Scribit

Scribit grew out of the room-scale wall-drawing installations at Carlo Ratti Associati and turned that idea into a consumer product: a small device you hang on any wall that draws, erases, and switches colors on its own.

I engineered the hardware, fitting all the motors, actuators, and computing into a single cast-aluminum body. A revolver-style pen holder switched between four colors and kept the ink from drying out. Instead of a mechanical eraser, a heating element worked with heat-erasable ink. On the software side, I contributed to the companion app, where users scheduled drawings, turned images into vector paths, and previewed the result before the robot started.

Scribit raised $1.6 million on Kickstarter and $2.4 million on Indiegogo, was named one of TIME's Best Inventions of 2019, and won a Red Dot Design Award.

It also taught me a lot about trade-offs. The four-pen revolver and heat management made the device heavy enough to need serious wall anchors, and a closed-source, cloud-dependent software stack added latency and made long-term maintenance hard. Those choices weighed on it commercially. Still, it proved that precise multi-axis plotting can fit into a product people put in their homes.