Sanford @ Stanford

Over the years at Stanford, I completed my Masters in Electrical Engineering and my Engineers Thesis in Electrical Engineering. Additionally, I created a company focused on digital cinema called Limelight. You can see both efforts below:

Engineering Thesis

Development of High Bandwidth Torque Sensor for Control of
High Performance Manipulators

The thesis is based on the research conducted at the Stanford Robotics Lab in the Computer Science Department and is found in PDF form below:

• Opening Section (Acknowledgements, TOC, etcera)
• Chapter 1 – Introduction
• Chapter 2 – Background
• Chapter 3 – Torque Sensor
• Chapter 4 – Control problem and Design
• Chapter 5 – Identification and Results
• Chapter 6 – Conclusions and Recommendations
• Appendix A – Explanation on LVDTs
• Appendix B – Derivation of Component Values
• Appendix C – AD2S93 Explained
• Appendix D – Laboratory Values
• Bibliography
• Epilogue

Limelight – A Vision for Digital Cinema

Limelight was a combination of a number of occurrences at the time; I was working as a projectionist at a local multiplex “building prints” at night (read: attaching the reels together for the next day), working at Accenture during the day on online architectures and web interfaces and spending my free time talking with other entrepreneurs on how the Internet was going to “change things”.

With (at the time) new digital projection technologies emerging like liquid crystal on silicon (LCoS) and digital light processors (DLP) generating increasingly lifelike resolutions, I sketched out a concept for “electronic cinema” – creating a network of digital projectors and supporting it with additional offerings to make the trip to a movie theater into a full-service offering…a full seventeen years after Francis Ford Coppola did.

Starting with a group of graduate students in a business plan class, we researched the market and discovered various players and obstacles. Our team learned a lot about the space and found that, based on partnership obstacles and the prevailing financial environment, the investment community was not receptive for an startup in this space.