Context
High-school physics classes still run on expensive, dated lab equipment. LABKickstart is a modern, lower-cost alternative: students run experiments with compact wireless sensors and watch live data land on a shared dashboard.
Approach
The flagship hardware is Ronto, a wireless physics sensor module the size of a flip phone: acceleration, rotation, tilt, and temperature over Bluetooth, no base station or cables. Around it I've built a software family: a live experiment dashboard with premade experiments and CSV export, a physics simulator for classrooms without hardware, and Ultraviolet, a cross-platform graphing app (Windows/macOS/Linux). ESP32/BLE firmware in C++, a real-time Python/FastAPI hub, and web dashboards. I own the full technical stack as co-founder and CTO of LABKickstart (a Delaware C-corp).
Result
The prototype (kineti-kit) took 1st place at UCLA IEEE IdeaHacks 2026, the largest hardware hackathon on the West Coast. Drew inbound interest from DigiKey (to be featured via Maker.io); shipped the product site at labkickst.art with an educator pilot program underway.