Pehr Anderson, Teresa Esser

Pehr Anderson

email pehr at pehr.net
 direct line 414.433.4982 (updated 2005)

projects
photos
software
books
webmail

Projects

The Venture Cafe
Teresa Esser wrote a book about some of the people starting companies on the MIT Campus.
She used some of my exploits as examples to illustrate what is good (and bad) about entrepreneurship.

The Venture Cafe, by Teresa Esser, Secrets Strategies and Stories from America's High Tech Entrepreneurs
Welcome to The Venture Cafe


NBX Corporation
In 1996, I co-founded NBX corporation along with Alex Laats and Chris Gadda. In 1999 3Com bought the company. The NBX 100 gets consistently excellent reviews. We designed the system to be legacy-free, which allows it to cost  less and do more that older PBX designs. The handsets attach directly to the Ethernet. Audio is sent using data packets.
I'd like to thank everyone involved in making this a successful product. You built a great machine!

An ethernet-based phone, the secretarial keypad, and the base unit for connecting incomming telecom lines to your ethernet network.
The 3Com NBX Phone System

E Ink Corporation
Electronic Ink is a new kind of electronic display material for super-low-power applications like PDAs, ebooks, tablets and cell phones. The technology is based on capsules of charged particles, pushed around by electrostatic fields.

While at E Ink, I put together a system for sending messages to our signs over a metropolitan-area wireless network.

A sheet of the new display material called Electronic Ink
A prototype from E Ink Corporation


MIT Media Lab
At the Media Lab, I worked on lightweight network interfaces. The project was inherited by Matthew D. Hancher who took it forward into being a useful resource for other Media Lab Projects. The goal of the Filament Project was to make it much easier to make networked gadgets, gizmos, sensors and interfaces. This work was done under the direction of Professor Neil Gershenfeld.

Two ethernet-to-serial microcontroller boards
MIT Media Lab, Lightweight Ethernet nodes

Charles Stark Draper Laboratories
I wrote device drivers for this little robot using a Z180 single-board computer. It was tele-operated with a computer control station developed by John Thele.
The goal of this six-wheeled robot vehicle was to detect land mines and attempt to dig them out and carry them to a disposal area.
We also experimented with using Lonworks nodes as the control network for the robot.

A six wheeled robotic vehicle for clearing mines in a peace-time environment, Draper Labs EOD Rover
Draper Labs EOD Rover



The MIT Towing Tank
As an undergraduate, I contributed to research on how to make fish-like robots. I built underwater presure sensors, strain gauge sensors, A/D hardware, and data collection software for the MIT Towing Tank. Dave Barret led the robotuna project. He is one of the most amazing roboticists I have ever met.

A 3 foot long robotic tuna model attached to a large carriage
MIT RoboTuna Project