Tag Archives: Carnegie Mellon University

Saturday, May 9: Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour

This Saturday, May 9th, is the Vacant Home Tour of Wilkinsburg. Tour takers will spend 45 minutes walking through Wilkinsburg, be shown five vacant historic homes by knowledgeable tour guides, then be able to sit in on a workshop to learn what goes into buying one. If you’re thinking “that sounds unique”, you’re right: it may be the first tour of its kind. And if you’re thinking “I should go”, then you’re not alone: nearly 500 people have RSVP’d on their Facebook page. Best of all, the tour is free for you to take because of a Small & Simple Grant from Neighborhood Allies, additional funding from the Fels Challenge and Carnegie Mellon University, and residents generous enough to volunteer as guides.

Vacant Home Tour Preview from Wilkinsburg CDC on Vimeo.

Five Carnegie Mellon University students were exploring ways of highlighting and alleviating urban blight when they came up with the idea for a vacant home tour. Kenneth Chu, a student in Public Policy and Management at the Heinz College, spoke on WESA this week about working with students in other programs including design and human-computer interaction during the semester long class. Knowing that they wanted to deal with urban blight, their research and personal connections led them to Wilkinsburg, where they worked with the Wilkinsburg Community Development Corporation (WCDC) and local residents to develop the program. The resulting proposal for a Vacant Home Tour won a cash award from the Fels Challenge, a national public policy competition.

Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour

Planning for the Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour

Ultimately, the designers of the tour want the people who take it not to see the vacant homes as blight, but as a possible home or an investment opportunity. To help change perceptions, docents at each of the five homes will be on hand to talk about the history of these properties. The houses were chosen without knowledge of their histories and residences have pieced together their histories through online records, physical archives and good old-fashioned oral history. Marlee Gallagher, Communications & Outreach Coordinator at the WCDC, says, “I do think that having the historical background increases the value by adding emotion and humanity to an otherwise vacant, blighted, inanimate object.” She’s seeking to capitalize on a growing trend of wanting to know the history of your home, something that cannot be maintained if you demolish and start over.

Sat May 9th is the @VacantHomeTour. A free event to check out some impressive houses in Wilkinsburg #VHT15

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Poster for the 2015 Vacant Home Tour

Poster for the 2015 Vacant Home Tour

The task of restoring these homes will be difficult; in their current condition, they can only be viewed from the outside due to safety concerns. But it is not impossible. The neighborhood of Wilkinsburg has been looking for ways to deal with blight since the collapse of the steel industry. One such effort began in 2005 when Pittsburgh History and Landmarks Foundation (PHLF) conducted a survey of vacant properties in Wilkinsburg, concluding a year later that about 70% of the housing stock could be restored rather than torn down. But PHLF does not have the resources to restore all of the properties on it’s own. Karamagi Rujumba, Director of Public Communications and Advocacy at PHLF, told me that “we cannot do all the work; we can only be leaders”. By way of leading by example, PHLF acquired a former auto repair shop at the nexus of Hamnett place. They restored that property and opened the Landmarks Preservation Resource Center in 2010, a program that serves to educate community members on how to restore, maintain and preserve their homes. They attract people from Wilkinsburg, the greater Pittsburgh area, and even as far as Ohio and West Virginia to take their workshops. They offer lectures and film screenings as well as popular hands-on carpentry and masonry workshops where people can see firsthand how to do the hard work of restoring a home. The final stop on the tour will be the LRPC where they will be offering a workshop for people who might be interested in acquiring a vacant home.

Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour

Wilkinsburg Vacant Home Tour Map

The project is poised for success. It has received international attention (Brussels has asked what’s up) and people are responding to the subversion of the typical home and garden tour, and uniquely honest approach of highlighting blight rather than hiding it. The [Your Neighborhood Here] Vacant Home Tour is about to become a thing, and you can still be a part of the very first one on Saturday May 9.

The tour is free to attend.  RSVP on Facebook here.

Brew Gentleman Braddock Steeler Game

Watch the Steeler Game in the Shadow of a Steel Mill

Brew Gentleman Braddock Steeler GameI often try to think of the MOST Pittsburgh place one can watch the Steeler game, that doesn’t involved going to the game.  Well I don’t think it gets more Pittsburgh than this – now you can watch the game next to a steel mill.

