Mitch Altman born 1956, is the Inventor of TV-B-Gone and Co-founder of Noisebridge (San Francisco hackerspace). The San Francisco-based hacker and inventor, best known for inventing TV-B-Gone, as featured speaker at hacker conferences, as international expert on the hackerspace movement, and for teaching introductory electronics workshops, is also Chief Scientist and CEO of Cornfield Electronics. Altman is an alumnus of the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a master’s degree (1984) in electrical engineering. While at the University of Illinois, Altman co-organized the first Hash Wednesday in Champaign-Urbana in 1977. Altman moved to the San Francisco Bay Area in 1986 to work in Silicon Valley.

The Brain Machine „What would happen if you could play a recording of brain waves into someone’s brain?“ Being a skilled inventor and engineer, Mitch Altman decided to make such a thing himself. By using a microcontroller (a small programmable chip) he created a pair of glasses that blink LEDs at the same frequencies as brain waves. The result is a „Sound and Light Machine“ – wearing the glasses often induces colorful hallucinations while in use, a sense of relaxation afterwards and a fun 14 minute brain trip.