Hardware hacking for fun and scientific research

Professor (Edwin) En-Te Hwu is currently an Associate Professor of the center of Intelligent Drug Delivery and Sensing Using Microcontainers and Nanomechanics (IDUN) in the Department of Health Technology at the Technical University of Denmark. He has a Mechanical Engineering and system integration background.  He was a postdoctoral fellow in working group 5.25 Scanning Probe Metrology at German National Metrology Institute. 

His early research carrier in Taiwan mainly focused on nanometrology instrumentation. He actively collaborated with research institutes in Japan, Denmark, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Later, he started his carrier in Denmark in drug delivery, biosensing, lab-on-a-disc, and high-resolution 3D printing research. He often builds instruments with an unorthodox approach, implementing consumer electronics components. Thus, he is a specialist in hacking consumer electronics and has developed customized instruments to perform unique research, which commercial systems cannot fulfill. This is more complicated than using standard research-grade parts. Nevertheless, leveraging the billions of USD invested in consumer electronics, mass-produced, high-quality, and low-cost components lead to many benefits such as higher performance, shorter time-to-market and lower production cost.

The hardware hacking approach has resulted in high value-adding technologies/patents and has given birth to 6+2 startup companies. For example, Blu-ray drive-based 3D printing led to the startup: Atto3D. Another startup, BluSense Diagnostics, uses a Blu-ray drive for disease diagnostics and was nominated for the 2021 European Inventor Award. His Nt-Unit and Atto3D teams received the largest Taiwanese and Danish governmental pre-startup prize, respectively.

You can watch his talk at Danish Engineer Association here.

Read more about Edwin Hwu and his interesting hacks.