The Brew Gentleman is a new brewery that opened this year in Braddock, just down the road from the Edgar Thomson Steelworks, which is a steel mill that is still that opened in 1872 and is still in operation today.

The brewery was founded by two wonderful fellows who I had the good fortune of meeting at this foodie, networking event a few years back.

Matt and Asa came to Pittsburgh to attend Carnegie Mellon and have stayed in town to open a brewery.  I just opened their latest email blast and The Brew Gentleman will be showing the Steeler game this Sunday, September 28, 2014 – the game is at 1pm and they will open at noon.

The Brew Gentleman’s brewery is a beautiful space with a spacious tasting room.  Head down for the Steeler game or stop by for a beer during their regular hours – Wednesday-Saturday 4-10pm.

Food will be available from Caroline’s Chili – which is a new food vendor in town and new to twitter (be sure to follow @CarolinesChili).

A Conversation About Gun Safety

200px-LWV_LogoI know this is a bit of a detour from our usual postings about things to do in Pittsburgh.  But, I wanted to post about this event because I think the League of Women Voters is an important organizations that more people need to know about and because I think this is an important issue for cities.  Please take a moment to follow the League of Women Voters Pittsburgh on Facebook here.

The League of Women Voters is a non-partisan organization – that means that they cannot advocate for any specific candidate or position.  The League of Women Voters exists to provide more education about government and issues.

Gun Safety in a Free
Allegheny County Conversation Presented by the League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh

Sunday, October 6, 2013, 1 – 5 pm
In Oakland — with free parking and refreshments
Bus routes 71B, 61D & 61B
Get beyond the slogans and help explore possible solutions with your fellow citizens of Allegheny County
Facebook Event

The League of Women Voters of Greater Pittsburgh (LWVGP) is sponsoring this forum to promote discussion and cooperation among Allegheny County residents with different views and experiences with guns. Participants will divide into small groups for moderated discussion based on a guide booklet of background information containing facts and viewpoints on guns and society. A panel of experts will be available to respond to questions from the small groups. The goal of these discussions is to identify policies or actions that will promote public health and gun safety in our communities.

Participation is free, but registration is required. Click here for online registration or call the League of Women Voters at 412-261-4284. Registration requires the completion of a short, confidential survey, to assure that all interests are represented in each group. A link to the discussion guide and location information is provided at the end of the registration process. Register now. The deadline is September 30th.

Presented in association with the Program for Deliberative Democracy at Carnegie Mellon University.

Pittsburgh Startups: SolePower charges your phone while you walk

Pittsburgh’s startup scene is flourishing. Local entrepreneurs, founders, developers, designers, investors, mentors, accelerators and incubators are working together to help dream and create new promising ideas.

We’ll be profiling local startups throughout the summer. Know one that should be featured? Email us at catherine @iheartpgh.com, leave a message on Facebook, tweet us, or leave a comment here!

One of the most promising startups making a buzz in Pittsburgh is SolePower, an energy-generating shoe insert that charges portable electronics, like your cell phone, as you walk. We sat down with Hahna Alexander, co-founder and CTO of SolePower, who received both her Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Carnegie Mellon, at their workspace in TechShop to learn more about their product, where the idea came from, and their Kickstarter (which ends July 18 so donate now!).

About SolePower
We’re creating power-generating shoe insoles so you can charge your phone, or any other portable electronic that can be charged off a computer, while you walk. The idea right now is to start with outdoor enthusiasts, like hikers, campers, backpackers, anyone that’s off the grid for a while, and the goal is to get a full iPhone charge after 2.5-3 miles of hiking. In the average walking distance in a day, the idea is you can have a full phone charge at the end of the day, when your phone usually runs out of battery power.

Obviously, there’s applications in lots of other areas. Anywhere that someone doesn’t have access to reliable power and walks a lot, this can be really useful. A really good application is in developing nations where people will walk 5-6 miles just to charge a phone, so there’s a huge need there for power. Hopefully, we can fulfill that need.

We have 6 people working here over the summer. Myself and Matt Stanton [CEO and co-founder] graduated with Mechanical Engineering degrees from Carnegie Mellon. We’re focusing on the mechanisms and power generation side of development. Elliot Kahn is our first full-time hire. He’s a UC Berkeley Electrical Engineer who has experience developing these types of circuits. He’s working with Adam Pinson, who is our EE intern this summer, to design the battery pack for charging portable electronics. Overall we have a very strong development team and have been able to accomplish a lot in a short amount of time.

