“I am bad-ass enough to actually do this.” Jonathan Foote is co-organizer of Dorkbot-SF, has a PH.D in electrical engineering, and makes objects that change the way we experience things. He received this month’s Awesome Fellowship for his clear and compelling proposal to build robotic desk lamps. From his proposal: “Remember Luxo Jr. from the Pixar short? Like that, but for real…All the components are off-the-shelf available: servos, microcontrollers, full-color high power LED lights, and remote control via RF so multiple lamps can move in choreographed synchrony. The whole thing would be a platform for more cool things, like web control, open choreography software, you name it. And naturally it would be open HW/open source, yadda yadda.” We’re especially curious about what the yadda will entail 🙂 Congrats Jonathan!  We’ll keep the Awesome World posted on your progress!

Congrats Ken Murphy; your project is Awesome! The Board of the San Francisco Awesome Foundation is proud to announce our first grant goes to Ken Murphy’s “A History of the Sky”. It’s local, it’s awesome, and Ken’s proposal was clear, enthusiastic, and specific about what an Awesome Foundation Grant would be used for (equipment for installations). “A History of the Sky” is a time-lapsed visualization of the San Francisco sky over the course of a year. Ken mounted camera equipment to the roof of the Exploratorium and it an image every 10 seconds for a year. As Ken wrote, “The results are assembled into a large mosaic of time-lapse movies, where each tile represents a single day, and all of the days are in sync.” Future goals include obtaining  equipment to display the project at different venues and eventually a permanent space for the exhibit. Ken’s work can also be supported through his Kickstarter campaign. (Great video of his proposal can be found on Kickstarter) “History of the Sky” in progress will be shown at the Maker Faire in San Mateo May 22-23. The SF Board of Awesome would like to acknowledge that there were many compelling submissions for our… read more →

Hello World! The Awesome Foundation-San Francisco had its kick-off meeting last week and we are psyched to start awarding $1K grants to men and women with awesome ideas! We’re focusing on Bay Area projects/submissions and our first submission review meeting will be mid-May. If you have a project that rocks, be sure and submit your idea by May 11, 2010 for our chapter to consider. Can’t wait to see what’s out there!