#458 – An Interview with Ken Burns

Chris Gammell: This is The Amp Hour Podcast. Released September 15th, 2019. Episode 458. An interview with Ken Burns. Welcome to the Amp Hour. I'm Chris Gammell of Contextual Electronics.

Ken Burns: And I'm Ken Burns with Tiny Circuits.

Chris Gammell: Hey Ken, how you doing?

Ken Burns: Oh, pretty good, Chris. Good to talk to you again.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, back in Ohio, my old stomping grounds. Or south of my old stomping grounds, I suppose.

Ken Burns: A little bit, but still northeast Ohio. Just south of Cleveland.

Chris Gammell: Northeast Ohio, that's right. Yeah, the NEO. I remember there was, when I lived there, there was like a, not an accelerator, but it was like a booster club for technology in NEO. I don't remember what it's called or if it's still around, but NEO everything.

Ken Burns: Yeah, there's a team NEO now. And they like that acronym because it kind of encompasses all of what they consider northeast Ohio, which is Cleveland, Akron, Youngstown. Yeah. Yeah, but I'm here.

Chris Gammell: Nice. Well, that's great. It's great. And so we never worked together directly, but I actually used to work with some of your former coworkers at your old job when you were a consultant engineer at Abbott.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And actually, again, the world out here is relatively small. And so engineers, again, you don't want to burn any bridges in this area because you're going to run across the same people that you met earlier on in life. And so, especially in electrical engineering or firmware engineering, it's a relatively small community. So it doesn't take long in a career before you start kind of overlapping. And so, like you said, yeah, we, I worked at a place called Avid. And so we had a number of engineers there that worked really at all different places. And so it's just kind of interesting to see how things mingle together. Yeah. Certainly in this area.

Chris Gammell: And so, well, let's hear it. So we're going to work all the way up first. You said you're from Tiny Circus. We'll definitely talk about that. You have a Kickstarter coming up. We'll definitely talk about that too. But yeah. So where'd you get started? I mean, like maybe even before, oh, CIA too. Yeah. I figured you'd say that one. Yeah. Yeah. So you have a long and storied background in hardware before you became an entrepreneur and doing hardware. So how did you get to where you are today?

Ken Burns: Oh, I think maybe I have the standard engineer, techie type background in terms of childhood. So I was kind of, you had the-

Chris Gammell: Legos and taking stuff apart. Exactly.

Ken Burns: The taking stuff apart, playing with Legos and playing with computers. So at a very early age, kind of playing with computers. Actually, I'm a bit older than you. So I remember when the Apple II first came out. And so we actually didn't have a computer. So I had to go to the local library when I was five or six and have to sign up for 15 minute increments to play on an Apple II. And then we eventually got a Commodore 64 was our first computer, I think in 83. And so I was about like eight years old. And so I remember kind of cutting my teeth on that in terms of programming basic and just playing around and playing games. And so my brother and I, who, my brother's a mechanical engineer, and so we were kind of, you know, big computer geeks, I think, which is common with a lot of the listeners here. And yeah, just kind of always, you know, navigated or was attracted to math and science. And so certainly through high school, I just kind of knew that engineering was where I wanted to go. And so I enrolled in electrical engineering. And so it's kind of a toss up between that or mechanical, but I was really more attracted to kind of computers and just fascinated with how they worked. And so it really kind of started it in terms of really want to figure out how these things work and, you know, hopefully work in that field. Just because, again, just had such a love for computers. And so went to the University of Akron for electrical engineering.

Chris Gammell: Nice. That's great. That's great. And, you know, kind of you've been in the Midwest the whole time. So has that or not the whole time, the whole time? Yeah. Sorry. I was in D.C. for a little bit. Scroll, scroll on the scroll on the page here, the old LinkedIn page. But yeah. So why? I mean, I guess I get this question, too. Why the Midwest? Why not? Why not move to California? That's what Dave always asked me. Why not? Why not go where more hardware is?

Ken Burns: Why don't they move here?

Chris Gammell: That's a great question, Ken. Let's, you know, we should do. We should start in the Midwest. Not NEO right here. Here we go. Well, you moved from here, though, Chris. You moved to Chicago, right? There was reasons. I had reasons. Yeah. Yeah.

Ken Burns: I mean, it's still Midwest. I'm still Midwest. I'll give you a pass. At least you didn't go to the Valley or something.

