#173 – An Interview with Jeri Ellsworth - Intense Illusion Introduction

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast, recorded November 25th, 2013. Episode 173, with guest Jerry Ellsworth. Intense illusion introduction.

Dave Jones: Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Dave Jones from the EEV blog.

Chris Gammell: And I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Jerry Ellsworth: And I'm Jerry Ellsworth of Technical Illusions.

Chris Gammell: Thank you very much for joining us again, Jerry. Again. Jerry, I don't know if you saw this, but at the back of the coupon book, you know, now that you're out of coupons for being on the Amp Hour, you actually get a free ice cream cone as well as four appearances on the Amp Hour.

Jerry Ellsworth: All right. Now, do I get to exceed the three-hour maximum of... Oh, Vincent.

Dave Jones: Oh, Vincent Himpe, right.

Chris Gammell: Well, you could have taken it as a lump sum payment up front. That was the three-hour show, or you can get four one-hour shows. So, unfortunately, we have to limit you. You can do whatever you want. We'll talk as long as we can.

Jerry Ellsworth: All right, maybe we'll keep it shorter this time.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Hey, Chris, she's really cashed up now. You know, we should have upped our process.

Chris Gammell: Oh, we should have asked for some money, huh? Yeah, yeah. This show brought to you by the Cast AR. Technical Illusions. Jerry, we'll talk after the show about how much that just cost you.

Speaker ?: Gulp.

Chris Gammell: Well, congratulations. That is so awesome. So, people don't know, Jerry and the Technical Illusions team, and the Cast AR got funded for over a million dollars, which is...

Dave Jones: Woo-hoo!

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Woo-hoo! Awesome. That's a lot of zeros.

Dave Jones: Which, come on, Jerry, admit it, that's the magic figure you were looking for, right? You wanted the seven figures.

Jerry Ellsworth: We did.

Dave Jones: Everyone wanted it.

Chris Gammell: Who doesn't? I know. I'd be happy with 20 grand, Dave. You know what? Right. How can we do this on a shoestring? Who cares?

Jerry Ellsworth: So, there's these analytical tools that kind of track your Kickstarter and tell you what you're trending for. So, day one, when everything was going really well, it was something like $10 million or something ridiculous. Yeah, yeah. And we're like, oh, my gosh, will this keep going? Of course, it doesn't. It gets extremely depressing in the middle. And then it was trending towards something like, you know, $900,000, you know, $80,000. Yeah. And we're like, no. No!

Dave Jones: So close. I saw that graph. It's actually an exponential decay graph. Except you had a little tail up at the end, I think, because of, you know, last minute flurry of people going, oh, no, I'm going to miss out. I'm going to miss out.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. It's strange psychology in Kickstarter. Folks, there's a lot of early adopters that get on, like, immediately. And then everyone warned us ahead of time that it's going to be depressingly slow in the middle. And it is depressing because you see, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars come in the first couple of days. And you're like, I mean, like $10 days all through the middle. And we were hitting lots and lots of press, like really big press sites were picking us up and newspapers and TV stations and stuff. And each one of those was just this little tiny blip right through the middle. Nothing we could do would, you know, bring it off that flap. We're trying to adjust our story and try to, you know, fix all the missteps that we had earlier. And it's just, you know, once the people pile through the first couple of days, they never come back.

Chris Gammell: I guess you just have to have low expectations from the beginning, huh? You just can't, you got to kind of run with it and try and promote as much as you can and then see what happens. And of course, you know, get Chris Gammell to be on the last 10 minutes of your campaign by accident.

Dave Jones: That's what got him over the million bucks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's what it was.

Jerry Ellsworth: That was. Yeah. Chris showed up and boom, right over a million bucks. Having you on the right up to the, you know, last couple seconds. We actually counted down all of us.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, it was. That was a good time. I feel bad for making fun of Rick's couch so often.

Jerry Ellsworth: I was telling Dave, sorry, I forgot your name there for a second, before we got going, that the only thing that would bring us off the flatline in the middle was we were starting to go show bigger companies. So there were some big companies who wanted us to come in and do demos. And those were more valuable than press because we actually got in and showed, you know, 50 to 100 people one-on-one the unit.

Dave Jones: Yeah. That's great for feedback. Race out, race home and race back to their workstations and buy it. Yeah. Cool. That's really surprising that, well, you know, with hindsight, it's not because you've got that factor of, you know, that hands-on, people can scratch and sniff and actually that wow factor, you know, oh, wow, this does actually work and this is really cool. And, you know, they race back to their cubicles and punch in their credit card number into Kickstarter.

Jerry Ellsworth: It seems to me that Kickstarter is kind of going through a transition right now. It doesn't seem to be quite as, a few years ago, you could throw a brick up there and sell a couple million dollars of them. Now it's, people are a little wiser.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. There's like books about how to do campaigns. There's like all this, I wouldn't say like mythology, but like there's like a strategy around it now too. I mean, like, I remember even you were talking about like the, the making of the video and you knew it had to have certain elements and you've seen what works, what doesn't. So there's like a, like a science almost to it. But at the same time, it's like, you still need to have a good product like you guys did in order to, to get to certain, certain goals. So.

Jerry Ellsworth: You actually have to deliver this time. It's like. Oh no. Really?

Dave Jones: And you foolishly, Jerry, put a realistic timeframe on your delivery. You fool. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: We got a little, I mean, that's an aggressive time schedule too, but people are like a year. Like really? I have to wait a year? That's how long it takes.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. What did people expect? I don't understand it. Yeah. Did people expect like six months or something? I, I, I, I'd seen that people were saying that this was an aggressive, or a, a, a realistic timeline versus a super aggressive one, but a year, that's it?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, I'd say it's aggressive. Yeah. Pretty aggressive actually.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I would agree.

Jerry Ellsworth: You're making frigging chips. Folks just don't know. Folks don't know. So that's the thing. I had some, some people like posting comments, like I was mentioning like, oh, it's great. We're over whatever, $500,000. It's getting into the realm where I can hire a few more engineers, mechanical engineers to get us through all this. And they're like, ah, someone posted like a good mechanical engineer could crank this out in a month. I'm like. All right. Yeah. So sorry. You don't understand realities of manufacturing.

Chris Gammell: Well, maybe, maybe a prototype, like 3D printed, like prototype, maybe. Not a, not a, not a, not a more design. And then a couple of spins on top of that. Yeah. Right.

Dave Jones: See, that's the thing. Yeah. Because you're actually manufacturing a, a real mechanical sort of consumery type product. You're not just making an, you know, an Arduino, you know, blank board or, you know, just an assembled PCB. This is a serious product.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. We have to go through. I see our biggest challenge in the next year is the mechanical. We have the glasses and the glasses have an optical component to them. So there's optics engine that has special materials in it, like liquid, liquid crystal polymers for the plastics. And then the actual frames themselves, which have to be of a certain type of plastic. And then you have hinge, the arms on them hinge. And we'll have to have some work done around the electromechanicals of how do you get the wires through the hinge? So there's some effort there. There's a couple of design spins right there. Are we going to stress from leaving all the wires?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. I mean, you know, you're not going to get that first spin. I mean, if you do, you're incredibly lucky.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. You're going to be incredibly lucky if your part ejects the first time out of the tool. So I've worked on designs where, you know, the first time we squirted plastic into the mold, we broke the injection pins or the eject pins off because it jammed up so hard.

Chris Gammell: It just stayed in there and then like the pins gave first, huh? Yeah. That's some darn strong plastic.

Jerry Ellsworth: So do you think that with this. Well, the tool gets hot.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. The tool gets hot and, you know, your tolerances aren't quite right on the pins. And then the pins stick and you have this press that's pressing at many tons.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Pow.

Chris Gammell: Hmm. More like ping.

Speaker ?: Ping.

Dave Jones: Yeah. So did you think that because you're experienced in, you know, bringing these consumer type things to market and you know what the realistic timeframes are and you were honest about it, did that potentially limit your funding perhaps? Although it's hard to tell without. Yeah. Control to a control group.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Experiment. Yeah, exactly.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, I'm just the way people were complaining about certain things. Being very honest about timelines hurt us. Just people like, well, I don't want to wait a year. That was some of the things that we heard quite a bit. And then, you know, I guess if we would have lied and said six months and then just delayed, whatever, we could have got a lot more. And then a misstep on our part was not subsidizing shipping to Europe. Yep. So we tried to, you know, extrapolate out what it would cost to ship all these units from various logistics centers out to different places in like Europe was particularly expensive because we have this surface that's a meter long. So it gets rolled up in a tube and then you have a box that has the glasses and the other peripherals in it. So it's two packages and it's oversized.

Chris Gammell: Right. It's got electronics for like customs and everything else. I'm sure that's kind of a hassle too, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, we didn't understand that the psychological aspect of shipping being a huge percentage of the total cost. So the units were $189 and shipping was anywhere from $60 to $80. Wow. Even though they're completely decoupled from each other. Yeah. People are like, you know, this is crap that you're charging me $70 for shipping on something that only costs $189. Uh-huh.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. You should have told them that they could get like a plane ticket and come see you and pick it up themselves. Right.

Dave Jones: Exactly. Speaking of which, who are the two people who bought the $10,000 hand-built prototype? She can't tell you that, Dave. Oh.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, one of them's public. Right. So it was Palmer from Oculus, which is a kind of competing product. Oh. Which is pretty cool.

