Cultivating the next generation of wireless solutions.
Many thanks to this Teardown Session’s sponsor: Qorvo!
In this Teardown Session, Crowd Supply’s Helen Leigh talks with Alpenglow Industries’ founder, Carrie Sundra, about running great hardware events, from workshops and meet ups to conferences. As well as sharing their experiences running and attending hardware events around the world, they will discuss ways to make events accessible, inclusive, and appealing. Sundra will also be giving us a sneak peak as some of the things she is preparing for this year’s Makerfaire Bay Area.
Carrie grew up on the island of St. John in the US Virgin Islands, then attended Harvey Mudd College where she proudly scored a 19 on her first electrical engineering exam. Electronics felt esoteric and un-relatable, so she subsequently chose to pursue more mechanical and manufacturing courses. But shortly after starting her first job, she got thrown into fine-pitch SMT soldering and sensor research for a 6” micro air vehicle (and this was in 1999, this stuff didn’t exist yet). Suddenly, faced with a super cool application and concrete “thing” to build and make work, electronics got a lot more interesting. Ever since, she’s designed custom PCBs and helped develop products for a variety of applications - from avionics for small UAVs that are now in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, to livestock thermometers, to waterproof power scrubbers, to assistive devices for freezing-of-gait Parkinson’s symptoms, to her own yarn-winding and twisting devices. She now lives in San Luis Obispo, a coastal California town which is home to a burgeoning tech and maker community. She climbs, snowboards, knits, makes stuff, and teaches soldering to anyone who wants to learn.