Chris Gammell: It's a little bit less rust belt than my upbringing was. You know, Cleveland and Buffalo and Pittsburgh is quite a bit of rust in there. But, you know, now I've got skyscrapers and big city.

Ken Burns: So there's skyscrapers in Cleveland. They're rusty, though. But, yeah, so, yeah, I guess the term for the area is certainly the rust belt. And so it's got a very industrial past. And actually right now where our office is, I'm in an old rubber factory on the fifth floor. Oh, yeah. I have a big, huge brick building. Yeah, that place. We'll definitely talk about that, too, because that's a cool spot. It's a very cool spot. And so, yeah, again, I think there's this fallacy to believe that all the real jobs are on the coast. And if you want to do anything in technology or certainly high tech, you've got to move to California or Boston or something like that or Austin. And it's really not the case. And certainly in our case, in this area, like some of the places you worked at, it's definitely an industrial focus, I'd say, is kind of the strength. And if you look at a lot of the companies that are either headquartered here or have big presences here, they tend to be kind of the almost the old guard of technology, you might say. Yeah, I think so. And so, certainly I worked for a little bit as an intern at Rockwell Automation, which was the old Alan Bradley, was the group I worked in. But, again, you see these things for big industrial control facilities, but they really were doing quite a bit of high tech development. And, again, it doesn't have to be the fanciest consumer Fitbit type thing that you're working on to kind of get your chops going.

Chris Gammell: And I think that kind of stuff is like it is. So, we had John Davis on, too, who you may know. I don't know if you know John. No, I don't know John. But also from Ohio. And, you know, he does a lot of industrial stuff, too. And, you know, you just hear about, like, these things that are actually controlling plants and, you know, out in the world and making things go. You know, like, just like Detroit is for cars and, you know, the Valley is for consumer. It's just kind of like it sounds like it's just kind of concentrated in specific areas.

Ken Burns: And then, too, you get these startups out of the Valley. And, again, I'm not putting down the Valley, but they'll come out with something. Of, you know, some way to completely change and disrupt factory automation and whatnot. Oh, yeah. Without realizing that there's a lot of big players out there that are doing a lot of things. And, again, they might not be as flashy and as showy. But the engineering talent, I say, in a number of these places is definitely on par with potentially startups. I also think, again, startups generally, I don't want to say they have ageism, but certainly it seems to attract a younger engineer. Yeah. And I think some of us do the lifestyle, the amount of work hours and whatnot. Whereas certainly around here, as a young engineer, I think it was really beneficial to be able to work with people that have worked 20 or 30 years in industry and kind of learn the old ways of doing things. And understanding that was really great to have that kind of mentorship as you grow up. Yeah. As opposed to being thrown in a startup where everybody's just freshly out of college and has never designed a product before. Where I was working with people that had worked on billion-dollar industrial-type facilities. We're working on consumer products and all sorts of different things that have done 20, 30 products before. And so being able to kind of go through that almost boot camp when I was at Avid was really kind of cool in terms of learning how to design product.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, definitely. And I'll do a call back to another previous guest too, Todd Bailey. I remember I talked to him back on one of his previous jobs. He actually specifically chose a job just for working with a couple of graybeards there. And I totally endorse that method of going to find mentorship and going to find people that have been there and done that. I think the risk is always if you get jaded too early. Obviously, there's a lot of grumpy happening with the graybeards as well. But I think that in terms of the actual learning opportunities, I'm going through that right now. I'm actually seeking out. I talked about it last week on the show, I think. Like, I'm seeking out tutors right now where I'm just going to hire people to try and replicate that experience. And people that work in companies like you're talking about, you get that, you know, not for free. You get it as part of your job, though. And it's a great, great resource.

Ken Burns: Yeah, it really is. And I mean, part of my job now, we deal very closely with a lot of universities, again, kind of in the maker realm. So not only our customer base, but then also we have a number of interns. We had four engineering interns in this summer and marketing interns and others. And I try to mentor them in some ways to say, hey, the first few years of your career, when you actually get out of school, that you want to go somewhere where you're going to learn as much as possible and kind of in what you want to do. And we've had some. And again, they're kind of chasing the money. And so maybe they take a job that they don't really want to do, but it's got great benefits or whatnot. I'm like, you're 22 or 23. Your costs are low. You got very low cost. You're basically with your parents through college. Go somewhere. And you know what? Yeah, you might be making five or 10K less than maybe somewhere else. But you could potentially learn a lot of things and really in five years time or three or four years time, you know, make that leap. And then at that point, start caring about the money. But it's really those first few years that are super critical. And again, with engineering, if you take a job, let's say you go into sustaining engineering or something like that. After a few years, you're basically that long term. You can't really. It's really hard to do a career change. So if you want to get into design or firmware and you've done something else for 10 years, either you're going to have to take a big, huge pay cut or most companies probably won't even consider you. So, again, to those young engineers, just kind of try to soak up as much as you can from, again, the graybeards. And don't chase the money until later. Or never in my case.

