images from this project I've been supervising. This student, Ilana, has been working in the special needs office in the Oakland Unified School District to adapt toys for students with special needs. Standard interfaces exist for folks with bodily mobility or motor-control differences who need adaptive tech, but the options are limited and very expensive. Ilana and this club of students have been shopping for toys that can be easily hacked to have a specific connector. Once that connecter is installed a variety of interfaces, from large buttons to breath-controlled actuators, can be attached to the toy. Ilana and the group have been helping Chantal, the assistive technology director, build a library of adapted toys for students and families to check out. Here are some images from an adaptive tech club workday in November, where we adapted about 40 toys.

Student Work from the Fall 2023 Analog and Digital Class

A sampling of final projects from my fall Analog and Digital class at Lick-Wilmerding. The project is to design and build portable amplified Bluetooth speakers. Students design and build every part, from the printed circuit board to the custom enclosure. This set includes work by Emma, Kyra, Manu, Natalie, KaiL, KaiS, Nico, Olivia, KaiD, and Taran.

Time to skill up!

Starting this January I'll be teaching metal shop, for the first time, to 9th-grade students. Gotta skill-up. Here's my CNC-plasma / MIG welding warm-up project.