Chris Gammell: So it's like him stealing like the Iron Man Mark I suit almost. Right.

Dave Jones: So do you have to now busily head down, bum up and build two full prototype units?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. Luckily, it's not too far off from what we have. We didn't make big claims about it being production ready kind of prototype. So there'll probably be a glob of hot glue in there somewhere.

Dave Jones: Awesome.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, yeah. For your $10,000. Here you go. I'll use some.

Chris Gammell: It'll be the nice hot glue.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. It'll be special. Maybe I'll paint in gold or something.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Put glitter on there. People like glitter. Glitter.

Dave Jones: I like that. And five people paid three and a half grand to come and have tea with you and visit and tour the facility. Wow. People really don't mind spending money, do they?

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, we did a lot of talking with a PR person before we did this. And they filled us in on kind of the psychology of there's certain folks that have a lot of money and they have everything physical that they want. And they're out looking for the experience. And that's very important to them. Right. So we chose to put a very expensive here's an experience type thing. And, you know, they sold out. I didn't come up with a name, though. That was Rick and Josie were like a ride. Tea with Jerry. Yeah, it doesn't exactly. I think someone's coming from Europe. So we've been in discussions of, like, what time would be good for folks to come out. And they're going to have to make very special plans to fly out.

Chris Gammell: Well, let's dig into some of the, you know, you mentioned the mechanical side of things. But what about, you know, as we're moving, so you've got this big hunk of cash that shows up in your bank account. Kind of walk us through.

Dave Jones: But does it? Does the money instantly show up in your bank account?

Jerry Ellsworth: There's some cool-down period through Amazon. So Kickstarter takes a chunk of it for their percentage, which I think is 5%. And then Amazon takes 3%-ish, something like that. So a big chunk gets lopped off the top. And then there's a certain amount of people's, like, their credit cards were maxed or their credit card got stolen during the month. Or something goes wrong with the transaction. And it doesn't go through. So there's, you know, a certain percentage of the money never shows up that way. And then there's a certain amount of money you need to leave, like, in Amazon, just in case there's chargebacks or some credit card for all-in or there's some scam. But yeah, pretty much a big chunk of money you can just transfer right into your bank account after a certain amount of time.

Chris Gammell: So then what? So then buying spree for soldering irons and, like, the...

Dave Jones: People. I think people are in family. That's actually people.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Where do you buy people? Because I heard that was illegal. Cast AR is people.

Dave Jones: We are human. We are human.

Jerry Ellsworth: We've... Before even Kickstarter ended, we were already trying to recruit folks. So we've been talking to a lot of folks trying to get a lot of contractors up front. Because it's going to be difficult to get quality full-time employees in a very short amount of time. And so we're trying to get the mechanicals underway immediately. Because that's our longest pole in the tent, is from the way we see it. And so that's been a lot of our effort. It's just trying to find some quality people. I am looking for a new oscilloscope. I'm working with sticks and stones right now. I have this old 100 megahertz scope on my bench. And everything that I'm doing is gigahertz range. So it's like... Everything looks like DC to my crappy old oscilloscope.

Chris Gammell: You've got to fake it out. Do some shifting. Frequency shifting or something. Down converted or something. Yeah, exactly. Yep. So we probably should ask... Are you like... Do you want people to email you if they're like... Oh, I definitely want to work for you. Or is that more of a... Oh, absolutely. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah? We need more EEs. We need more mechanical engineers. And maybe even, I hate to say it, industrial designer.

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. Ooh.

Dave Jones: Artsy-fartsy types. Artsy-fartsy. Make it look fancy-pantsy. Yep. Yep. Exactly. Although we're... How do you hire people like that? Because you don't... How much experience have you got in that area? Like hiring a good mechanical person? How do you know they're good? Do they bring their stuff in and go, Hey, look what I designed. But it took me a year and you need someone to do it in a month.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, exactly. You know, look at their portfolio of stuff. I've assembled teams before on both mechanical and electrical. But it's difficult. Hiring is always the biggest challenge in any company. And that's why we're looking for some hired guns to get us going immediately while we look for the rainbow unicorn that can do everything. Rainbow unicorn with a soldering iron for the horn. Exactly. That would be the...

Chris Gammell: The crap out injection molded parts. It's... And rainbows.

Jerry Ellsworth: You know, it's... This whole design cycle is going to be kind of fun and exciting because there's so many disciplines in it. So, in the early stages, we can have someone that's maybe a bit more junior. The designs don't have to be manufacturable for the first... We have some early units that we're going to ship, which are going to be... I think we have 70 or 80 of those committed. Oh, right. Those could be machined out of a solid block of aluminum. And it doesn't matter the cost of those. But you really have to find that unicorn, the person that knows how to make the tools. Yep. And someone that's very senior at doing that. Or you're going to have, like, these issues I talked about before where injection pins, you know, seize up or...

Chris Gammell: I've been amazed. I've been working with someone who's, like, a mold designer and stuff like that. And I just... You know, I thought, oh, I've seen a 3D printer before. How hard could it be? But it's like, you know, injection molds, like, the molds themselves are just, like, works of art. They're cut out of, like, these huge blocks of steel. And I'm sure you've done all that stuff before, too, right? We've worked with, like, that kind of mechanical stuff.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, I've worked closely with folks like that. I've never actually cut a tool myself, but...

Chris Gammell: Oh, no. Me neither.

Jerry Ellsworth: But the... Fortunately, our volumes that we're working in right now are fairly low volumes. So we can cut aluminum tools, so soft tools.

Chris Gammell: Oh, soft tools. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So they're a little bit more forgiving. Right. And you can cut them much faster.

Chris Gammell: How many shots do you get out of an aluminum tool, usually?

Jerry Ellsworth: It depends on how much you care about surface finish, because each time you shoot a... Yeah. ...charge a plastic into it, it slowly erodes the tool, and you get checking on the tool. And, like, if you look at a really cheap, like, import toy or something like that, and you kind of look at it, and you see, like, kind of looks like spider webs in the plastic or a lot of shrinking and stuff in an area... Yeah. ...you can usually, you know, track that back to, like, checking and erosion in the tool or poor tool design if it's shrinking in it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Huh. Yeah, it's a whole art. I forgot about the toy stuff, though. That's... I mean, I'm sure you have a wealth of people that you know in the toy industry, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, I've been reaching out to a lot of the contract manufacturers that I worked with before and various folks trying to get them on board. You know, a lot of them are already, you know, doing something, so... Yeah, that's always the problem. I tried to give some of these folks heads up that this was going to happen, but, you know, until you actually do the campaign and it's successful, it's hard to, like, lock anyone in.

Chris Gammell: Right, exactly. Allow me to jeopardize my future by not going and looking for new works, just to wait around in case you do get a million dollars.

Dave Jones: Well, that's the thing. A lot of, you know, a lot of your reputation may ride on the ability of a contract manufacturer to, you know, do what they say they can. And if they leave you in the lurch, well, you know...

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm absolutely terrified that something's going to go wrong this year, like some disaster, like our boat sinks, it has our entire load of Cast ARs on it. That's all. Yeah, everyone's going to believe that, aren't they?

Chris Gammell: Air freight, Jerry, air freight.

Jerry Ellsworth: Or the 747 goes down into the ocean.

Chris Gammell: Submarine, Jerry, submarine. Carrier pigeon. So, I guess my question about the, so with the mechanical stuff and even hiring hired guns, I mean, from estimates I've seen before, how, it doesn't seem like a million dollars would get you, I mean, like, it'll get you a lot, but it won't necessarily get you, like, a ton of people time, right? I mean, like, how long do you think that'll take you?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, no. Well, that's why we're working on secondary funding with VCs. So, that was actually part of our plan from day one, a strong showing on Kickstarter. And before Kickstarter, we went to a bunch of venture capitalists and showed them the product. And, of course, they came back like, yeah, we'll give you some money, but, you know, we want a big chunk of your company. And so now we've gone out and we've shown that.

Chris Gammell: It's all right, I guess.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah, that's their attitude a lot of times, like, yeah, it's pretty cool, I guess.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they're like the high school cool guys, right? And they're like, oh, yeah, well, I don't need you, you need me.

Jerry Ellsworth: Exactly. And then as soon as our Kickstarter, like, even halfway through the Kickstarter campaign, we started getting phone calls and emails from these folks, like, all right, let's close this deal. This is, yeah, let's close it. But now we're pushing back a little bit more now.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a mess. But I guess, I mean, that's the thing, like, so I always thought, I always wondered about, like, VC stuff. And I was like, oh, you know, I would never want to, you know, take money from that kind of thing. But money just transforms into, like, you know, something you have into a way that you grow faster, right? It's like a way that you can hire more people so you can do more awesome stuff and get it out the door. And it's just a sacrifice you're going to make.

Dave Jones: With less risk, really, of it all falling apart at the 11th hour.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, if you look at our…

Dave Jones: Because all your money runs out.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, you look at our Kickstarter, you know, we have a million dollars. We have a fixed cost of $300,000 to $400,000 sitting there. So, you know, that's not going to buy a lot of full-time employees. But if we could go raise a chunk of money from VCs, then we can staff up and look at what's going to happen after 2014 delivery of the Kickstarter units. We start planning for 2015 for a more mainstream launch of the device. Holy crap, is it 2015 already?

Dave Jones: Well, coming up? That just blows my mind. I'm sorry. I'm just… My life is flashing before my eyes.

