FlowIO-Platform

My mission is to democratize opportunities for innovation and creative expression to people from all technical and socioeconomic backgrounds.

I pursue this mission through the development of novel open-source hardware and software tools and platforms that are both powerful and easy to use by people, to help them unleash their creativity. Platforms like Arduino, Raspberry Pi, and Scratch have democratized and transformed the fields of electronics, portable computing, and interactive graphics, respectively. Thanks for platforms like these, a project that 20 years ago may have taken a week of work by a small engineering team, in an expensive lab, today that same project can be done in a weekend, by a high school student in their living room, and for a fraction of the cost!

I wanted to bring a similar kind of democratizing transformation into the rapidly growing field of programmable materials, and to make this field just as easily accessible to researchers, makers, and artists, as electronics and computing have become today. I wanted to enable people from all backgrounds to be able to bring their projects and ideas to life rapidly and easily, without being limited by technological, educational, or monetary constraints. That's why I developed the FlowIO Platform, and am now expending this into a complete modular set of platforms including TendonIO, HydroIO, FlowIO, and MagnetoIO - which together make up SoftRobotics.IO. And to distribute this development platform to the world in a way where it is truly accessible to all, I am also introducing a new hardware distribution philosophy that I call "public domain hardware".

The idea of public domain hardware is that hardware developed under this model only has creators and users but never any owners. Public domain hardware can be used freely by anyone, for as long as they need it without any limitations on duration, but once a person is done using it, he/she would send it to someone else who wants to use it, or return it back to the creator(s) for upgrades and repairs. And then the creator(s) would put it back into circulation. I am distributing FlowIO completely for free under this model of public domain hardware and to people who can do great projects using this platform.

Each FlowIO device costs several hundred dollars in parts, and the number of devices I can provide to the world would entirely depend on the amount of donations received. All donations received will be used entirely for making and distributing FlowIO devices freely to the world, and this would also help me understand whether this philosophy of public domain hardware would work in practice, or whether it is just wishful thinking.

On the SoftRobotics.IO website, I will have full transparency over how much donations I have received (if any) to support this mission, how the money has been used, how many devices have been made, and where each device has been given.