5 out of 6 went to school here in Pittsburgh, and our mentors are all from Pittsburgh too. We have the best mentors ever because we went into AlphaLab.

How they came up with the idea
Matt, my cofounder, and I started it at Carnegie Mellon as our senior design project. We basically decided to turn down job offers after the summer and founded a company. The design prompt in class was to figure out a way to develop a product that solves a problem that students face. We thought of a lot of really crappy ideas at first and our professor was like “those are terrible, come up with something else,” in a day, basically.

Matt had this power-generating shoe idea in the back of his head. He said “guys, let’s do this” and we said “sounds good, we have no other options.” The original idea was to put lights on your shoes so cars don’t hit students walking home at night and you can see where you’re going.

But then we said, “what powers the light?” You don’t want to have to constantly worry about switching out batteries because it’s supposed to be a convenience and safety thing, not an obnoxious thing. We made this functional prototype for a way to actually generate power to charge the light. We then realized that idea was more universal and more applicable to many things than the light in the shoe.

SolePower shoe clip, from their Kickstarter page.

SolePower shoe clip, from their Kickstarter page.

Working at TechShop, a do-it-yourself manufacturing co-working space
At TechShop, we just make everything. Usually, if you have to prototype something and you’re not really sure it’s going to work, you come up with a couple of designs, then you export it to a professional prototyper. It will cost you about $5000. On a startup budget, that’s not feasible, plus it will take maybe a month or two to make these parts. If you’re trying to work really fast and iterate, then that’s not a good thing.

TechShop is really great because we can come in and figure out what works and doesn’t work in the beginning by making it ourselves. When you actually make things, you intrinsically understand what is going to work and what is not. When you’re designing it and have an idea in your head, if you can’t actually make it then it doesn’t matter how good the idea is. Having the ability to come here and figure out how a professional person would make it helps you reduce costs and make better decisions. It’s really, really important.

Our prototype was made in the metal shop on an automated machine. Basically you design it in software, then the machine codes it to know how to move the drill bit. It will do it for you so you don’t have to worry about tolerances and human error and things like that. We’ve also did parts on lasers, we did a part on the electronics bench, and we’ve casted some gears on the ovens in the back.

Why Kickstarter rocks (and why they need people to donate!)
It’s a crowdfunding site. People can log into the site, pre-order your products, or decide to get rewards for certain levels of monetary support. You can say “hey look, I have 100 people who want to buy my product,” which is great for investment. Basically, you set a goal. Ours is $50,000. You try to push it to the media, try to get people interested and to sign up and support you. If you make over $50k, you get everything; if you get less, you get nothing. So it’s a gamble. There’s a lot of strategy which goes into it, which is fun.

Kickstarter is cool because you can basically gather capital and pre-orders. Essentially that counts as revenue, which is something that’s really good if you’re trying to raise more money in the future.

The actual production of SolePower’s insole
We have a lot of pre-orders, so it’s very unlikely we’ll make the final product ourselves. Instead we’ll have tooling for our components made. This includes dies, cutters, and other equipment necessary to make the insole and the embedded device on a larger scale.

It’s not necessarily unfeasible to produce everything in the US, but we’re not to the development stage where we need to make final manufacturing decisions.

SolePower undergoes lots of real-life testing.

SolePower undergoes lots of real-life testing.

Their timeline
We started in last May. We founded in September and we were doing our Master’s at the same time, so we were doing full-time Master’s and full-time on this, and not sleeping and it was awful. In January, we entered AlphaLab.

In terms of getting the product done, our pre-orders say December 2014; ideally we’ll get it out the year before that. I definitely think we can get the smaller units, like the testing ones, out before that. But in terms of how long it takes to do tooling, it’s a couple months and we can’t control that.

Similar things other companies are doing
There’s other energy-harvesting footwear companies but we have a couple unique things about us. A company in Boston is doing a micro-fluid system, which is basically really small chambers with ionized fluid that I think they’re running through sets of magnets. Reverse-electrowetting uses a microfludic system to move liquid through very thin dielectric films to generate the energy. The system is being built into the sole of a shoe, not an insole. It also has greater manufacturing barriers.

