LeafLabs had the pleasure of working with Tellart and Visionaire (sponsored by Cadillac) to create the interactive art exhibition, Autoportrait, which featured an assembly robot drawing portraits of gallery patrons. Autoportrait is on view to the public at Cadillac House through November 4, 2016!
What Happened to My Headset Jack?
Have you wondered how information is carried over a modern interface like USB-C, or if the manufacturer of your smartphone decides not to provide a 3.5mm headset jack, how audio is routed? This post is intended to address these questions at a high level: I’ll embed various links to additional information, for those who care to explore further.
Open Letter to Future Graduates
Hello Soon to be College Graduates,
I have advice for you, especially if you’ll soon be graduating in the next year. I am a recent graduate from MIT starting my career at LeafLabs, working on sensor interface and FPGA design. There are so many students who are starting to think about life beyond school so I wanted to share the knowledge I gained when trying to enter the workforce. I really enjoy what I do and what I am working on, but while I was still in school, I was very uncertain about how to find a job that would be right for me. With the combination of exploring options in and outside of school you can prepare yourself and feel more confident leaving school behind.
Project Ara: Erring on the Side of Epic
Written by Andrew J. Meyer, LeafLabs CEO
An early Project Ara phone boots for the first time!
Among my favorite moments during the three years we worked with Google to build Project Ara, was reading the deluge of internet comments following the press coverage of Google I/O 2014. The responses were split roughly 50/50 between “shut up and take my money” and “I’m an engineer and this is impossible...and stupid.” We knew we were on to something. We also knew a lot more than any of the commenters about what the technical risks and challenges actually were.
It was past the time that we should have gone home, earlier that spring, when we huddled around a lab bunch, inserted a few fully assembled modules - display, processor, and battery - into a sleek aluminum frame, and saw the Android logo pop-up for the first time on a Project Ara phone. I think the battery died pretty soon after that, which was longer than we expected. Engineering had barely started 6 months before, and for the first time, I changed my technical opinion about Paul Eremenko’s grand vision of a modular phone from “probably impossible,” to “let’s get it done.”
Thanks, Paul, for a vision that was absolutely worth chasing. Thanks, Regina and Ken, for pushing us to err on the side of epic. Thanks, Ara and Seth, for inviting us to be a “part of it.” Thank you, Google, for having the courage to keep looking beyond what’s “obviously possible” for new products.
Most of all, thank you to the tremendously talented engineers, both inside and outside of LeafLabs, who reliably pulled rabbits from hats, repeatedly solved problems the internet specifically deemed unsolvable, and for being a team that I’m proud to have been a part of.
