Logan Holby
Founder, Nexus Pen LLC
Logan Holby is the founder of Nexus Pen LLC, an Illinois company building an AI-powered smart pen for students, professionals, and creators. A user speaks a question into the pen and the answer appears on its display in seconds.
Building the pen
He built it end to end. He designed the four-layer circuit board in KiCad, wrote the ESP32 firmware, the Python backend, and the iOS app, and took the product through design-for-manufacturing with a contract manufacturer overseas.
During the production run the manufacturer proposed substituting the battery-protection MOSFET. Logan reviewed the substitute's datasheet and first concluded its pinout was wrong. Before sending that rejection he checked it against three manufacturers' datasheets — and found the opposite was true. The chip he had specified is not manufactured in the package he had designed the footprint for. His own board was wrong.
He corrected the layout, approved the manufacturer's part, and sent new fabrication files before a single board was populated.
He also built parental-consent flows into the product to comply with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, because students under thirteen would be using it.
Before this
Logan started Nexus Pen at seventeen, while a student at Mundelein High School in Mundelein, Illinois. He also runs LYFTED, an apparel brand that donates a dollar from every sale to a local church.
Contact
Press and partnership inquiries: logan@nexuspen.org