Interview with Nick Such

Featured Engineer

Nick Such

Nick Such - CEO of AwesomeTouch

How did you get into electronics/ engineering and when did you start?

I built my first circuits as a third-grade project with some help from my dad, who likely had some help from my uncle (EE with AT&T, worked on the NJ Relay Service). I learned HTML in 4th grade, and build my first electric bicycle in middle school. These fed pretty well into my two loves: interaction design and electric vehicles.

What are your favorite hardware tools that you use?

Soldering iron, hot glue gun, DMM.

What are your favorite software tools that you use?

Notepad++, Pro/E, Inkscape, GIMP, InSSIDer, 360 Panorama, RedLaser

What is the hardest/trickiest bug you have ever fixed?

While I started off in preschool playing games on a Commodore 64, my first “real” computer ran the original version of Windows 98. This version had minimal support for USB. When I received a new USB game controller for my birthday, I wanted to use it on my computer. So I upgraded (one INF and DLL at a time) from Win98 First Edition to Win98 Second Edition.

What recommendations would you give to young students aspiring to be engineers?

Be curious and become a hacker. I’m not talking about stealing passwords and credit card info, that destructive. Rather, realize that you have the ability to change the world from the state in which it is presented to you into whatever state you envision (see link). There is so much technology floating around you that can be easily modified to suit the world’s needs. Poke around, and find ways to make new and better tools for humanity. Learn that failure is a key tool for engineers: how can we know what something is able to do until we push it to it’s limits? And when you get there, to that limit, trace your steps back and use this newfound context to learn why things are the way they are.

What is on your bookshelf?

Here is a list of my books, as well as books on leadership, and lots of Michael Crichton

Do you have any tricks up your sleeve? (special way to analyze circuits, special process you use to make something, etc.)

It has amazed me at how the simple ability to “translate” between engineering-speak and normal human language can be a pivotal factor in the success of my projects. My superpower: explaining really complex concepts in every-day terms. I can thank my grandmother for this. She recently received her first computer as a gift, and I was the family member in charge of teaching her how to use it. I hadn’t realized how my power-user habits have numbed me to the frustrations of a computing novice. For instance, trackpads create a non-intuitive disconnect between where a user is touching and where the on-screen interaction is occurring. This was, however, a very illustrative case of the superior ease-of-use of well-designed touchscreen devices.

What has been your favorite project?

I spent five years working with the University of Kentucky’s solar car team, and it was awesome. Every two years, we design, build, and race a solar-powered car in track and cross-country races, competing against university teams from around the globe. I started off as a driver (finally, a good reason for being shorter than 6-foot!) and progressed to leading the team my final year. I had the opportunity to work with a super-smart team of engineers (ME, EE, CS) and business people (we had to raise $200k for parts & race fees), as well as the fiercely collaborative solar car racing community. Our team frequently traveled to K-12 schools in Kentucky to promote engineering, and I loved meeting a generation of kids who have fully accepted that they will be driving electric or hybrid cars (or some other type of vehicle). And as one of our races traveled from Dallas, TX, USA to Calgary, AB, Canada, I am now officially an international race car driver! (yet, sadly, that pickup line has never worked for me).

Do you have any note-worthy engineering experiences? (blowing up things, getting shocked, etc.)

Our third-generation solar car used 162 lithium polymer batteries, which were carefully controlled by an active protection circuit in a ventilated, flame-retardant box. After seeing the YouTube videos of fires emitted from 6-cell laptop batteries, we decided that we wanted to do a destructive test on our Li-Po cells. We wanted to better understand its limits for racing purposes, as well as the dangers to which we would potentially be subjecting our drivers (who share a vehicle compartment with the batteries). So, we imparted some mechanical damage to a cell and continued charging it at 20 amps, well after it had reached it’s 4.2V upper limit. Within 30 minutes, the cell failed, and emitted a 6-inch flame that was incredibly difficult to extinguish. After seeing the destructive power of 1 cell, we took care to ensure that our pack of 192 was very well protected and monitored throughout the race.

What are you currently working on?

AwesomeMap is a wayfinding application for large-format touchscreens that’s used in the hospitality industry. In short, we make giant touchscreen maps that help visitors discover cities. Our team was initially focused on hardware design, after developing a novel method for producing through-window multitouch displays, but shifted to software as our customer’s needs changed.

I’m also working with a local high school student who is developing a miniaturized R/C version of the University of Kentucky’s latest solar-powered car.

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

The rate at which humanity is creating electronic data is staggering: nearly 2.5 exabytes per day (source). While there is lots of great information in that stream, the amount of noise is staggering. We are noticing, even for local place information, picking out the signal from the noise is a challenging task. Increasingly, we will be focusing on better methods for aggregating and curating this information, as well as effective ways to present it across tomorrow’s varying platforms.

What challenges do you foresee in our industry?

Interaction with software and data will become a seamless part of our lives. Whether it’s on large-format interactive displays or mobile devices, this data will increasingly be accessed through gesture-based input methods. This requires a major change in the way we design interfaces, as well as choices for how much we allow technology to proliferate our daily lives. While the “Day Made of Glass” video from Corning provides an excellent proposition for the software that my company develops, I think there is a balance to be found among the connected world and the natural and human beauty on this planet.

And while electric vehicles are very cool, I’m more interested in the system-level changes in transportation that can be facilitated through more intelligent software. Energy will be one key driver in our future transportation choices, but with the growing ubiquity of wireless connected devices, human productivity is a far more significant factor. Unless we want to continue to lose thousands of lives each year from distracted driving, we must find a better way to move people around while allowing them to efficiently communicate and perform their daily tasks.