Maker
KYLE MACHULIS:
HARDWARE
HACKER
Reverse engineering guru
works to unlock our personal data.
By Gary Wolf
Most of the tools Kyle Machulis makes
are self-justifying. It seems futile, at first, to
search for utilitarian rationale in Machulis’
workshop, which he calls Nonpolynomial
Labs (
nonpolynomial.com). Often he makes
things to find out if he can make them, and
to learn something, and to have a laugh,
and to inspire others.
His robots do things like automatically
mix drinks for video game players based
on their score. (The higher the score, the
stronger the drink, which ultimately leads
to a lower score, and, appropriately, a
weaker drink.) Or track yo-yos in mid-spin
using the Wiimote camera. Machulis also
gets deeply into hardware hacking on general principle, freeing game controllers and
commercial devices from the limits placed
on them by the companies that build them.
I first met Machulis through the
Quantified Self (a personal health tracking technology conference), where he
was showing his work on a project called
32 Make: makezine.com/29
Open You (
openyou.org). Open You is
dedicated to writing open source drivers
for personal data devices, including
pedometers, blood pressure monitors,
and scales. It’s your data, after all. Why
should you have to always go to the
manufacturer’s website to see it?
The more I got to know Machulis’ work,
the more intrigued I was with his vision
of a world of manipulable, connectible
parts, unhampered by the legacy of some
marketing survey that said “nobody will
want to do that.”
And as programmable hardware
leaves the world of games and becomes
integrated into many different aspects
of our personal lives, Machulis’ work on
hacking these systems begins to have
a practical edge.
Gary Wolf is a contributing editor at Wired magazine, where
he writes regularly about the culture of science and technology. He is also the co-founder of
quantifiedself.com, a
blog about “self-knowledge through numbers.”
Gregory Hayes