Chris Gammell: Well, you know, you do what you can. Well, and you mentioned another thing at Avid, though, too. And you'd kind of said that, I think you said, like, replicating the same thing over and over again or like getting lots of iterations on designs. Right. You'd mentioned people had done, you know, tens or hundreds of designs and learning from them, but then kind of doing it yourself. And that's something you were able to do when you worked at Avid, which was a design house, effectively. It was like a for hire house. Can you explain what that is real quick? Yeah.

Ken Burns: So Avid, it's actually Avnet now. Avnet Design Services, I believe they changed their name. Yeah. Yeah, I heard about that.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Chris Gammell: And changed hands a couple of times. Yeah. I think it was around the same time that they, that Av, wait, no, it didn't, it wasn't around the same time that they bought Eagle or someone bought Eagle and then they sold it to, oh, Element 14 bought them. Yeah, that's right.

Ken Burns: Yeah. So they were owned by, who's the big company behind like Element 14 in the UK? Premier Farnell. Oh yeah. So originally they're the ones that bought them and then they, you know, got piled up by Avnet. Right. Yep. And it sounds like it's actually going pretty well. I still keep in touch with a number of people there. And, but yeah, so in my day it was, it was privately owned. So there's a single owner that owned the place. And again, he was an engineer. So it was really great from that standpoint. And it was a relatively small shop. When I started there, I started there, I think I learned 2002 or 2003. There were only eight or nine engineers and there is also a PCB CAD group. And that's really how the company was founded. Um, and so they were just basically doing, you know, printed circuit board design services for other people. And then, um, in, I believe the late nineties, they brought in my, my old boss, Rick Benson, who actually worked, uh, where you used to work, ABB. That's right. Yep. And, um, Rick kind of started up the engineering group. And so I was, when they hired me, I was probably the youngest person they had hired. Uh, so I was probably 28 or 29 when I started there. Um, cause again, it was older people. And then by the time I left, they're up to about 50 people. And so about 25 engineers. And so basically we were just extension of different companies, engineering departments. And so, or anywhere from startups, see if somebody comes with an idea and a napkin and we would do the electronic design for them. Or up to dealing with like fortune 50 companies where they need additional engineering resources for a particular job where they just want to outsource it. Um, and so the great thing about that place was you generally did relatively short jobs. So it wasn't like working in a big company where you're on one project for, for years on a time at a time and don't really get any exposure to anything else. Here we're doing things from, you know, military electronics to consumer electronics to medical type stuff or industrial, which I spent a lot of time on. And so just kind of jumping between those things, you really learn a lot of techniques that might be very common in an industrial system, but you wouldn't see in a consumer type system. So you get that overlap, right? You know, these different areas of expertise.

Chris Gammell: Why did you put in a 200 volt protection diode, Ken? Yeah, exactly. It's bigger than the microprocessor.

Ken Burns: And again, some of those, you know, industrial guys or automotive people, when you, when they go to consumer, you know, when your bill of materials cost is more than what they want to sell the product for. Yeah, right, right. And again, you do run into that. Again, some of those industrial type people, well, they're over-designed things. It's like, no, no, no. Cost is the driver here. Uh, and so it's kind of good to jump back and forth between all those different projects. And any one project, when I first started there, it may be a few months and you might be doing two or three different projects at once. And so any given day, you might work one day on one project and the next day on something else, or you're splitting hours. Um, and so just again, that exposure. And like you said, the graybeards there, uh, you had people that had worked in motor control for 20, 30 years or, you know, industrial electronics at, you know, a number of companies in the area. And so just getting that kind of, um, again, mentorship where you've got a question and you can go to somebody that knows exactly what to do and they teach you why you do it that way. And hopefully they do it with a smile and not, uh, but, uh, grumpy face, not a grumpy face, but in general, that place is extremely collaborative. And so I, I look back on that time very fondly. And again, I worked on probably 50 different products there. Um, most that went to production. And so again, kind of, um, again, I wasn't the sole engineer in any of those products necessarily. Uh, some of the smaller ones maybe. Um, but again, just having that exposure to all these different design teams and then working with these outside companies to see, okay, if they're manufacturing in China or they're manufacturing here in the States, or they have their own, own announced manufacturing, uh, just getting exposure to that world as well of dealing with outside contract manufacturers and kind of learning, how do you actually take, you know, this prototype that you have on your, on your desk, um, and making it so you can actually, you know, produce a hundred thousand of them.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Um, well, the last thing I want to ask you about Avid was about the, um, about wireless heart, just because I think that that's an interesting, uh, footnote. Like you were working on the standard there, but how did you, first off, what is it? And then how did you get involved with it?