Chris Gammell: You're in two months away, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: No way we can do a mainstream launch in 2014. That's very, very unlikely, just because the product isn't polished enough. But if we could get a team of enough people working, especially on the software side, and we learn a lot from the Kickstarter units that we build, then we'd be positioned very well for 2015. Right.

Dave Jones: So what a lot of people probably don't understand, they think, oh, you've got a million bucks. But, you know, if you don't get VC funding out of this, you're probably not going to make a profit on this thing. I can't, you know, with hiring all the people and doing all your fixed costs and prototype costs, there's just no money in it.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, we never planned about that at all. We, you know, I mean, we discussed a lot, like, well, what margins should we set the units at? And we decided to go with regular retail margins like you would get out of a normal consumer device so that we could present it to the market in about the same form that it would show up in 2015. So that we could show the viability of it. If we came out with, like, a $900 unit, we probably could have sold, you know, hundreds of them, had hundreds of thousands of dollars to work with. And it would have maybe been easier, but it wouldn't have set us up in a good position for later. That's a whole strategic, long-term thinking plan, isn't it?

Dave Jones: I mean, there's a, you know, a lot of thought has to go into that. Yeah, I know. That's what I keep thinking.

Chris Gammell: It's like, this is like really, it really sounds grown up, you know? Yeah, I know. Like, you're making videos. Like, I was thinking that. This must just be a hacker, Jerry. Come on. This is for video games. Like, I mean, this is so much, there's such business behind it. It's like, oh my God, and technology behind it. It's like, good gravy. Hiring people? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: What? Well, our whole summer has been, like, trying to figure out which way to go with this. So, you know, we didn't want to be some niche-y thing and just make a few hundred thousand dollars each and be done with it. Right. So, you know, it wouldn't be worth all the effort that we put into it. So, you know, our bigger plan is, you know, go for the gold and see if we can turn it into something bigger. And, you know, we appeal to the video game folks because it's a huge market and they're usually the early adopters. But there's actually, personally for me, there's so much more exciting stuff you can do with augmented reality glasses and our input devices. And so, we did the Kickstarter and all these companies came out of the woodworks, like big companies. Like, hey, you guys have finally developed what we're looking for. And so, that's also part of our 2015 strategy is, like, there's going to be, you know, mainstream consumer product. And then there's potential for these really big, high-end things.

Chris Gammell: All right. So, could you go over some of the, not the actual companies that you talked to, but, like, some of those applications you had in mind? Because, I mean, I really like the suggestion you guys had about, like, CAD and doing, like, 3D CAD type stuff. Yeah. But did you have other big ones?

Jerry Ellsworth: So, there's ones in the entertainment field where location-based entertainment. So, maybe super high-res versions of the glasses and you give them to people and they wander through an environment and they have some kind of multimedia interactive amusement park type thing. There's the CAD stuff that you talk about. You're talking about architectural companies are very interested in this. And even kind of geological survey companies are interested. So, you know, currently, like, people that go look for oil deposits or coal deposits or natural gas or whatever, they do all the surveying and they try to present the data to their clients and it's just a piece of paper with a bunch of squiggly things all over it.

Dave Jones: Oh, that's the industry I come from. Yeah, I can tell you. It's a big deal. Being able to visualize the deposits and stuff like that is a huge deal. And to do it in real time as well.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, with our tech, you just put the glasses on your clients and tell them why their land is worth so much money because they could walk around the table and look at this topology of the land and they can see potentially where the oil deposits are. And so, yeah, that's just some of the applications that are non-gaming which are going to be pretty interesting.

Dave Jones: By the way, Jerry, just a clue you went, these companies have billions of dollars. Like, they have no problem signing a million-dollar check for just some little widget.

Chris Gammell: Well, guys, video games are out and oil's in. Charge like a window pool.

Dave Jones: You know, you can make a hundred million-dollar business selling a hundred units. Yeah. I'm not kidding. No, yeah. Oh, yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, what would – I guess the video games kind of drove the whole thing in the first place, right? Because I'm always confused about that. I've never been in the consumer space, but that seems like a really shitty space to be in, if you'll excuse my French. I mean, like, margins are low and the demands are really high. And you don't necessarily – I mean, like, in your case, you're doing really cool technology. But, like, you know, in a lot of the business-to-business type stuff, you get to work on really specified things and, like, high-end, high-margin technology. I don't know. It just seems like –

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So, the Kickstarter for us, you know, we really wanted to kickstart some hardware and get it out there and get it to developers. So, that was one aspect of it is just to get a lot of these units in folks' hands. But we also looked at it as a huge PR thing for us. So, if we never make a penny on the Kickstarter, the PR that came out of it is – you know, you cannot buy that. You couldn't buy it with the amount of money that was in our bank account, at least.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: So.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's a really good point. It's like, again, all the grown-up stuff that you don't want to think about. But at the same time, yeah. I mean, like, it's like you're – YouTube won't do it all, right? I mean, like, you have this huge following on YouTube just like Dave does and it's like even with that, you're not going to reach a lot of the people you still have to go through these traditional media outlets, which is, you know, for better or worse.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. It's surprising where, like, some of these larger companies heard about us and it wasn't through, like, gaming media or through my YouTube channel or anything like that. It was like they were reading New York Times and there was some little blurb about it and, you know, mainstream media because we got on to some of that stuff.

Chris Gammell: That's really cool.

Jerry Ellsworth: Ride that dinosaur. It's weird. It's weird. Exactly. And it's – no, it doesn't matter how much you try to predict this stuff, it just never turns out as you expect. Like, we expected some of this stuff, but the things we expected didn't happen and lots of other things did.

Dave Jones: Do you have any demographics of the people that are backing at all? Like, I expected like a thousand just off the bat of, you know, fans of your work, you know, people who have been following you forever, you know, just buying in because it's something you worked on. Or are they all gamers or any data on that?

Jerry Ellsworth: I kind of peaked at some of that stuff. I haven't analyzed it very close, but there was – I put a YouTube video up and that was – directly from that YouTube video was a huge percentage on the first day. Right. So, yeah, that was – That's what I'd expect. Yeah. Yeah. Your existing audience. And so, there was all this – these theories about how to do a successful Kickstarter. And we were told things like you need to get 20% the first day. And if you get 20%, then you're likely to, you know, reach your funding goal. And we blew right through that in the first like 53 hours. We blew past that. But it's definitely the – you have to have that excitement there the first few hours because when these – tons of people will pile through. And if the excitement's there, they'll join in.

Dave Jones: How did you set the $400,000 target? What was the – you know, how did you come to that number? Did you extrapolate, oh, X number of units to make it viable and that's just what it – the figure that popped out or –

Jerry Ellsworth: So, there's a psychology around Kickstarter. At least this is the conventional thinking is that if you set your goal like really high, like if we would have set it to a million dollars, we probably wouldn't have made it. Because people would have looked at that and said like, oh, they'll never make it to a million dollars. And if you set it to 100,000, you know, us folks in the industry that are savvy about manufacturing will be like, oh, that's bullshit. They could never make all the tools. And so, what we did is we spent all summer beating up on the bill of materials. We reached out to a bunch of contract manufacturers. We want – these are the parts we want. And we worked on the bill of materials continually. And so, that's how we set the price. And then we extrapolated out off of our units that we needed to sell. And that's how we came up with our total unit price. And 400K was what Rick and I, we sat down and were like, okay, if we only get 400K, can we do it if we threw our own money in there just in case something horrible went wrong? Yep. And that's what we did. It's like 400K, maybe we'd have to chip in another 100K if something bad went wrong. So, and that's how we came up with the number. And I don't – I'm not sure if it hurt us or not because as soon as we hit 400K, like, our pledges went way down. So –

Dave Jones: Well, that's another part of the psychology. A lot of Kickstarter projects only make like just a little bit above their target if they make it. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So, I wonder if we should have set it to, you know, 500K where we would have had a little bit more buffer. And I don't know what would have happened. It might have extended our, like, growth spurt there for a little bit longer. But what's interesting is as we started talking to folks about how to do this Kickstarter, people came out of the woodworks everywhere that were experts in Kickstarter. And for only 2% of our – Oh, no. Our Kickstarter funds, they would give us the magic sauce to make it happen. Oh, really? It's like – Oh. Go blow yourselves, guys.

Chris Gammell: Sneak oil at every turn. Yeah.

Dave Jones: There's people leeching. There's a whole market out there leeching off that, is there?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, yeah. And even after Kickstarter, there's, like, people contacting us like, ooh, congratulations on your, you know, super successful Kickstarter. Now, let us take care of your clients and we'll be happy. Logistics.

Dave Jones: For 2% of your – We'll manufacture it in China for you.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: That's crazy. So, what about this – so, you were saying you were beating up on the –

Jerry Ellsworth: Beating up on the vendors?

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. So, you said you were beating up on, like, vendors and getting prices and stuff like that. What – but I remember in the past you had said that you had trouble kind of getting traction with them. So, how do you go from, like, you know, being – you don't have, like, a big brand name behind you because, you know, you guys are getting started still. How do you actually get the attention of vendors and start being able to push for better pricing?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So, getting pricing on units and tools and your – for your bill of materials is extremely difficult because, like you said, you don't have a reputation yet. So, you have to play a lot of games. Lie. You have to – yes. You have to try to lie. But these salespeople are pretty savvy and they catch on to you pretty quick.

Chris Gammell: So, you know – You send your Kickstarter link and you're like, come on. Look at that goal. Come on.

