West Berkeley hobbyist wins attention, funding for invention Inventor's interactive bracelet gains interest, funding

Engineer Lisa Winter puts on safety gear before cutting metal in a West Berkeley workshop she shares with her father. Engineer Lisa Winter puts on safety gear before cutting metal in a West Berkeley workshop she shares with her father. Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Photo: Liz Hafalia, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 10 Caption Close West Berkeley hobbyist wins attention, funding for invention 1 / 10 Back to Gallery

(12-26) 10:24 PST Berkeley -- When West Berkeley resident Lisa Winter started making robots as a kid, it was an eccentric hobby popular among punks and nerds.

Today, in an industry suddenly flush with venture capital, the 27-year-old Winter has become something of a rock star, and she's about to release her first consumer product: Bond, an interactive communicative bracelet for couples that comes out in the new year.

"I liked to build robots, basically since I was born," she said. "And now it's not so odd anymore."

As West Berkeley becomes a hub for fringe technologies and Google continues to buy up robotics startups, offbeat hobbyists are suddenly finding themselves the center of attention. And their products, which were once theoretical toys thought up in machine-building clubs, are starting to be produced on a larger scale.

Bond, which Winter is building for a company called Kwame Corp., is a small, vibrating, color-changing module that's sold in pairs for couples. Discreet, white and magnetic, it can be worn as a bracelet or a necklace. If one person taps the Bond, the other person's Bond vibrates.

"Most wearable devices, 98 percent of them, are fitness based. Ours is social," she said. "When you press yours, the other person feels it. You're not just getting a beep on your cell phone, you're feeling a loving vibration. And it could even be a harsh vibration if you're angry - short intense vibrations would signal, 'Oh, that's aggressive.' "

At Kwame, an international organization of developers, designers and programmers, Winter is in charge of building prototypes - which she's been doing since she was a toddler.

"When I was 3, Dad would leave things around, like drill motor parts, and I'd put them back together," she said. "He'd find them and be like, 'Who put my drill motor back together?' It was fun for us."

After reading about the Robot Wars at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco in the 1990s, Winter's father, Mike, also a robot hobbyist, decided he'd build one to compete. Not one to be left out, 10-year-old Lisa built one, too. Wearing pigtails, she commanded a robot with spinning lawn mower blades and a chef's hat - and destroyed the competition. She went on to become the Robot Wars' middleweight world champion and, for the next six years, was a regular on the Comedy Central show "BattleBots."

'Alternative' student

At Miramonte High School, she sewed her own plaid skirts, wore boots, dyed her hair bright green and had bihawks (a mohawk on both sides of her head). "I was the only alternative kid in school," she said. "But, hey, I was voted best hair."

She went on to get an art degree from UC Santa Cruz and worked part time for her father's robot company, Stupid Fun Club. "I'd be working with big pieces of metal, 1,000-pound robots."

She and her father, along with an aunt and some family friends, started building connected toys, which could communicate with each other and with phones, in the early 2000s.

And then, suddenly, even tiny robotics companies started to get attention - and funding. Her neighborhood in West Berkeley seems to be a center for robot makers. Outside the Westside Cafe on Ninth Street, she runs into former Wired Editor Chris Anderson's drone building team, which just got $30 million in venture capital.

On Feb. 23, they're having a robot block party.

These days, her father works for Google, which has been snapping up robotics companies throughout the neighborhood. "He's literally a genius mad scientist robotics guy," she said.

Collegial culture

Steve Gould, the co-founder of a robotics workshop, recruited Winter and her father to join his Berkeley robot enclave, where he runs an industrial design company.

"She comes out of the gaming culture, and there's a helpfulness and collegial culture that's natural to them. It's so special," he said.

"After I first met the Winter clan, we all went together to South by Southwest and made a trebuchet to launch balloons at tablets that would trigger an app," Gould remembered, laughing. "Lisa's been doing this stuff since she was born. She represents something unique to here."

She's vegan down to her red faux-leather boots and wears her hair and eyebrows dyed turquoise. In her free time, she climbs rocks.

At the robotics workshop, Winter walked over to her workbench, which she shares with her dad when he's not in Mountain View. They have a family belt sander, band saw, drill press and mill. She noticed the table was full of gear - a Dynamixel Servo, which is a kind of robotics motor, and some brackets on the table.

'New thinking'

Harold Morrison, a machinist in the same laboratory as Winter, emerged from behind a computer monitor - "Lisa works with a group that are kind of on the edge - all new thinking in all new ways."

Morrison pointed to an enormous robotic arm equipped with lasers contained within a tall metal cage (because when it's switched on, it can be dangerous).

"When her dad first brought her in years and years ago, he was like, 'Here's my daughter, but don't worry, she's cool with this.' "