Ken Burns: So wireless heart is a wireless sensor network, um, similar to let's say a Zigbee. And actually at the time, um, and actually to move back a little bit further, heart is a community communication protocol to communicate with, um, what might people might see is like

Chris Gammell: old school type electronics in industrial sensors are not like, uh, not super, super hip. You don't see, you don't see the kids putting those, but it's actually, once you get into

Ken Burns: it, it's actually somewhat hip. I mean, it's like, Oh, this is really cool. I see why they do it this way. So yeah, these are basically four to 20 milliamp type devices. And heart was developed by Rosemont, which is now Emerson back in the seventies or eighties. It's a FSK signal that you can communicate with these, with these instruments. And so it's used in, let's say an oil refinery for someone to go out and calibrate a temperature transmitter or pressure devices to measure these big things in, in again, these process control plants or industrial control plants. And so heart had been going for a number of years and people were using it and it's still extremely prevalent. And even with newer digital field buses, profi buses and foundation field bus and things like that, heart was still had a huge chunk of the market. Cause again, these sorts of plants, they don't upgrade instruments every year. That's right. Things are installed for 20, 30 years. Um, easily. And also kind of the mindset of a lot of the operators in places, they know a certain technology and they're not changing, uh, cause it's a risk. And again, if you're operating a billion dollar oil refinery, you don't take risks usually. Um, and so I, I worked on a number of heart interface devices. And so one of our key customers at Avid was a company called Mac tech. Um, and actually our owner at Avid, who was a part owner of Mac tech as well. And it was basically a single man company, very small company that just made heart modems. And so these were basically just something you hook up to a laptop that would let you communicate with the heart device. And so you could use a PC application. And at the time is relatively novel. This is the mid nineties. Normally you had to have like this big expensive field communicator and go out and now you can use laptops. And so that was kind of the, how the company got started in the nineties and they did extremely well. And then by the mid two thousands, there's kind of a push among all these companies involved in, in the heart foundation. Uh, people like Honeywell and Emerson and ABB, um, you know, these, these big companies in industrial automation to create a wireless version. And so, um, Mac tech wanted to play a role in that. And, uh, the owner was not technical. And so I was brought on, you know, through Avid is kind of their technical representative. And so it was really quite cool that I got to go around the world many, many times to these working group meetings over a five or six year period. And we typically had three to six meetings a year, usually one in Asia, one in Europe and one in the U S and got to kind of see the, the behind the scenes of standards wars in a way. And so you see different companies. And again, I represented a one person company. Um, and you've got these big billion dollar guys in the room. I'm sure you had a ton of sway though, right? Oh yeah, definitely a lot of sway. And so a lot of it's kind of sitting back.

Chris Gammell: Listen ABB if that's your real name.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And these big companies all had kind of their thing that they were pushing for. Cause again, this was not done in a vacuum. Everybody kind of wanted to make their thing the standard. And eventually it did become standardized and it was based on 802.15.4. So very similar to Zigbee. Um, and actually dust networks, which was a, again, Silicon Valley startup that I think learned a lot through this process. They, I think they thought they knew more than they did, but, uh, they wanted to get an industrial automation and, uh, by a linear tech or not. Yeah, they did. And they still make their chips and they're very good chips. Um, and I really like working with those guys, but again, it's kind of interesting to see the Silicon Valley startup kind of come into this, um, again, behemoth fight between all these, all these big players. Um, but again, eventually that's what it became. And it actually changed quite a bit from the original dust protocol to make it more fit into the heart. And so the product I worked on was called the wireless heart adapter. And so this was a device that would communicate wireless heart, um, to wired heart. And so you could put this on, you know, one of these old four to 20 instruments and actually could get rid of the four to 20 loop if you wanted. And it would communicate back over the wireless heart network. And so the network, um, again, is a, is a mesh network, uh, uses a time synchronization. And so you could get very low, uh, power at each node. And so a number.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I remember, I remember seeing that for like scheduling of like when the packets were being sent on the dust network thing.