Jerry Ellsworth: No, but we were working on the bill of materials way before the Kickstarter was even going because we wanted to know way before exactly what it was going to cost by all the tools. Well, you have to. It's essential. Yeah. So, my background in toy design, I kind of know what a tool will cost and I just confirmed that I haven't done a toy in a few years. I wanted to make sure it hadn't doubled in price. And so, I contacted a few contract manufacturers and confirmed that, you know, a single pull soft tool for plastics is, you know, it's $4,000 or so depending on what you do with it. But the actual cost of the micro displays and the metalized gate array and all the stuff in it that we were going to do, that took a lot of work because just like Dave said, I had to try to lie at first. And then when they got savvy with that, then I had to come back and say like, well, here's our projections, which is just another way to lie. And then –

Chris Gammell: I know that one too, yeah. You do that at established companies too. It's like, I don't know what the hell this is going to do.

Jerry Ellsworth: I know, I know. I've worked with like toy companies where we are going to buy like millions of units and you go through the same dance anyway. And then, you know, the last thing you can try is just appeal with them like, hey, you know, we're a small startup. And sometimes that works and it took a lot of work.

Chris Gammell: I'll give you 2% of the company for the Kickstarter.

Jerry Ellsworth: So around September, we started feeling really confident about the bill of materials and we had second sources for a lot of the stuff in there in backup plans. So Rick and I were lots of backup plans. Like what if our micro display manufacturer disappears before we actually do our purchase of the units? And what if, you know, this little tiny metalized Gatorade company disappears or decides to double the price on us? And so, yeah, we felt very confident about all of our backup plans. You never want to do anything where you're only single source.

Chris Gammell: Of course. Yeah. That's interesting. I guess it helps too because a lot of this stuff – I mean, I think about like the metalized Gatorade. I think about a lot of chips these days where, you know, I'm designing chips in that have very specialized footprints. The chip vendors want it that way. So it's almost by design single sourced. But then when you guys are doing that with the metalized Gatorade, you know, if you have to do a second spin, you're going to be doing – it's all custom – well, relatively custom anyways, right? I mean, you can –

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, you can actually choose your bonding pads and stuff and maybe get it close so you don't have to reroute everything or you might have to reroute a little bit. But you can make it easier on yourself. And it's great. You can just – and a lot of times just put things on the side of the chip that you want. So if you have a right and left micro display, you just put those pads right and left of your – on your die. Oh, nice. So it makes the design smaller and more reliable. So that's all the stuff we were looking at. You know, it's like what are – for the metalized Gatorade, what are the underlayers that are available to us? And can we get all IOs we want? Can we drive? That many IOs with simultaneous switching. So that's one of the things that we wanted to make sure before we committed to some, you know, super low-cost Gatorade that we wouldn't run into trouble because we're pushing 24 bits of pixels out simultaneously to two micro displays.

Chris Gammell: Is that a serial connection or is that parallel? I got lost in there a little bit.

Jerry Ellsworth: The ones we're using are parallel. Although a lot of displays and cameras are going to this MIPI interface, which drives me nuts.

Chris Gammell: Do you know what that stands for or no?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, it's for mobile displays and it's kind of a universal interface for everything mobile. It doesn't do anything well.

Chris Gammell: Tell us how you really feel, Jerry.

Jerry Ellsworth: All right. I take that back. I'm being a little bit harsh because people will flame me for saying that. It does do some things good, but for what we're doing, it's not so great. The big advantage to MIPI is that the link can be shut down at any point. And for like displays, there's different modes. If your display supports it, you can only update parts of the display, not the entire display continuously. So you can cut the serializers and cut the power. My gut feel is that, you know, designers are going to be lazy and just use it in the streaming mode anyway and it's going to burn power anyway.

Chris Gammell: Right. So is power a concern for you guys? I mean, I know that the Gatorade will help with power, but could you tell us about your power stuff on there?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, it actually is a big concern for us. We have a mobile strategy. We're going Android, so we want these to run off of cell phones. Currently, we're doing a lot of processing on an FPGA and it's burning tons of power. So our current glasses, you put them on and they feel kind of warm and that's all from the FPGA that we have up there right now because we're just pushing all this wire load and all the routing matrix.

Dave Jones: How much power are we talking here in watts just in the FPGA?

Jerry Ellsworth: You know, I haven't measured it because it's not a big concern. We're moving away from it. Although there's an interesting situation coming up where an FPGA vendor wants to win the design.

Chris Gammell: Ooh.

Jerry Ellsworth: And they have some interesting parts that might be low enough power.

Chris Gammell: Don't trust them. FPGA vendors keep saying, oh, we're going low power. We're going low power. It's like, yeah, okay, sure. All you got to do is turn all your gates off.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, exactly. Well, that's one of the things that we haven't optimized for and that's going to happen in the next year. It's like right now the design is just running continuous like the pixel pipeline. Like I don't need to be toggling all these bits, but it's toggling just this huge pipeline anyway in the blanking and the vertical and horizontal blanking. And there's a lot of room to cut power. But the biggest win would be going to the metalized gate array. Yeah. Talking about the FPGA vendor that wants to win the design, they came back to us like, oh, yeah, we can hit the price point that you want. But it's going to be a one-time buy. Oh, jeez. And I'm like, no way are we going to agree with a one-time buy and have you double the price on us when we actually want to make another batch of these things.

Chris Gammell: Well, what we'll do is we'll sit at a table and we'll put one bullet in a gun.

Dave Jones: And how easy is it to transition from the FPGA to the ASIC? Can you go into the technical details? Is the gate array going to be exactly the same circuitry as what you're currently running in the FPGA? But it's just translated? Not always.

Jerry Ellsworth: Right. So it all depends on your design. And so from day one, I anticipated that we were going to do something like this. So there was things that I did to the designs to really simplify the conversion to metalized gate array or even a full custom. The first thing you do is you never use any of the FPGA IP, if you can help it.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that styling scrap, that 9K memory block stuff. Is that what you're talking about?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, you got to use that stuff because it's there. But what you do is you put wrappers around everything. You put a generic memory interface so you don't directly infer anything into your design. So you can infer a memory by just making an array and coding it that way in your Verilog. But that's very hazardous because you could break your design when you go to your metalized gate array or your custom ASIC.

Chris Gammell: Or even a different FPGA vendor, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. You're moving to another vendor of FPGA. So you do that. Like the memory wrappers, I always make those with really straightforward names. It's like Ship Enable Bar, right? No, in particular the polarities of them, which that actually bit me once in a design where I got the polarities wrong and almost bricked an entire chip. Because the ASIC vendor supplied an I.O. that had a different polarity enable than the other. But luckily software to the rescue, they were able to save the chip.

Chris Gammell: Not, not, not, not, not.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, in software we were able to fix it. But if that was a memory or something like that, the whole design would have been a complete waste. Hopefully that comes out in simulation. Right.

Dave Jones: So would you be avoiding internal PLLs and SIRDES units and stuff like that as well?

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, sometimes you can avoid, again, put them in wrappers. Right. Like we need PLLs on our design and we need memories. And we're going to have to use potentially SIRDES if the vendor has a fast enough one.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so the Gatorade guys, they all have that. I guess I don't understand how the IP stuff works as well. Like, I mean, I always hear about the SIRDES stuff on FPGAs. But is it like that's just a block that every kind of chip vendor can drop in these days?

Jerry Ellsworth: Sure, yeah. So memories are just a block and SIRDES are just, that's an analog plus some digital on the IOs. And so they plop a certain number of those around the perimeter of the chip and they're there. And PLLs are also the same. Those are all hard macros that are in the underage.

Chris Gammell: And we should say, too, SIRDES, because this confused the shit out of me for years, SIRDES is serializer, deserializer. And so you basically can go from a parallel to a serial stream for like one wire or, you know, a couple of small wires back up to parallel again whenever it gets there. Because, sorry, that term always got me. So I'm sure some of our listeners are slamming on their iPods. What is it?

Jerry Ellsworth: You tell me the answer. And the reason I'm concerned about SIRDES is that those are a problematic area going to a full custom design. They don't always perform as well as something that gets hammered a lot more like an FPGA. And so we built in backup plans into this, too. So for our design, we're receiving HDMI video. And that's what we want the SIRDES for is to receive that video. And if that doesn't work, we've priced in, worst case, what it would cost to get an HDMI receiver and put onto the glasses. Right.

Chris Gammell: And that's like a separate chip?

Jerry Ellsworth: A separate chip, yeah. So we could just eat that cost.

Dave Jones: Why didn't you do that from day one? Like just, you know, eliminate that risk? Is it the power cost targets you were trying to meet? Because if it was me, I'd go, oh, I don't want to deal with that shit. I just want to, you know, I want the lowest risk. I don't want to deal with the HDMI interface. Screw that. I'll just buy a chip off the shelf that does it.

Jerry Ellsworth: That's true. That's true. But there's also power. You know, you're deserializing the HDMI and you're converting this to 24-bit digital. And then you're transmitting that again. So all those IOs are toggling, which that's a big penalty. That's a lot of data.

Dave Jones: But because it's a dedicated chip, isn't the power going to be similar to what you'd get on your own custom gate array anyway?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, but you go off chip and then come back on chip. There's a pretty big power penalty for that.

Dave Jones: Yep.

