Enrico Miglino – Maker, Musician, Engineer.

January 13, 2025

I first saw Enrico Miglino in action via the online Element14 community in around 2015, he was working on a “Meditech” project for a competition called “Sci Fi Your Pi“. A project best described in his own words, “a multifunctional measuring system for health and disease support”. During the competition Enrico shared his findings with regular blog posts which inspired active discussion around the technologies used. He went on to win the competition and was featured in international press, the project was selected as project of the year 2015. Meditech was further developed as Open Source Hardware and presented at QTCon 2016 in Berlin with a refined electronics and enhanced software.

Education and Career

Enrico was born in Turin, Italy. He studied organic chemistry and particle physics at the State Industrial Technical Institute. And during this time he developed and interest in computers via reading Byte Magazine.

He continued his education researching Human Science, Natural Science and Image research at the University of Turin. Whilst here he worked on 3D models with different departments helping to reconstruct and model ancient buildings and people. This allowed him to develop his skills in software engineering in a multitude of programming languages.

His career then took a turn into the world of personal computers where he developed drivers for faxes, printers and radio data system decoders for Windows computers. Linux also featured for interfacing to medical scanners, cutting plotters and simulators. And he developed the first direct printer driver for Android over USB and Bluetooth.

Whilst working on Android and Symbian projects for mobile devices he developed an interest in the Qt framework a cross platform toolkit for developing graphical software.

And he’s used this wide range of skills to allow him to freelance with different companies across the globe as well as being named on several patents.

Travel

From his start in Italy, Enrico travelled across Europe and lived for a period of time in Denia and Ibiza in Spain, and Gent and Drongen in Belgium.

He also enjoyed travels in his “Jan the Van” which he upgraded with a number of gadgets such as solar charging and a number of screens for navigation, information and control. For more details see the We are Borg blog.

Author

As well as writing for Element14 and his own blog, Enrico also wrote for New Zealand magazine, “The Shed” where he shared his love and knowledge of electronics, music, travel and even reviewed the Belgian Power Tool Drag Racing Championship.

The Element14 projects inspired him to write a book on Vintage Upcycling with Raspberry Pi which was also presented via video conferences.

There is also a new book out Feb 2025 which wraps a story line around some maker projects “Tales for Makers: Real-World Projects to Modify, Hack, and Reinvent”.

Artist

Another project which inspired was the Art-A-Tronic which was created in collaboration with digital artist Lorenzo P Merlo. A digital art project combining a mannequin with an arduino, a Pi and some custom AI Chatbot software.

The project was entered into the Element14 PiCasso Design Challenge and also showcased in Depot 09, a vintage designer market in an old flax plant and the Kolder Art space in Ghent.

Musician

As a classical trained guitarist until recently he always played acoustic. But after buying electric guitar, amp and effects 5 years ago, he got into electronic music. And having caught the electronic music bug he built his own effects, sound generators and synths. He also trained himself recording and production techniques. And wrote, filmed and produced a music video for Pavillion. mainly filmed in Ghent where he lived at the time.

But as amazing as all of these achievements are, the one project which will always remind me of Enrico is the Christmas joy spreading machine, which is shown below.

By Andy from Workshopshed 5 Comments

  Posted in: Inspiration