Ken Burns: Yeah. Everything is scheduled. Um, and so let's say you have a neighbor node that you're communicating with. You basically have a negotiated time that you're going to wake up and communicate with each other. And the entire network is done that way. And there's a network manager, uh, that basically schedules that to make it efficient. And then there's redundant routes and all that kind of fun stuff. Um, the, the problem with that sort of network is you can't really do asynchronous communication very well. So if you have like a sensor node out there and you want to report back data, let's say a light switch and like a Zigbee type network, you can flip the switch and it might be a couple of seconds before you're actually scheduled to wake up to send that data. Um, but in the case of a sensor network, it actually works really well, uh, where you're just reading temperature on like, right.

Chris Gammell: And they're reporting tenths of an hour or every hour.

Ken Burns: You can, you can schedule it to go actually under a second. Um, but again, that affects power consumption. Uh, but you know, big players like Emerson, uh, Honeywell, ABB, they've, they've come out with wireless, wireless heart devices. And, um, again, we, we brought our product to the market and then that company, Mac tech actually got bought by Peppel and Fuchs.

Chris Gammell: Um, maybe another name that I never knew before I got into the space. Exactly.

Ken Burns: They're a big industrial company, um, based in Germany. And actually they have a big, uh, representation here in Northeast Ohio as well. Uh, so they bought them out, but, uh, again, it's kind of cool again, just to see as a relatively young engineer, I think I started to go to those meetings when I was in my late twenties. Um, you know, got to go to about 20 different countries and interact with engineers from around the world and just see kind of, you know, behind this, how the sausage is being made, which is pretty, but, uh, it was a lot of fun.

Chris Gammell: I always wonder about that. I don't think we've had anyone on the show before that's done like, I mean, it was, it was an industry standard, but it, it was a standard, right? I mean, it became a standard.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And actually there's an ANSI version of it and I think an IEC version of it. Um, so it's, it's a standard, but then they're also competing standards. There's something called ISA 100 that was out. And again, it was, uh, is an interesting experience. Um, and again, I'd say in the early days, I basically sat in the room and kind of listened to the fights. But then once we actually got things kind of settled down and chose the technology that's kind of involved in the physical layer, uh, side of it, and then also some of the application layer stuff to define, you know, how these devices actually communicate specifically like the adapter type things I was working on.

Chris Gammell: Oh, that's great. That's great. But it was so exciting that you went running from the entire industry. Yeah. So I quit. You know what? After that. I'm going to go and build circuit boards instead. Yeah. So, so what was the, what was the buildup to you doing that? Cause that was a big thing. It was a big thing.

Ken Burns: Yeah. So, um, basically the, the reason there was I always kind of had this bug to kind of start a company. And so even in the mid two thousands, I was tinkering with ideas of different things to do. I was getting involved with a lot of these industrial companies, particularly through the wireless heart thing. And also a lot of my big focus I did was mostly embedded, embedded software, particularly when I was at Avid. And so certainly I did hardware design, but primarily there I did embedded software. Um, and so I was working with all sorts of, again, from consumer to these industrial type products. And so I was kind of taking the idea of the wireless heart that you have these big four to 20 old school devices that potentially cost anywhere from 500 bucks to many thousands of dollars, but they're extremely simple to communicate with. I mean, extremely simple. You can hook up to one of these things and send one or two commands and tells you exactly what it is. I'm a temperature sensor. I'm reporting in degrees Celsius and it's, you know, 47.2 degrees. And I just kind of thought, wouldn't that be really cool for an embedded type sensor? And so originally I started out, let's take that same basic idea and make like a small, simple little sensor bus. Um, yeah, you can connect up to sensors. Maybe you can get these things certified to some spec and they sell these and potentially gets embedded into a product and each would, would have a little processor, um, like a little AT tiny or something like a little sub $1 processor. And you could have calibration data in there and do all this kind of fun stuff and be able to sell these things extremely cheaply, but it basically be a smart sensor platform. And so that was the original thought. I'm like, Oh, people are going to love this and it's going to be so great and change the world and then started digging a little bit into it. And I'm like, ah, I don't know if there's a brilliant cell. Um, and then kind of decided I needed some sort of processing platform cause I need to communicate with these little smart sensors I'm working on. Um, and at the time, Arduino was starting to become popular and the whole open source.