Chris Gammell: Pushing electrons across traces. Yeah, yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: You're pushing all that capacitance. Yeah, exactly. So ideally, you know, best case, we're going to get that onto the ASIC and we're going to cut, you know, a little bit of power out of the design. And moreover, we want to make sure that we cut anything that will generate heat because that's one of our bigger concerns right now is that these things don't get warm. Right now, the FPGA on there, they do run warm because that FPGA is grinding pretty hard on all this data. So we're doing a lot of cool stuff in the FPGA. We're doing all the tracking for the head tracking. So we're recovering IDs of these modulated LEDs that you can put out in the world. We're calculating your position in the world. We're also stabilizing the video that's coming up from HDMI. So we're doing some magic work to the video to make it look more like the video is actually locked to the world. That's cool.

Chris Gammell: It's like frame shifting and stuff like that. Yeah. So first off, how much are you allowed to say about the technical details? Because I think last time you were on here, you said, once we're funded, we can tell you everything. But then I'm sure that there was patents and lawyers and everything else.

Jerry Ellsworth: So do I have a source code? Yeah, we are patenting some of the stuff. Well, we can just guy rate it then. Yeah, exactly. It's public. But it'll be way already in the market by then. Yeah. That's part of the VC thing, though. The first thing they ask you is how many patents you have. So we have to look at it. Like grown. Yeah, I know. You know, I wouldn't do them if I didn't have to. But we have to make the company look attractive. Dollar dollar bills, y'all. You know, hopefully we'll... Well, didn't Apple just win a patent case for rounded corners on a... Oh, did they? Don't get started.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So I should patent rounded corners on glasses.

Chris Gammell: On FPGAs. Yeah.

Dave Jones: Now, last time we had you on as well, I think we were talking about the Gatorade being a sort of like a product technology in its own right. Are you still like targeting plans to sell that technology so that people can like buy that ASIC and integrate it into other stuff?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, there has been some interest that way. And we actually made our Kickstarter a little bit more confusing anticipating that people would want to buy this tracking system and do stuff with it. And in the end, the people that... I think we only sold like a dozen tracking packages. Yeah, I see it. Yeah, you sold 11. 11, yeah. What a... What a mistake we made. We should have just like... Forget it. It'll be available on our website after if you want it.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Dave Jones: Right, because you have to deliver to those 11 backers, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, so that's a custom SKU. I mean, we'll do that by hand, but...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah, yeah. So then what would that be then? So then the... Can't you just offer them an upgrade?

Jerry Ellsworth: By its... I'm sorry. We guys walked on each other.

Chris Gammell: Oh. We do that. Dave asked if you can just give them an upgrade.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, it might be worthwhile. Just like, hey, sorry guys. Here's a pair of classes. We'll give you a full package. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Exactly. So if you did produce the chip just as a... It would basically be just like outputting coordinates or... I guess, what is output from the chip then? And then... So the actual ASIC itself, is that doing everything, everything? Or is then there's like an ARM chip on there or something like that is doing the microcode stuff? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So it is giving... As it sits now, it's outputting a bunch of stuff, but it's giving coordinates to all of these LEDs in the world. And then we have a little bit of code that's sitting on the PC that is calculating out your world position. And so we're actually talking about bringing that up into the glasses just to cut back even more of the bandwidth. And the reason we want to do that is cell phones are really complicated to interface to because they're so fragmented. Yes, they are. It's a nightmare. It's a...

Chris Gammell: And you don't want to like standardize on one phone and then six months later it's gone, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Not all the phones have USB. Some of them have USB, but when you plug a video connection into them, you can't access the USB. USB. So our solution is for mobile, we're going to have an option where you can modulate the coordinates over the microphone input. Wait, what? So just like a modem. So we've done some tests and it...

Chris Gammell: Old school, dude. Yeah. Well, yeah, I know what a modem is. But wait, the phone's audio inputs would plug into like the headphone jack or what?

Dave Jones: Yeah. Yeah. Because that's the only lowest common denominator on a phone is the microphone input.

Jerry Ellsworth: And you actually get very reasonable deterministic, and that's important too, interface with high bit precision. So there's a potential there to... We don't need to push a lot of data across, but if we ever decide we need to, we could actually push a whole lot of data across the microphone. So we've done some simple tests and proved out that it works, and so that's going to be our strategy on phones, because phone manufacturers can't get their act together and come up with a nice set of interfaces.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Well, a lot of people go to Bluetooth as well, I guess, but then that's not deterministic, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. When you're doing head tracking, you really want a deterministic link, because when you're swinging your head left and right, and the computer computing device has to figure out where your head is in the world and generate the right video, if you drop a packet, that's pretty darn bad as far as visually what it looks like. We tried Bluetooth, and we're like, eh, this isn't going to... Yeah. ...not going to cut it.

Chris Gammell: Especially not for the power, it's probably not worth it. I mean, if you could just run a cord...

Jerry Ellsworth: And cost, and cost. We had to be corded anyway because of the video out.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: It's still going to be a bit of a nightmare relaying the message to folks like, Right. You have an MHL connector, you need to get this HDMI out to... Hopefully, you know, in a few years things will be a lot simpler. So we're going Android first, and then Linux, Mac OS, and then trying to work with iOS devices, which they just mixed everything up on their recent phones too, as far as connectors. Huh.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, I guess that audio would be the most universal, huh?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: How much bandwidth can you... I mean, like, so most... I guess I think about it as the microphone side of things. So microphones themselves are usually, I mean, sub-10K, right? I mean, they don't need to actually catch the higher frequency stuff, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: But you just look at, like, let's say we were going to go even 56K. That went across phone lines that I don't remember what the bandwidth was on phones. I mean, we don't even need that much bandwidth, but...

Dave Jones: Ah, two and a half, three kilohertz.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So that was extremely up-limited.

Dave Jones: But that's actually complicated technology, the encoding, which gets you 56K board down a phone line. That's not trivial stuff. Yeah, we wouldn't want to do that on a phone.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, but you're looking at analog-to-digital converters, 16 bits at, you know, in the kilohertz range. It's a lot of bandwidth sitting there. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I guess I was a little confused about... I was thinking that this had... So is it mostly just going to be the ASIC then, or the metalized gate array? I always thought there was another processor on there for some reason.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, there's the 6502 sitting on there right now. We may not stick with that in the long run. I had the 6502 IP from a bunch of toy designs I did, so I stuck it on there. And all it does is it wakes up once per image sensor scan, does a little bit of housekeeping, and then goes back to sleep. But if we actually put the world solver on there, we're going to have to beef it up a little bit more. 8-bit arithmetic's just not going to cut it.

Chris Gammell: Right. So that's still on the ASIC, though, right? I mean, that's not off-chip. It's all still single. So it's just going to be a single-chip solution then?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, that's our main goal, single-chip solution. That way we can keep the cost down. And then that sets us up for the part of our math that's being done on the PC side. It doesn't necessarily have to be floating point, but it is in floating point now, so it has to be converted to fixed point. And, yeah, we'd probably look at one of the open-source 32-bit processors. Again, we can't use, like, a Neos or what do they call it on Xilinx there?

Chris Gammell: Oh, the Microblaze. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Actually, I worked on a chip once where we emulated on an FPGA, and then the management team decided, like, we were using the Neos processor. So they're like, well, we're just going to stick with that. Oh, my gosh. What a mess. Luckily, I didn't have to do the work on that, but it took, like, three or four people, four or five months to make it ASIC-ready, taking after we licensed it. It was really bad news.

Chris Gammell: What about the OpenSpark? You could do that one, where they open-source the Spark core?

Jerry Ellsworth: It depends on how big they are. I mean, I think...

Chris Gammell: Yeah, they're huge.

Jerry Ellsworth: If we actually go the route of putting the world solver in there, we're going to have to actually look at the algorithms very closely and first prototype them in fixed point and see what needs to be done. And, yeah, maybe the 6502 could do it with just a little state machine there to grind through the math. Right.

Dave Jones: So how much is an ASIC going to cost you now for NRE?

Jerry Ellsworth: It depends. It depends on how many metal layers that you do. So we anticipate at least three metal layers, and it depends on the underlayers, which is the base substrate. So it's about 15K a metal layer, and that adds on top. And then they charge you more if the underlayer is bigger.

Dave Jones: And who are they? Who are you dealing with to do the FPGA? Because I think we talked about this on the previous show.

Jerry Ellsworth: Gig Optics used to be ChipX. Right over to them. And then we've been talking to eASIC, which is... They have kind of interesting devices, but... Hey, eASIC guys, work with me, please. Hi. Are you out there? Can anyone hear me? And there's Atmel, too. There's Atmel that does some units. But really, the Gig Optics guys, the old ChipX guys, have the most interesting parts right now, and eASIC have the most interesting parts.

Dave Jones: So what tools are you using to do the ASIC? Are they all different?

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, so I just use the... Between vendors? Yeah, I just use the tools, you know, on site with them. So when it comes time to synthesize it, you just walk in the door with a big pile of Verilog. Got it. And then sit down with them.

Dave Jones: And then sit there for a month and...

Jerry Ellsworth: How long would it take? It doesn't take that long. So you get it working on your FPGA. I use all the free Altera FPGA tools currently. And then I do it with the same design methodology I was talking about with all the wrappers and stuff. So when I walk in the door at Atmel or one of these places, they're going to give me data sheets to their memories and their IOs. And then I just have to wire those up. And then we do... I need to walk in the door with my test benches, which that's something...

