Meet Tony Batey

Meet Tony Batey, the newest coop student with TinyCircuits. He is an electrical engineering student from The University of Akron, graduating in Spring 2017. Tony began working for us at the beginning of summer and will continue through the fall semester.

There is no typical day in the office for Tony. He works on a lot of varied projects. He's working on a special project with the EPA to monitor the water levels in streams. On a regular basis, Tony is the 3D printing liaison; he worked with the printer to develop the cabinet for our new TinyArcade, the smallest arcade cabinet in the world. Tony also supervises the high school interns. They come in with ideas, and Tony helps them develop and make their ideas. He likes seeing that they are interested in the technology and seeing what ideas they come up with. Tony is also in charge of the online content for TinyCircuits and makes the demos and for Instructables and Hackster. He's made demos on making a tiny scrolling nametag and making your own smartwatch.

    
Tony enjoys working at TinyCircuits because, “there's a lot of freedom when your target audience is people who make things.” In order to develop kits and products there are lots of opportunities to make cool things. To test the TinyShield pressure/altitude sensors, he set off rockets in an abandoned mall's parking lot. All the rockets didn't make it, but he got good data. He's gone with the TinyCircuits gang to Maker Faires in Akron, Detroit, New York, and San Francisco to show off the TinyCircuits products and see what other people are developing.

In his time at TinyCircuits, Tony learned software design. Though he finds it can be frustrating, he does plan on continuing to work with it and hardware design in his future career.

Note: Thanks to Stephanie Baker for this article