Chris Gammell: What is this timeframe? I wanted to get that in.

Ken Burns: This is like the late, late two thousands.

Chris Gammell: Okay. This is when you started thinking about it.

Ken Burns: You're saying this is when I started thinking about and tinkering around with it. Yeah. So again, Arduino started to become extremely well known. So I'm like, well, I'm not going to reinvent the wheel. I don't want to, again, I was a firmware engineer, but I don't want to do firmware because I understand how expensive firmware is to design and do. So, uh, why don't we kind of leverage open source as much as possible? And so I also knew I needed it really small cause I wanted to do these things to basically be embedded into other products. And so I'm like, okay, I'm going to make a smaller Arduino. And that's kind of how that started and then completely went away from the whole smart sensor industrial type idea of, Hey, just let's just make a small Arduino platform. I mean, there's other ones out there, but, uh, you can't stack things together.

Chris Gammell: Um, and so I guess, I guess these days it's so common that I feel like we have to kind of do a callback almost to when it, when it was, I mean, this is the feathers and basically

Ken Burns: the Arduino pro and pro mini or nanos were the only things out. So you had to solder.

Chris Gammell: Um, again, this is like, you were looking at it as like, uh, like you wanted to make it easier to snap things together.

Ken Burns: You're saying exactly. Let's make as small as possible. And so the form factor we came or I came up with was it's basically 20 by 20 millimeters. So it's about the size of a U S quarter or Euro and they just stack together and it works exactly like a standard Arduino. All the shield signals are supported. And again, you can snap them together and just prototype things extremely quickly or create your project extremely quickly. And so that was the original idea that I went to market with and went to, and again, I just did this all the better in my house. I didn't know if I thought eventually this might become a business. I hoped it would. Um, that was really the, I didn't go into it just as a hobby. I really did want it to be a business. But again, I also had that thought about maybe only two people out there actually want this thing. I don't know. Uh, I showed it to people at local hackerspaces and whatnot and showed it online and yeah, there's an interest, but I'm like, are they actually going to pay for it? Uh, you don't really know until you go for it.

Chris Gammell: And so, um, Well, I remember like seeing it the first time and thinking like, okay, it's tiny. It's an Arduino. That's cool. These are all good things. But then I remember like thinking, well, why wouldn't someone just go and build their own thing? And I think my mistake there was thinking as a hardware person. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Everybody's just going to build their own thing.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Why wouldn't you just go solder stuff together? And what you're saying is this, I'm not the target market for this thing. I'm guessing it was all software people, right?

Ken Burns: Yeah. And again, the, I think the standard maker, when you're doing something of this scale, um, you know, you're dealing with very small surface mount components. And so it's kind of outside the realm of a lot of, you know, guys just working out of their house. Uh, now it's actually gotten better. I mean, there you can get stencils and circuit boards for almost nothing. It seems like, um, and so if you haven't done service mount soldering out there, I'd definitely encourage it. It's a lot of fun. Um, but again, yeah, that was the idea of what, what can we get super small? That's really easy to use. And also from, again, from the hardware standpoint, if you just need something very quickly, um, you know, this was a nice attractive thing. I mean, something else I worked on at Avid, we did a lot of very quick prototypes for a number of companies where we had to basically do like a looks like type prototype where you put something together. It has to do some function very quickly. And basically you had to get a bunch of development boards. You go to dig key and buy like a microchip development board and then some other sensor board and you're, you got this whole huge clap trap and it, you know, it's, it's going to break anybody. Yeah. And it's not cheap at all. And so it's like, why isn't there like a standard way to just connect these things? And then Arduino came out and there's that, but I'm like, this is pretty big. Um, just get these shields that kind of stack together or you, you know, before Arduino, like all these different companies would have similar things, whether it's microchip or Atmel or Renaissance or who knows what would have these development boards with these add ons and they're all 50 bucks each. Um, and it wouldn't have the sensor you actually want. So then you have to get a development board from the sensor manufacturer and then wire it up. And, um, so again, that was kind of the mindset of just make this as easy as possible to hook up different components. And, um, so that was their original inspiration for it.

