RedBull Creation – Alpha One Labs – Meet the Team

Alpha One Labs has been selected to compete in the 1st ever RedBull Creation challenge! 16 teams will have 72 hours to create something functional and on July 10th from 3-7pm show and tell everyone in McCarren Park about it.

We’re doing some pre-planning in an operation we’ve dubbed RedBull Amoeba.  Get involved by joining our Google Group.

And now meet our crack commando A-Team:

Psytek, an inventor and engineer, began his career in technology and electronics at age two when he bit into an electrical wire. He put together his first computer with parts he found off the street and has more black hacker t-shirts than can fit in his urban apartment which naturally led to his co-founding of the hackerspace, Alpha One Labs. His current projects include a real-life flying saucer, 3D persistence-of-vision hologram display and a thousand other ideas for things that will make life easier like Grripz and NagNation

Robert is a software engineer by trade, and a hardware hacker by hobby. Robert has taken the lead on offering instructional classes at Alpha One Labs; teaching members and non-members iOS development, Eagle CAD, and basic electronics. He also was instrumental in launching Alpha One Labs first commercial product: the Carduino, a wallet-sized Arduino-compatible platform with integrated USB plug and prototyping area. His current projects include an Arduino-controlled BBQ smoker and a nixie tube calculator.

Ari Douglas is a recent law school graduate with numerous technical degrees, including one in lasers (photonics). After a decade of work in various technical fields, including running a sport-car tuning business, and inspired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation he decided to apply his experience to the legal realm. He hopes to contribute to their mission of fighting for cyber civil liberties.

Konstantin is an electrical engineer by birth, and a mad scientist by hobby. After earning his electrical engineering degree at Union College, he went to work at West Point where he mentors cadets to be better engineers. One of Konstantin’s projects was building a MAME arcade cabinet for Alpha One Labs, which required engineering a custom encoder interface. His current projects include designing a robotics platform, remote control solutions, and building an RFID security system.

We’re very excited to be in this competition and we hope you can be there.  One of the constraints of the challenge is that each team must bring in 200lbs of stuff to start out with. Since we have the home team advantage we want to get creative with our 200lbs of initial stuff by opening it up to you.  If you have a part or thing that must be in our creation, send it in and we’ll work out best to incorporate it.  We’re hoping to get a minimum of 10lbs of stuff from 20 different sources to have a good variety of stuff.

Send your box to:

Alpha One Labs – RedBull Creation
231 Norman Ave #312
Brooklyn, NY 11222

As boxes come in we’ll put them towards our 200lbs!

And as a side note, according to RedBull, we’ve already won 1st place for “amazing at following directions!”, that is just the tip of the iceberg. So watch out, we’re in it to win it and have fun!

Good luck everyone!