His 'technological Disneyland'

BERKELEY - From the digital sampler he built as a teenage audiophile to the laser cutter he assembled in his college apartment, Zach Radding quite literally lives by his own devices.

That's how this poster boy for the wired generation earns his keep at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where colleagues say his derring-do energy can be measured in megahertz.

And that's how he made friends when he moved here in 1996 after college: by covering his helmet with 200 tiny blinking lights to stand out in a crowd of hundreds of skaters who roll through the streets of San Francisco every Friday night. ("I met literally hundreds of people,'" Radding said. "It was an ice breaker. I had an electric light parade on my head.")

Now this 28-year-old renaissance tinkerer wants to decode the world of drill presses and circuit boards for people age 13 and up by giving them hands-on experience building things. Holograms and robots. Computer-controlled lasers. Any kind of mechanical or electronic gadget or gizmo that can be dreamed up.

Familiarity with string theory and quantum mechanics are not required, but manual dexterity and boundless imagination are a plus. Radding envisions his nonprofit organization Zach's Cool Stuff -- ZCS for short -- as a cross between the Jetsons and Junkyard Wars, a kind of East Bay Exploratorium where people can expand their knowledge of electronics, robotics, mechanics and computers.

In other words, you don't have to have an encyclopedic knowledge of microprocessors or a chronic compulsion to cluster in the aisles of Frys Electronics and post comments on Slashdot's News for Nerds. Luddites are welcome.

"The goal is to provide this space where people can express their dreams and ideas. If they have an idea for an invention that they have never been able to do, they can come here and learn how to build it," Radding said. "When you can turn something on and say, 'I made that,' that's pretty powerful for a kid and for an adult."

Some worry that Radding has embarked on an enterprising but quixotic mission at a time when kids get callused thumbs from videogame joysticks instead of roughing up their hands building forts in the backyard or getting them greasy under the hood of a car. Such amateur scientist pastimes as fiddling with chemistry sets and building model rockets and transistor radios have faded in popularity in the digitized age.

Americans have a pretty dim understanding of science and technology and a tenuous grasp of basic scientific facts, concepts and vocabulary, according to the National Science Foundation. Most know the earth travels around the sun and that light travels faster than sound, but few could tell you what a molecule is. At the same time, technology has become so complex that you need a technical degree to understand it.

Working to inspire a new generation of garage inventors and "citizen scientists" to pursue science and engineering as a hobby -- if not an avocation -- is an important public service, says Shawn Carlson, director of the Society for Amateur Scientists. Carlson, who used to pen the now-defunct Amateur Scientist column in Scientific American, has dedicated himself to that cause; his latest project is Lab Rats, a national group modeled on the Boy Scouts that will teach science and leadership skills to young people.

"We have to nurture and develop scientific talent if we want to continue to be the technology leader of the world," he said.

Radding, who comes from a build-it-yourself family, seems to channel the spirit of the Erector set: He believes idle hours of youth and adulthood can be converted into creativity. And if the hooked-on-robotics craze in the Bay Area is any indication, that spirit still flickers.

"Zach sees this as a technological Disneyland," said Roger Gilbertson, president of Mondo-Tronics and the Robot Store, the San Rafael-based catalog and online outlet, who is advising Radding on how to get his dream off the ground. "He wants a place where kids and adults can learn the wizardry of modern technology."

Berkeley -- a place known for abstruse experimentation of all kinds in and out of the laboratory -- is the perfect setting for Radding to see whether he can get kids and adults to play with technology, Gilbertson said.

"People in Berkeley are very open to different ways of experiencing stuff, and it's a very technologically oriented community," he said. "It should be fertile ground for this kind of experiment."

Radding finished construction on the building that houses Zach's Cool Stuff two months ago, but he is still tinkering with how it will all work. While holding down his day job at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Radding is spending nights and weekends writing the syllabus and curriculum, raising money and asking for donations of equipment and time. He has compiled a mailing list of about 500 people interested in taking classes. He plans to offer the first one-day robot-making workshop Aug. 28.

By January, he hopes to offer a full load of six-week classes on everything from "If I only had a brain," an introduction to microcontrollers, to "Making things move," learning to use motors, actuators and air-powered pneumatics. Radding is even considering team-building workshops for corporations.

"I'm not sure he sleeps," said Cassie Bowman, deputy coordinator for the NASA Robotics Education Project. "He did this with his own money and out of his own personal dedication, idealism and belief that all people need is an opportunity."

Once Radding sweeps the dust from the floor and peels the "coming soon" sign from the big windows, he hopes the sunlight and students will stream in. Radding plans to create an open area with modular work benches and carts stocked with tools and equipment and a vending machine filled with parts as well as a machine shop and a computer lab.

The result, he hopes, will be the opposite of a stuffy classroom: a light and airy space where education happens through osmosis, not lectures and textbooks. Radding says the material may sound ubertechnical -- hobby servo motors, embedded controllers, accelerometers -- but the courses will be anything but. Students, propelled by their own curiosity, will be able to design their own projects and work at their own pace, he says. One student might make a robot leg; another might work on an art installation in a workshop on plastics, for example.

Eventually, Radding hopes Zach's Cool Stuff will become a resource for inventors looking to patent or commercialize their ingenuity. "We're trying to design a program that's really different and really plays to the way people learn, which means getting hands on and working on projects," he said.

Because that is how Radding himself learned as an Arizona teenager: in an after-school electronics lab at a nearby junior college where his brain could rove with the intensity of a NASA scientist until the light bulb of invention popped on overhead.

