Rev prototyping program teaches entrepreneurs to ‘get messy’ and pivot

When they were seniors at Ithaca High School last year, Isabelle Cohen, Alex Elia and Jennifer Zhao hated seeing the plastic waste pile up from the 3D printer in their school’s makerspace, with no way to recycle it.

“This is really distressing to people,” said Elia, who will attend Cornell as an engineering major in the fall. “It makes them feel bad. It costs a lot of money, as well as being really wasteful, and there isn’t a cheap way to recycle this filament.”

So they decided to develop a solution specifically for makerspaces that would do something about the problem.

Their solution – a recycling device they dubbed the MicroCycler – is one of 23 prototypes debuting at Rev: Ithaca Startup Works’ Hardware Demo Day, from 6-8 p.m. July 31. The event is the culmination of Rev: Ithaca’s Prototyping Hardware Accelerator, a 10-week program that helps budding entrepreneurs from all over the U.S. take their back-of-the-napkin ideas to a proof-of-concept prototype.

Demo Day attendees will see a wide breadth of projects, including tactile books for children and a device to make biochar from banana peels.

Read the full story in the Cornell Chronicle.