Dave Jones: I was going to say, it's all about testing. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So that's one thing that needs to be done in the next year is test benches. Because since I'm doing all the emulation on FPGA, I've been using a shotgun method of, you know, stick it on the FPGA. It works. All right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's actually... So if I back up before I walk in the door, there's probably going to be a good month of someone sitting there coming up with all the test vectors. And then we walk in the door, we hook up the IP, the IOs, and the PLLs and all that stuff. And then you're going to spend one or two days just trying to get the thing out of reset. That always seems to be the in simulation. I don't know why. It always seems like that's the biggest issue is trying to get all the signals on the pins asserted correctly to get the thing to not propagate that.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, but you know the reset works though, right? I mean, that's important.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, you always bypass. Here's the issue with reset, that it'll have a global reset on the chip, but you want to bypass for the first simulations your power on reset circuitry

Chris Gammell: because you don't want to wait for a tenth of a second of simulation time

Jerry Ellsworth: for the power on reset to click on. So that usually causes some headaches because it's when you assert the global reset relative to all your clocks and your design, you can get the red X of death that's propagating through the design. So that's for the listeners that don't know, in a simulation, whenever you get an X, an unknown condition, which can be just like a small timing issue, it will propagate through your design. So your design might be running, like one corner of the design will be looking like it's running great. And then somewhere out in time, there's this red X of death that's propagating from somewhere and it'll hit that block and then it'll go red. And it can be very... Everything else does. Yeah. And everything from that time on is unknown, so it's X.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Oh, that's a mess.

Jerry Ellsworth: So that's just going to be a behavioral simulation at that point. And then once you get confident of your test benches, they're going to do a synthesis run on it. And then you're going to do gate level sims. And then those take a lot longer because you're actually doing wire load and gate propagation delay.

Chris Gammell: Oh, so it's like a huge SPICE simulation at that point, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you make sure that helps you... The synthesis tools give you an idea that you've hit timing, but then you run simulation and you see if it's actually true. And then you might take a step back and put your power on reset circuit in there and make sure that all that's good and various other things that might take a long time. Once you've proved out your timing simulations, and then you do these really long, like, you know, two, three day simulations.

Dave Jones: I'm thinking that you should have just done another Arduino compatible Kickstarter. I know, I know.

Jerry Ellsworth: That's a good point. Well, then we got to go through FCC certification. Yeah.

Dave Jones: I mean, this is a big deal. Which countries? How big a deal is that? Oh, it's going to be huge, actually. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm actually kind of concerned about some of it. That could be a big showstopper. Yeah. The glasses I'm not so concerned about, but we have an RFID grid.

Chris Gammell: Did you guys have a reward level for that spark gap generator? You were the hidden level, $20,000?

Jerry Ellsworth: Luckily, the glasses are pretty manageable as far as the unintentional radiator aspect of them. But the RFID grid, this is a... Oh, yeah. Yeah. It's an intentional radiator. So FCC part 15 intentional radiator. Was that C or something? We have an entire array of RFID pickup coils, and they're all resonant circuits. Uh-huh. And they're... And you've got a whole mat full of them. A mat of them, right? At 13 megahertz. 13.5 and... Yeah. It could be fun. It sounded like a good idea at the time. And that was one of those things that we have a lot of faith in this design is it's the right way to go as far as the interactions. But it didn't sell nearly as well as we hoped. So this is going to be one of those things that we're going to do in faith.

Dave Jones: Amount of effort versus number of backers you got.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know how many we sold. There was a kit in there that had the... Eight. You sold eight RFID tracking grids. No, there's more than that. Those are people that just wanted to play with them by themselves.

Dave Jones: Oh, I just wanted that. Right. Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: There's a kit that includes it. So we probably only sold a few hundred RFID grids. And so we believe that's going to be the best way to play these kind of board games. But we're going to develop this and we're going to continue to sell it. And we'll go through all this pain and we're going to lose a ton of money on it. Did you...

Chris Gammell: That's the fun part.

Dave Jones: Do you get the feeling that you bit off more than you could chew in terms of, you know, number of things that you have to deliver?

Jerry Ellsworth: It's a lot of things. It is. This is... Yeah. This is... If I compare it to... I was constantly comparing it to toy designs that I did that would be one or two items. And we're talking about... We have the RFID grid, which is going to be painful. We have the glasses, which is... Electronically, it's pretty well done now. But mechanically, it's going to be painful. Wand. Little RFID pucks, which aren't going to be any effort at all. Yeah. So there's a lot. But I bit off a lot.

Chris Gammell: You know, when you say something's not going to be a lot of effort, right? You just cursed yourself like crazy. Yeah. Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. It might be the biggest...

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Come on. You know you just... You just tempted Murphy pretty bigly.

Chris Gammell: Pretty bigly. Pretty huge.

Jerry Ellsworth: Okay. The RFID pucks is like over-molding an RFID tag into a piece of plastic. That's right. That you just buy off the shelf. Pretty high confidence. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: I'm just saying. I'm just saying. I know.

Dave Jones: I'll be shipping next week. All right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So...

Chris Gammell: Okay, go ahead. What about the X factor here of like where's all this stuff? Like are you going to be in China this whole time? Where are you guys looking at manufacturing?

Jerry Ellsworth: It's going to be in China. I've already been talking to contract manufacturers in Shenzhen. So some companies I worked with. And some interesting things talking to these companies I worked with before is we were doing hundreds of thousands of units. And I'm walking in with talking about thousands of units across five different items. They're a little bit less. They're just not going to care. Right? Yeah. They're not quite as excited. Most of them.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So that's been a bit of a challenge. We're rapidly working towards buying our capacity in one of these factories. And we want to try to lock that down because we're going to be competing with a Christmas production run. Oh. With other companies? Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So 2014 Christmas? Is that the idea? Yeah. That's the timeline?

Jerry Ellsworth: So we're going to start shipping in September.

Dave Jones: Of which year?

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: But yeah, we have to compete with the Mattels and MGAs and the big companies that are wanting to get capacity in these factories. Gulp. So we have, you know, it's interesting. There's been some domestic contract manufacturers that contacted us during Kickstarter and post-Kickstarter that are saying that they can do the same price. I'm still very skeptical. So one contract. One time.

Dave Jones: But I'd be, but hey, I'd be serious looking into that because, well, going to China sucks.

Jerry Ellsworth: It does. It does. Although the quotes I'm getting back from, there's a particular company in the Bay Area that came back with a per hour test assembly and per hour assembling test of $15 per hour, which if you even just like start crunching those numbers, it's like, how can they even do that? I mean. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Sneak the units to Mexico.

Jerry Ellsworth: You're right. They can. It's bullshit numbers they're coming back with. Yeah. You know, they gave a range of like, oh, it's somewhere between $40 and $15 an hour test and assembly. So there's absolutely no way they're going to hit $15 per hour. You know, you just look at labor alone. It's like, I'm sure minimum wage is about $12. And so I don't know. This is America we're talking about. Unless it's all illegal immigrants or something.

Dave Jones: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah.

Dave Jones: But that might be the thing though, right? Because your volumes are relatively small. I mean, a couple of thousand is small volume for China. I mean, almost to the point where they don't even want to talk to you. But it's the tools. That's the problem.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Right. Especially the design and everything, right? Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: So cutting tools in the United States is really expensive. And if you cut the tools in Asia and transport them to a place that'll do the plastic press in the United States, there's all that logistics time.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Well, you could do the plastics in China, but you could do the electronics in the US perhaps. Because there's a lot of issues in the electronics manufacturing side of things where you need, you know... Someone on the ground. Feet on the ground. Yeah. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: Our plan from day one is that, unfortunately, it's probably going to be me and whoever's doing the tooling is going to be over there babysitting the entire time. Hmm. I mean, I've been over there for toy production runs. And the way it worked for toys is I was never over there during the setup of the production line, but I was in close contact with them. And then I would land on the ground the day before we did the actual pilot run, and we would run off 100 units with a skeleton crew. And we would check for yields and kind of see what's going on. And if there was any, like, yield problems, we'd open the units up, and I would try to identify, like, oh, you're shorting these wires out because you've, you know, the step of the production line. Here we might do another pilot run or two, and I might be over there for a week. And then, of course, this is for big, big production runs where that's when they bring the whole lineup is when I was leaving before. And then the toy companies had folks on the ground that, you know, oversee the whole thing for the next three weeks.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. But now it's you.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. There are a lot of contract manufacturers that look very eager to work with us. So it looks promising. I just, it's hard knowing, like, even the bigger, more reputable ones, the corners that they cut, that, you know, they're not just blowing smoke up our ass, and then we get over there, and they don't have the capabilities to do the assembly that we need. Mm-hmm. Because we're going to have to have optics assembled. So, you know, we don't want fuzzballs getting into the optics path and, you know, stuff like that. Someone's hair fully meeting. Exactly.

Chris Gammell: You know. There goes the cat-assembled units, just like you wanted, Jerry. Dogs rule. Cats rule. So you've been over to Shenzhen before, though? Like, you've been, like, you've spent time over there and stuff? Okay.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, quite a bit. Almost every production run I did on toys, I'd go over there.

Chris Gammell: What's the last time you were over there? I just wonder, because it seems like that area still is changing so much as well.

Jerry Ellsworth: It is. I think it's 2008 was the last time I was over there, so it's been quite a while.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Okay. That's cool. Well, it seems like there's a big contingency of people, like, of, like, expats over there as well, you know, like, that are in the same horrible position of having to babysit their thing for production.

