Yankee Scientific: The Practice of Ingenuity
Senior Electronics Engineer 
Howard is a career product designer and brought his extensive firmware and electronic prototyping expertise to Yankee Scientific in 2006. He specializes in making tiny, inexpensive processors do jobs that are normally done by larger, more expensive choices. He is currently working on Yankee's joint venture with ECR International (Climate Energy) on controls, firmware and telemetry support for the freewatt cogenerating heating system. Prior to joining Yankee, he was a senior product design engineer at LCS/Telegraphics, one of the contributing companies to the original USB specification. Over his 12 years there Howard’s work included FM radio transmitters, assorted handheld electronics, network server security devices, unique musical instrument control panels, medical devices, psychology lab test equipment and some rather unusual computer mice, keyboards and joysticks.
As Testing Editor at McGraw-Hill's BYTE Magazine in the early 90's he wrote monthly reviews and articles in addition to designing custom test equipment and procedures for evaluating personal computer performance. One Howard’s creations is 'Thumper II', a robotic controller that converted a folding card table into a battery life testing station for 8 notebook computers. Thumper used R/C car servos as both power and force sensors to press keys while watching for screen activity using optical sensors. His career also includes designing and building the first publicly displayed tablet-style computer (Hindsight's Letterbug), system architecture, firmware and application software for the Coleco ADAM, and the first touch-sensitive, speech-recognizing automatic teller machines.
Howard has an S. B. (1982) from MIT's School of Architecture and Design where he did original research at the Architecture Machine Group (now the Media Lab) in lip synchronization. In his spare time, he flies power kites and builds the occasional prototype gadget for friends and family.