The difference between ours and everybody else’s idea is that we’re building it into an insole, the idea being that you don’t have to buy a particular pair of shoes to use it. You can just buy one insole and then swap it. The actual mechanism itself is OEM-friendly [basically once it’s developed, it’s easy for another company to buy it and implement into their own product] so we can sell it to a boot manufacturer if we wanted to and they could build it into their sole. That gives us more versatility on the business front. We also only use mechanical components, while they’re using lab-intensive fabrication processes. Their scale-up is going to be much more intense than ours, so hopefully we’ll require a lot less capital.

Another is piezoelectrics, a material that when you compress it, causes stress which induces a current. The material itself is the energy generation component. You’ll be able to embed it in floors and when you walk, it will power lights. It’s really expensive and still in the research stage, but that will be the next greatest thing in terms of road technology.

If you can spare a couple dollars or more, SolePower is still short of their Kickstarter goal, which ends July 18. Every little bit helps!

Meds, Eds, Startups – A Few Reasons to Celebrate Oakland on April 12

This Friday, April 12, 2013 – you are invited to celebrate the neighborhood of Oakland.  The Oakland Task Force  has organized Oakland Forever.  Okland Forever is a mega event at Schenley Plaza and includes the food tour A Taste of Oakland.  More details on the event are belwo.

While I know many of you are thinking I’ve lost my mind – Oakland is a crowded place where you sit in traffic and try to avoid hitting the many college students and doctors who are criss-crossing Forbes and Fifth Ave 24 hours a day.  Well, sometimes that is the case, but I think we need to look past the traffic and dig a little deeper into what Oakland means to Pittsburgh and the revitalization of this city.

Oakland, Meds, Eds and Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh has emerged from the decline of industrial economy fairly well compared to most of the other rust belt cities.  Much of Pittsburgh’s success has been attributed to Meds and Eds – and Oakland is the heart of both medicine and education here in Pittsburgh.  While I know there are many strong feelings about UPMC’s relationship with the city, which has been good and bad, for the purpose of this post, lets just focus on the impact that medicine in general has had on Oakland and Pittsburgh.

Here are a few articles about Eds, Meds and Pittsburgh

What’s Next for Pittsburgh – Startups

I’d like to make the argument that the next renaissance for Pittsburgh is going to come from the startup community.  Over the past 12-18 months there has been an incredible wave of activity in the Pittsburgh entrepreneurship scene.  This past weekend – hundreds of people attended the 3rd Startup Weekend Pittsburgh – where teams worked to build a company in just 48 hours.  One of the interesting things to note about Startup Weekend is that it is one of handful of events that is successful in getting students out of oakland and collaborating with other Pittsburghers who aren’t necessarily students.

With Oakland home to both Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, the neighborhood is really best positioned to be the birthplace of the future businesses that drive Pittsburgh’s economy.

Real Estate in Oakland is at a premium and mostly occupied by universities.  Much of Pittsburgh’s startup activity has been pushed to neighborhoods, like the Southside and East Liberty, which are close but  that aren’t as convient  for students to get to and from Oakland.  (Keep an eye on StartUptown – which is an impressive co-working space that is slightly more convient to the Oakland Schools.  With Uptown being right in the middle of Pitt, CMU and Duquesne – hopefully this will continue to grow as a startup friendly neighborhood).

There has been some efforts to do more to connect current students to the entrepreneurship community – much credit goes to Spencer Whitman who attended college in Pittsburgh and is now starting a company here.  Spencer has been organizing Entreburgh a monthly lunch at The Porch to make it easier and convient for students to interact with others in Pittsburgh’s entrepreneurship community.  You can learn more about Entreburgh here on Facebook and sign up to attend one of their monthly lunches.

The more mixing (and collaborating) between the university community in Oakland and the rest of Pittsburgh – the better off both communities will be.

Thinking of Oakland as More than Just Students

If you haven’t spent much time in Oakland, you are missing out.  I would argue it is one of the best places for lunch on any given weekday.  There is something about college nieghborhoods that creates a place where delicious food is abundant and affordable.  Vera Cruz, a little mexican place on Forbes, is still on of my favorite go to spots for a burrito. More Vera Cruz details available on Veracruz on Urbanspoon

Not only is Oakland home to major universities  but it is also a livable neighborhood with affordable housing within walking distance of parks, libraries, and museums.

A great introduction to the neighborhood is Oakland Forever this friday at Schenley Plaza.

Oakland Forever Details