Dave Jones: It was kind of interesting.

Jerry Ellsworth: I was talking to a lady. I was hoping to recruit her to help us, that she had been working for a big company that makes cell phones. And I talked to her about three years ago, and she was, oh, I love being over in China and doing these huge production runs. And I was going to see if she could help me out this time. And I contacted her, and she's like, I'm not in China, but screw that shit. I'm not going over there again. And she got so tired of it.

Chris Gammell: Bad experience.

Dave Jones: Yeah. Are you going to have to hire a Chinese-speaking technical person? Because that could be vital. Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: You know, every time I've been over there before, they gave me a person that just, the factory actually supplied the person. Yeah. And so the kind of funny thing when I was over there before is they'd be chattering about something technical, their engineers, and there's enough words that are the same. I could follow what they were talking about. And I would surprise them sometimes, and they'd be like, blah, blah, blah, transistor, blah, blah, blah, resistor, blah, blah, 1K, blah, blah, blah. And I'd be like, no, no, no, no, don't put a 1K in there. And then they would turn to me and be like, oh, do you speak Cantonese? I'm like, no. I speak resistor values.

Chris Gammell: Yes. Red, orange, brown, green.

Dave Jones: So what's your greatest fear in terms of manufacturing? Is it the electronics? Is it the optics? Is it the ASIC? Is it the plastics?

Jerry Ellsworth: I think it's the plastics by far. I fear that we're going to burn a lot of time in the first part of the year trying to compromise on the industrial design and something that's manufacturable. So I'm going to try to avoid one of the pitfalls that I've seen at a couple other places where, and this is what was going on at Valve when I left there. It was the industrial designers were ruling the design. And I could see that they were coming up with stuff that wasn't going to be mass producible.

Chris Gammell: Super fancy curves and everything.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. You know, you want it to look nice, but you've got to get the industrial designer out of the picture early and get into.

Chris Gammell: You need the structural engineer to tell the architect to shut the hell up at some point.

Jerry Ellsworth: We're even debating not doing industrial designer at all. We're hoping that we'll find some mechanical engineer that's the unicorn, right? Right. That has a good eye and kind of knows what feels good. Like for the wand, we kind of want it to feel good and not cramp your hand up. But I don't think we can burn two months of industrial design experiments on that. We just have to, you know, get it 90% of the way right away and then start working on the stuff that's going to be important, like the mechanics for the triggers. Exactly. And the button slides.

Dave Jones: Is it that important? I mean, you've got to deliver. I mean, it's all about delivery.

Chris Gammell: Dave's about to tell you to put it into a Hammond box or something like that. Just slap it in there and send it out the door. See, now, I wonder about this because it seems like even with mechanical versus like design kind of stuff, it seems like even still with mechanical engineers, you know, the electronics always ends up a slave to whatever shape they give you, right? Yeah. But since like, I think your title is officially president, right? Are you allowed to be like, no, this is a rectangular board and my foot is down?

Jerry Ellsworth: Maybe. Maybe. We're definitely going to run. Working at Valve was very interesting, the structure of it. And we're going to take some of the self-guided feel of Valve and we're going to try to structure our company that way. But there's definitely going to be a management layer. Like Rick is going to mandate certain things be done in software and I'm going to mandate certain things be done on the hardware side. And just we have to. We don't have enough time to do it. Dictatorships work. Yeah. Jerry and Rick, benevolent overlords. Totally open to people's suggestions, but our goal. If I don't like them, shut up. So our goal is the first five months we're going to lock the hardware. That's good. Yeah. So there's going to be no more.

Dave Jones: No more feature create.

Jerry Ellsworth: Exactly. And it's going to have to be that because we're going to be spending four months of time, you know, designing the tools, cutting the tools. You know, and all that stuff. So we can't be adding any more features, you know, five or six months into the design. It might be unfortunate. You know, there's probably going to be a few things that we wish we can change. And it's like any project, though. I think mechanically the two things that are going to be challenging for us is the wand because it's got an analog joystick. That's kind of an off-the-shelf part. But all your clearances have to be good there. And the buttons. And then the trigger. All that, we're going to want that probably to be mounted off of a single PCB so it's all in one plane. So that kind of limits where all these things can be. Yeah. And then the glasses, I think one of our challenges, the electromechanical and the wiring going from the bending arms and the connector to get the disconnect, the cable.

Chris Gammell: Right.

Jerry Ellsworth: We want all that to last and be good.

Chris Gammell: And then a cable actually running down to the unit or to the phone and or computer, right? That's the other thing? Huh.

Jerry Ellsworth: And there's a little box on the end of that.

Dave Jones: So that's engineering too. And then there's 3,000 people emailing you for the next 12 months saying, where are you at? Where are you at?

Jerry Ellsworth: Hopefully we can keep the communication up so they can see it happening along the way. Tell us about that. So the Kickstarter was, oh my goodness, as far as. Yeah, it was. We haven't talked about this.

Dave Jones: It was full-time work.

Jerry Ellsworth: It was. For a month. We thought we would be different. Everyone told us it was going to be full-time work just doing Kickstarter and communicating with people. And we were wrong. We spent most of our time answering emails and doing press things.

Dave Jones: You were doing three a day at one point.

Jerry Ellsworth: Three press things a day or three somethings a day. We kind of divided our day up into morning, mid-afternoon, and then kind of mid-evening. And we tried to schedule that way. So the first week was three things a day. So we were driving around going on like revision three. And then we went up to this week in tech and hack five and talk to New York Times and talk to various folks. And then it slowed down to about two a week the following week. And then for the rest of the Kickstarter campaign, it was about one thing a day. But the emails never slowed down. Never. I mean, the first day was ridiculous. We couldn't keep up at all because we had, I don't know how many people asking details and bitching about shipping and all this stuff. Yeah. But it seems it is about time we do an update, I guess. It's been a week and a half or two weeks now since the campaign. Oh, no.

Dave Jones: People will start to be screaming scam already.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. But hopefully we can do something a little bit more regular like that. Like as soon as we get a little piece of plastic design, we can show them. Yeah. But what's kind of interesting is we learned a lot from people's opinions during Kickstarter. It would have been really nice if we could have like got all those opinions before we did Kickstarter. We could have been so much more successful.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Can you start your first update video with you and Rick like walking out the door with big bags of cash? Like you guys are bailing.

Dave Jones: Hopping on your plane too. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Chris Gammell: And you're like, oh, oh, hey guys. That would be hilarious.

Jerry Ellsworth: Never mind these bags of money.

Chris Gammell: Yes, exactly. Right. Cast AR. That's definitely a real thing. Hey.

Jerry Ellsworth: We're going to go make it real now. Wow. You know, it's... We were watching all these kind of scammy Kickstarters all summer. Yeah. And going like, oh man, you guys are ruining it for us. There was... And like really big name ones like failing. Like, oh, don't do this to us.

Dave Jones: So do you think that really hurt you? Do you think you would have been much... Got much more like 12, you know, 15 months ago?

Jerry Ellsworth: I think so. I think a year ago, you know, people were more optimistic about it. But there's been... Yep. A lot of video game things that have failed.

Dave Jones: Yes. Very spectacularly. Like we're talking like $10 million ones too, aren't we? Like multi-million dollar.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Burning through just tons and tons of money. You think...

Dave Jones: And most of those were just software, right? They weren't even hardware.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, here's the thing. Like we look at like, oh, hardware. That's... You actually have to build things. It's infinitely harder. Well, I don't know about that. I mean, you look at a video game though. It depends on the software. Just wandering around the halls of Valve and looking at how many people it took to do Defense of the Ancients, which was a... It pretty much was just one game map with just a bunch of characters that ran around this map that never... The map, as far as I could tell, never changed.

Dave Jones: But the video games are so stupid these days. They're like Hollywood Productions. Give me freaking Duke Nukem Platform Edition or, you know, Frogger.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, that's where all the money goes. That's why it's probably worse for video game Kickstarters than it is for hardware. Because the expectation's high, right?

Dave Jones: Is that the... These days?

Jerry Ellsworth: I would say so because, you know, here we made all the prototypes. We showed that all this stuff works and it's pretty straightforward. Now we just have to execute on it and we know ahead of time what it's going to take. These video game productions, you know, because of the psychology thing we talked about before, they probably can't come out and say that this is really a $5 million production because they would never get it. They have to set it at $500,000 and then they get painted in a corner when they only make a million and a half and then they run out of money and then people start getting jaded about Kickstarter. Yeah. I don't know what's going to happen with Kickstarter and all this crowd source stuff in the future.

Dave Jones: Well, yeah, it's not going to go away, but I think the hype period is probably over or starting to decline anyway. Sure.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, it seems to be a lot more software things not getting funded these days. Rick and I watched all this stuff very keenly all summer. Like, how is hardware doing? How is software doing? Should we actually take some VC money and forget about this Kickstarter thing? And, you know, in the end we were like, yeah, we still think it's viable to do Kickstarter for hardware. I would not do a software project. You would never get the money that you need unless it's very specific. Like, I think probably our hacker electronics community could do it. Like, if someone wanted to do a software-defined radio program or something very well-defined, they could probably pull in the money. But big productions like video games, I think, are dead.

Dave Jones: So could you have taken VC funding before the Kickstarter and you chose not to? We did.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, we decided not to. Actually, you asked me what my biggest concern was and going into Kickstarter was staffing up after Kickstarter was my biggest concern. No, correction. My biggest concern going into Kickstarter is we wouldn't get funded. Second concern is we'd only get $400K. Third was that we wouldn't be able to staff up if we did get funded at like a million or more. And then fourth, I guess, is plastics and all the mechanics and what goes into that.