In fact, Radding's life has been one long research and development project. Radding started taking motors apart to see what made them whir at the age of 4 ("my parents were afraid to look under the bed because there was so much weird and wacky stuff I had taken apart under there"), suggesting a strong genetic predisposition for inventiveness.

Radding can still remember the smell of melting plastic emanating from the oven as his dad molded a joystick for an Intellivision videogame console when he was 5 years old. A general contractor who builds big things for a living, his dad also worked with wood, building cabinets and string instruments. Radding's mom, a seamstress who also teaches how to bead and make jewelry, nurtured his design creativity.

The junior college electronics lab turned into an idea factory for Radding with new projects rolling off his brain's conveyor belt all the time. "(The lab) gave me the encouragement to build stuff," he said.

There Radding made things teenagers would dig. He came up with a digital sampler that played songs backwards so he could listen for secret messages (he never heard any) and peeled the Jazzercise sticker off the bumper and built stereo equipment to soup up his stepmom's Mitsubishi minivan.

"I was always the geeky guy," Radding said. "Everyone would go, 'Here's the crazy guy who builds things.'"

That technical acuity earned him a full scholarship to DeVry Institute of Technology in Phoenix, where his college apartment was better stocked than the local hardware store.

"I had a drill press in my bedroom, an air compressor in the closet. Everyone would come over and do school projects at my apartment to build things because I had lots and lots of tools, saws, hand drills. I built my laser cutter in the apartment," said Radding, who liked to build small robots. "I really enjoyed having people over to help them with projects."

He was shocked to learn that one of the school's brightest electronic engineering students was having trouble building a robot arm because he had never drilled a hole before.

"I thought everybody had," Radding said. "That was a defining moment. I felt that something was missing in education when you can make it all the way through college and not drill a hole. I thought there should just be a general class on how to do sort of practical things."

After a stint as a techie at Hewlett-Packard, Radding ended up at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

In his early days as an amateur inventor, Radding focused on smaller, simpler robots: some had six legs, some jumped, others he designed to run into walls. But over time he began to use software to build bigger and more complex robots. He helped design the OctoBot, a best-selling robot at Gilbertson's Robot Store, so that when its batteries run low, it heads for an electronic charging station and recharges itself.

"Zach Radding is the best gadget geek that I have ever met," said Tony Hansen, a staff scientist on leave from the lab. "Not only does he know how to do mechanical stuff with motors and wheels, he can program a computer. He can bridge the gap between software and hardware and things that move. And he can do all of that at his desk or at a kitchen table with a huge jumble and tangle of wires."

Radding's work with lab scientists on a videoconferencing robot helped him land a gig building everything from computer-controlled microscopes to the electronics and software for laser tweezers that manipulate DNA for scientists there. His interest in robots submerged him in the dynamic world of robot hobbyists in the Bay Area; he even coached a Marin County high school team in robot-building competitions. It also enveloped Radding in a social network of like-minded thinkers and tinkerers.

In March 2001, Radding began holding a weekly class called the East Bay Builders Group for people interested in learning to build robots and other mechanical or electronic contraptions. Kiem Skelton, at the time a Mills College graduate student, says she spent several exhilarating months making a hexapod, a six-legged robot that moved like an insect.

"I had never made anything like that before," said Skelton, who now works in the computing services department at Mills. "Zach is able to convey very complex things in a very understandable manner."

Mike Howard, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory astrophysicist from San Ramon, met Radding through the San Francisco Robotics Society of America and began attending Radding's classes with his 19-year-old son Vincent, now a sophomore at UC Berkeley who has been fascinated by robots since eighth grade.

Howard credits Radding with nurturing Vincent's talent. Last year as a senior at California High School, Vincent claimed first place in the engineering division of the annual Tri-Valley Student Science and Engineering Fair for building a robot with a vision-recognition system, winning a free trip to the Intel International Science & Engineering Fair in Cleveland, Ohio, where he competed against more than 2,400 students from 40 countries and placed fourth.

"What he learned under Zach was a big influence on him," Mike Howard said.

From his teaching experience, Radding learned an important lesson: that his desire to create a place where people could build their ideas was more than science fiction.

"I always said, 'I am doing this experiment as much for me as for you so I can try different things and see what works,'" he said.

So, in Radding's retooled version of "This Old House," he bought and fixed up two run-down houses and then sold them at a profit in the hot Bay Area real estate market. (On one of their first dates, wife Liz, a software license coordinator at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, remembers thumbing through architectural magazines with Radding: "He would say, 'I could build that,' and he could." Two months after they started seeing each other, Liz found herself pulling carpet staples out of hardwood floors and ripping out old kitchens).

Radding raised $200,000 to buy a vacant lot and about four years ago began navigating Berkeley's Byzantine bureaucratic channels to build a three-story, 7,000-square-foot building at the corner of Adeline and Harmon streets to house Zach's Cool Stuff.

"Building this building was a big learning experience," said Radding, who was the general contractor but also pitched in pouring concrete and framing walls.

Nothing probably will compare with the learning experience to come as Radding gets ready to swing open the doors of Zach's Cool Stuff. His friends hope he will not be disappointed if his biggest brainstorm fizzles in an age when gadgets from cell phones to CD players have become both super complicated, so it's hard to figure out how they work, and super cheap, so they're not worth fixing.

"Even if we don't know how all of these things work, people can make things themselves that do work, and that's empowering," Hansen said. "It makes people feel that they are not totally at the mercy of some factory that makes gizmos."

Jessica Guynn is a Times staff writer. Reach her at 925-952-2671 or jguynn@cctimes.com.