HNHacker News
TopNewBestAskShowJobs

breakfastny

26 karma · joined July 22, 2015

submissionscomments
breakfastny··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2026)
BREAKFAST Studio (kinetic art) | Senior Technical Program Manager · Senior Electrical & Firmware Engineer | Brooklyn Navy Yard, NYC | ONSITE | Full-time | https://theartistbreakfast.com

We're the studio behind the artist BREAKFAST. We design and build his robotic sculptures for the Venice Biennale, Rockefeller Center, the Fontainebleau in Las Vegas, Tiffany & Co. in New York, Dubai and Seoul, and private collections around the world. The largest is the world's largest kinetic sculpture: 53 feet wide, nearly 3,000 motorized tiles driven by live wind and tide data, aboard a Royal Caribbean cruise ship. No screens, no projectors. Each piece is hundreds to thousands of motors on an RS-485 bus under a Linux host, built to run for a decade with nobody watching it, and every board, line of firmware and bracket is designed and built by 17 people in our Brooklyn studio. See them move: https://theartistbreakfast.com/works

Senior Technical Program Manager: the artist's person on the ground with a six-person senior design and engineering team. You own every schedule in Asana, pressure-test estimates, run the weekly rhythm, flag slips the day you know, and deal with clients through install. Hardware+software TPM or producer background (robotics, consumer hardware, instruments), 8–12 years, fluent across at least two of mech/EE/firmware/software/ID. $150–200k base + profit share.

Senior Electrical & Firmware Engineer: own the electronics end to end. KiCad schematic→layout→revision, stepper/BLDC drive tuning, RS-485/Ethernet bus architecture, embedded C, production test fixtures, field-failure analysis. 10+ years shipping electronics you personally owned; real motor control; power/EMI/thermal; prototype→CM. $140–200k base + profit share.

No art background needed. We care whether you're sharp, can own a thing alone, and write plainly.

Apply at https://theartistbreakfast.com/jobs and mention HN. The "what makes you right for this" box is the part we read.

breakfastny··on Flipdiscs
This is BREAKFAST (AKA Zolty) mentioned above.

The old panels had diode issues. It wasn’t the mechanism failing — the simplicity of electromagnets means they last an insanely long time, significantly longer than an LED. The diodes were just cheap and undersized. If you have a stuck disc on an old board, 99% chance you just need to replace the diode. If it still flips but gets stuck on one side, a pin has gotten sticky and needs graphite applied.

breakfastny··on Flipdiscs
BREAKFAST (AKA Zolty) here. The “ocean” aspect of the piece is in how it moves and the real-time API data that drives the wave-like motion. It grabs live tide data from a different coastal city each minute and changes based on that. The gold and marble bricks took inspiration from the Fontainebleau art deco style of their original Miami hotel (this piece lives in their Vegas location).

Here’s a clip of it moving (doesn’t read so well as a static image): https://theartistbreakfast.com/works/oceans