Dave Jones: Tick them off one at a time. You've already got two. Keep going. Yeah. Huh?

Chris Gammell: Step three. Go on the amp hour and see if anyone wants to work for you.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, yeah, yeah. Anyone who wants to work with us. I think it's jobs at Jerry, J-E-R-I, at technicalillusions.com.

Dave Jones: Because she doesn't get enough email already.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Jerry Ellsworth: It's already gotten out onto the web, so it's kind of noisy. It's pretty hard to figure out email addresses these days, too.

Dave Jones: Well, filter it. Put job in the title and then you can set up a filter on that.

Jerry Ellsworth: So mechanical engineers and electrical engineers is what we're looking for, especially if you, on the electrical side, intentional radiators. Right.

Chris Gammell: You love FCC testing and who doesn't, right?

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah, yeah. If you love staying in a Faraday cage for hours at a time. Yep.

Chris Gammell: Do you live in an anechoic chamber already? Well, come on down. Come on down to technical illusions.

Jerry Ellsworth: I might just have to put a jobs listing up for that.

Chris Gammell: Like an anechoic chamber gnome or troll or something.

Jerry Ellsworth: Brilliant. I worked with a guy that was, he was so good at doing FCC stuff. And it was all intuitive. So he would use stuff like he had a ham radio, an old ham radio, and he would dial through and he'd listen to the chirps on the ham radio. I mean, he had his spectrum analyzer. He knew where he was, you know, failing just by the peaks. But then he would tune them in on his ham radio. And then he could have his head down working on the circuit and he'd be poking his fingers on stuff and he'd be taking leaded capacitors. But he would be listening to the sounds coming over the ham radio. And if he attenuated something in the spurious, you know, frequencies, he would hear it.

Chris Gammell: And, uh, that's like the character in sneakers, right? Like the deaf guy or the blind guy in sneakers. Yeah, the blind guy. Redford movie. Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

Jerry Ellsworth: Which it reminded me of, like in the early days of I was doing electronics, I would use things like headphones to try to debug circuits. So there is a lot that you can learn. Like these piezo earphones are great. You can just hook them right up to slow digital circuits and hear what's going on and when things change. It's actually a lot to be learned by sound.

Chris Gammell: Or just listen to dubstep and it sounds pretty similar, right? I mean, a couple more lows in the dubstep, but, uh.

Jerry Ellsworth: Maybe I shouldn't have got into this high tech, like AR glasses thing. I should have just made a, like a circuit bent something. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah. You would have got the same amount of money with, uh.

Chris Gammell: C64 where you poke with your finger capacitor.

Jerry Ellsworth: A lot less work.

Dave Jones: A hundred times less stress. Yep.

Jerry Ellsworth: But there's, there's, I wouldn't, wouldn't be happy just doing the easy thing.

Dave Jones: Right. We know, we know, Jerry. That's the punishment.

Jerry Ellsworth: And it makes me feel good that, uh, you know, this is something that Valve, uh, tossed away and we made something of it. Yes! Stick it to the man! Yes! Well done, Jerry. That's addictive.

Chris Gammell: Well, Jerry, when can we, uh, when can we have you back on to hear about the updates? I'm guessing to 20, maybe this time next year, you think, you'll be ready to talk about what it's, how it's going? Or maybe. Oh, God, no. When she's sitting in a hotel room in China.

Jerry Ellsworth: Well, that would, that would definitely be a fun one, um, when we're over there. We should try to do something when I'm in China and be like, I could just tell you all the horror stories live from, uh. Yeah. Uh. I, you know, I imagine.

Chris Gammell: I'm in a factory right now punching my production engineers.

Jerry Ellsworth: I'm trying to pee down, uh, a toilet that's just a hole in the ground. That was my, yeah, Dave, you've been there, right? You've, uh.

Dave Jones: I've been there, yep. That's not. And that's a fairly accurate description.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. So, the first time I went to China, my guide that took me into the, into the factory gave me, like, a little packet of tissues. And she's like, you'll need these. And I'm like, oh, I'm not sniffling. No, thank you. She's like, you will need these. And I'm like, okay. And I just took them to be polite. And I, I don't know, I threw them in my laptop bag. And then I walked into the bathroom and it was, it was like 20 holes in the ground. Yep.

Chris Gammell: I will need those.

Jerry Ellsworth: And, uh, no barricades between. And I'm a shy peer, too. And it's like, I'm like, oh, yeah, I will need those. So, I had to go back, grab them.

Chris Gammell: And then try to do my thing. Then you fashion a large curtain or something.

Jerry Ellsworth: I sucked it up.

Dave Jones: All of the content here on the Ampia, I'll fix.

Jerry Ellsworth: You know, it's important. It's important. If you're considering manufacturing in China, you cannot be pee shy.

Chris Gammell: Right. You gotta have eyes wide open.

Jerry Ellsworth: Hey, it's, it's always exciting when I come on. I, I dropped, uh, all kinds of, uh, swear words.

Chris Gammell: What was the last time? I don't even remember now. Oh, I, no, I do remember now. It was vagina or something on one of them. Yeah, something vagina. Yeah. Oh, Jerry. All right. So, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll plan to do a live, a live, uh, amp hour connection between, actually, that works out well because that's pretty, you know, pretty closer to Australia's time zone. So, between the U.S., China, and Australia, we'll do, we'll do a live production update. And, uh.

Jerry Ellsworth: We could probably do some fun ones in 2014 also. So, it, um, Rick and I, our plan is to be very candid about what's going on. So, like, hardware lockdown time at, like, five months or so out from now should be very interesting to talk about, like, all the compromises that we're gonna have to make and.

Chris Gammell: Oh, yeah. Definitely.

Jerry Ellsworth: What went right and what went wrong.

Chris Gammell: Just live stream the, uh, the arguments in the conference room as it always happens, you know.

Jerry Ellsworth: Oh, my. You know, Rick and I get along very well, but, you know, there's been a few stressful moments of, like, there's, there was 14-hour days, like, leading up to this thing. And then during Kickstarter, it was less than 14 hours the first, um, three or four days. And, I mean, we were snippy. It was, I went to, uh, Revision 3, which is a web broadcast thing, and Veronica Belmont was gonna do a demo and, and talk to me. And I was, I, I almost had pneumonia, or I probably did have pneumonia. I was, like, so sick. And she was, like, she, I was, like, ugh.

Chris Gammell: Nice to see you again.

Jerry Ellsworth: And she, and she was, like, patting me on the back. She's, like, oh, dear. Oh, oh, oh. She's so nice. And she's, like, giving me cough drops. And she's, like, yeah. Yeah, I mean, and she's, like, oh, just do the best. Do the best you can. We'll try to edit it.

Chris Gammell: Don't die until you go on Hack 5.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. And so, uh, just before, you know, I pounded back a coffee. And then I just, like, put on this big smile. And I'm, like, hi, Veronica. It's great to be on the show. Da, da, da, da, da, da, da, da, whatever. And I, I did my, like, 10 minutes on her show. And then afterwards, it's, like, uh. And she said something, like, I was amazed that you pulled it off that well.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Oh, my God.

Dave Jones: Well, we look forward to it, Jerry.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. Thanks for having me on. The horror stories. It's, yeah. I'm looking forward to the horror stories. That makes for good time. Yeah. Makes it worth what?

Chris Gammell: You know, being in the thick of it with good friends, you know. That's how you get close.

Jerry Ellsworth: I look back at some of my, like, really stressful designs I worked on. And I, I'm so nostalgic about them. It was total hell. They're going through these different things. And in the middle of it, I'm like, ah, I'd never do that again. Or, like, the Kickstarter thing. Oh, I'll never do that again. But, you know, five years from now, the product will be out. And everyone will be happy with it. You forget the shitty parts.

Chris Gammell: Right? And you're like, oh, I could do that again.

Jerry Ellsworth: Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's how most people have a second child. I'm glad that we have short memories.

Chris Gammell: You know, like, I think that's how most people are appropriate. More than one childhood. Dave? It was so much fun the first time.

Dave Jones: Yeah, Dave.

Chris Gammell: Exactly.

Jerry Ellsworth: Dave, are you a second child yet? I haven't been keeping track of personal tweets too much. No, there is no second child. There is no comment, folks. Okay.

Chris Gammell: No comment yet, folks. Oh, shit, I just commented.

Dave Jones: Can we scrub that out?

Jerry Ellsworth: The wife will be on there. Uh-oh. I'll give you a couple years and it'll happen. Yeah, you'll forget.

Chris Gammell: Yep. Sweet. Back to Dykeland. Oh, it's silence. Chirp, chirp, chirp.

Dave Jones: Well, it's always a pleasure to have you on, Jerry. Thank you. Everyone loves when you're on. Almost a regular. You might even be able to break the Jeff Kayser limit. Oh, has he been on more than me?

Jerry Ellsworth: I think so.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, he's a 7 or 8. So you've got a little ways to go, but you can catch up.

Jerry Ellsworth: All right. When there's some major breaking news, I'll let you guys know.

Chris Gammell: Okay. Well, that sounds good. Well, thanks, Jerry.

Jerry Ellsworth: Thanks, guys.

Chris Gammell: Talk to you soon. See ya. Outro Music