I am Ali Shtarbanov and my mission is to make opportunities for creativity, prototyping, and innovation more accessible for everyone. I develop general-purpose tools and platforms that enable makers, researchers, artists, and designers to rapidly be able to build the ideas and futures they envision. Inspired by platforms like Arduino and Raspberry PI that liberated electronics and computing for everyone, my current work focuses on building and deploying novel hardware & software platforms aimed at liberating soft robotics and programmable materials for everyone. I am a PhD student and HCI researcher at MIT Media Lab.

Selected Research Projects

SoftRobotics.IO

Community website with resources about FlowIO, Soft Robotics, and Programmable Materials

FlowIO Platform

Open-Source Pneumatics Development Platform for control and sensing of Soft Robots and Programmable Materials

Wearable Sanitizer

Open-Source, On-Body Sanitizer for the COVID Pandemic

General-Purpose PCB Designs

Tiny8SSR

A tiny driver board with 8 solid-state relays and a multiplexer for high-power switching applications

Universal MCU Shield

A wiring shield that drastically simplifies wiring complexity during rapid prototyping with most microcontrollers

Vortex Generator Driver

A driver board suitable for any speaker-based vortex generator with up to 6 transducers

FabOptimus

A general-purpose programmer for AVR microcontrollers based on the FabISP programmer

Device Libraries for Arduino/C++

Concepts

MovieNet

Personalized Movie Recommendations via Physiological Responses of Viewers

Miscellaneous Works