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.
Daniel Baldeo-Thorne '25 works on a device for monitoring the health of greenhouse-grown plants, which he has developed as part of Rev: Ithaca's Prototyping Hardware Accelerator.
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.
When ideas enter the hardware accelerator, they seldom look the same when they come out. That's the point.
"It actually is a warning sign when someone ends the program thinking everything they thought at the beginning is true," said Ken Rother, director of Rev: Ithaca, which is administered by the Center for Regional Economic Advancement, part of Research & Innovation at Cornell.
That was the case with the MicroCycle team. More than half of the 26 potential customers they interviewed said they were saving huge bins of waste from their 3D printers, hoping to find a use for it.
Talking to people who work with 3D printers, however, revealed that their original idea to recycle the waste back into printer filament wasn't feasible. The re-processed plastic wouldn't be a high enough quality.
"It's not really productive if no one wants to use the end product," said Zhao, who plans to study mechanical and aerospace engineering at Princeton University in the fall. "What we ended up with was experimenting with the plastic and just grinding it, smashing it, melting it."
The outcome: pressed plastic sheets.
"There are tons of opportunities for what colors and textures you can create with the plastic," Elia said. "It becomes like a whole art project."
Their device looks like a modified t-shirt press with hot plates that press the plastic into 10- by 12-inch sheets. A laser cutter can cut the sheets to make stencils, shapes and signs. Patterns can be pressed into the hot plastic.
"After talking to more people, we realized that people do want these sheets," Zhao said. "They have a use for it, which is how we ended up with this idea."
Sometimes, the idea just needs to be reframed.
Lauren Greene, M.S. '25, and Marina Rosolem, M.S. '25, who met while studying in the Matter Design Computation program in the College of Architecture, Art and Planning, originally thought the customer for Pourtrait, a cocktail recipe generator, was bars, but bartenders weren't excited about it.
However, people who run photo booths were.
"We're thinking of it as an experiential element for events like weddings, parties and brand activations that gives you this novelty experience around ordering a cocktail or a mocktail," Greene said.
The Pourtrait kiosk prompts users to select a few preferences, like fruity or sweet. Then it snaps a photo of the user, and artificial intelligence uses the selected preferences and the "vibe" of the photo to generate a custom drink recipe, which it prints out.
"At events, people are really excited about personalized things and being able to have a keepsake, which is what we've been pushing with our design," Rosolem said. "It's Instagram-able, kind of like a 'surprise' moment."
Daniel Baldeo-Thorne '25 also found himself pivoting while participating at the Rev program. Initially he wanted to solve a pollination problem for commercial hydroponic growers by designing a drone he called Buzzsense.
Growers told him they couldn't spend a lot of money on pollination, though. They purchase bees by the box to pollinate greenhouses - and growers can buy a lot of bees for the price of a drone.
Instead, the growers told him about pests, disease and watering and fertilizer problems. Now, he said, he is "working to solve the problems that I've been hearing about and not to solve the problem that I thought was there," Baldeo-Thorne said.
"I'm working on a system that helps manage the plants and helps detect those physiological problems and pest diseases, and also something that helps collect the data from all the laborers that are in the field," he said. "This helps the grower at the end of the day."
Baldeo-Thorne, who studied computer science at Cornell, said he learned about electronics and mechanical engineering from the experts at Rev. He also valued learning about the process of refining an idea.
"They have taught me to be very messy right now," he said. "You know, be as messy as you can and just try to experiment, see what doesn't work. That process has just been really fun and exciting."
The teams are racing to finish their prototypes ahead of Demo Day.
The MicroCycle team has been collecting Rev's waste plastic for weeks to transform into plastic sheets, and Baldeo-Thorne has been raising tomato plants that he'll use to test his device.
Deanna Kocher, associate director of Rev's hardware programs, said, "It's really, really satisfying and really exciting to see the very beginning, to see the excitement of 'I made a thing come to life that solves a problem for a person.'"
The teams practice pitching and presenting their ideas as part of the accelerator. "Demo Day is often the first time they're telling the story to others," Rother said.
Products that started in the prototyping program have further developed and entered the marketplace, including a smart power strip and a cleaning robot for the hospitality industry.
Going to market isn't the only success story, though.
"If at the end of the program the answer is, 'Eh, there's no product here,' that's OK. Honestly, we celebrate that equally," Rother said, because no matter the outcome, the program builds entrepreneurial capacity: participants learn a process that they can use for their next idea.
The MicroCycle team is presenting their idea at the International Symposium on Academic Makerspaces in Berkeley, California, in early August, before they start their freshman years of college.
"We're very proud of how it has come out, and we're so excited to see how people there would use this product and see what they think about it," Elia said.
They aren't sure what's next for MicroCycle, but they have valued the accelerator program's support, as well as the collaboration with other teams.
Cohen said it has been gratifying to work on a problem, and a project, that she really cares about.
"It has definitely validated my decision to study engineering, which I wasn't sure about before this program," Cohen said. She'll study biological engineering in the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences this fall.