Chris Gammell: Nice. So how did that, uh, how did that first, so you've done how many Kickstarters now?

Ken Burns: Uh, we've done three and we just launched a fourth a few days ago. So the first one was for the tiny Duino is what we called it. You know, I got a little crap for calling it Duino, you know, it's like everybody does that. I'm like, okay. So, um, is the tiny Duino platform it, we had a goal of 10,000 and I should say I have a goal, um, cause it was just myself at the time and it actually did close to 110. And so at that point it's like, okay, you know, there's actually potentially a business here. Um, and then I kind of went down the dark path of doing manufacturing and all that kind of stuff, which is a whole fun discussion. So yeah, we'll definitely talk about that. It did really well.

Chris Gammell: Um, and also this is early Kickstarter too, right?

Ken Burns: I mean, this was not, it was, I mean, there were other things too, and it kind of, although, uh, I'm good friends with them. We're somewhat friends with them now. And we actually worked on it. The DigiSpark, which was a similar thing, a small, it was a small Arduino compatible platform. I actually used an AT tiny and just plugged into a USB port. Under 10 bucks that came out a month or two. So I was about to launch. I was working on the Kickstarter that came out and did like 350 K. Oh my God. Oh, you know, they stole a solar thunder, but, um, I'm like, I eventually convinced myself like, it's quite a bit different. I talked with Eric who owned it. And then we, we actually ended up manufacturing the DigiSpark pro here, which is kind of a unique thing. Again, it's a small world. Everybody overlaps, but, um, yeah, so there were some big success stories on Kickstarter that time, but yeah, it's still very early days. If you look at the original video for that, it's something I shot myself. You know, I'm not a video guy at all. I shot that in a bed spare bedroom of our house. And, uh, I mean, it looks rough. Um, but it's definitely that kind of personalized touch of, okay, here's this guy doing this. I don't think he could do that now. I think too many people be burned with Kickstarters to trust that. Here's just a guy working in his house and I'm going to give him money and know he's definitely going to deliver. Um, again, I think there's a lot more optimism back, back then. This is 2012. Whereas now I think just so many people have been burned with bad Kickstarters or crowdfunding campaigns that, uh, it has to be a lot more polished and we kind of have to sell ourselves a lot better that, Hey, we can actually pull this thing off.

Chris Gammell: Right. Right. Well, having a track record now helps too, I think.

Ken Burns: Yeah, it definitely does. Uh, so I, I think that fear is gone at least. Uh, and again, we have a number of, you know, happy customers and a track record of shipping, uh, I think a few hundred thousand boards now. Um, so yeah, again, that's nice, but at the time it was kind of scary. And so I guess to segue into something I think you're going to ask. So we, we decided, and I had a kind of a stretch goal at the time, which is a, you know, thing they do on Kickstarters. Although I, I don't think we're going to do any now. Um, but, uh, if we hit a hundred thousand, I said, we're going to do manufacturing here locally in Ohio, in Akron, and we're going to do it ourselves. And I kind of put that stake in the ground.

Chris Gammell: I'm going to stop you right there. Yeah. That's a big leap. That's yeah. It is. One hundred thousand and one dollars. And I pressed buy on eBay on the reflow oven that I've been looking at.

Ken Burns: And that was kind of the, again, I had that mindset because I, I, I've known of other local small companies have done it and they were doing similar sorts of things. There's a company called dimension engineering that, um, makes smaller robot controllers. Um, they're using like RC cars and different things. And so I knew them and they had a pick and place line. And that was kind of an inspiration in a way. I'm like, Hey, if these guys are doing it, uh, why can't I do it?

Chris Gammell: Um, well, did you see this, the tears streaking down their face every day? I mean, I don't know. Yeah.

Ken Burns: I think I came in a little late after they were a bit established, um, and I didn't see the early days.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, exactly.

Ken Burns: And so again, my background at Avid and other places was a design engineer, not manufacturing. And we worked with outside contract manufacturers. I'm like, okay, we send it to these guys and they build a sport. Right. They send it back and it's done. And they send it back. And the interface I had with those companies was relatively minor. And occasionally I go to CMs and see their lines. I'm like, Oh, this is really cool. I want these machines. This is so cool. Robots are cool. Robots. Yeah. And, uh, again, thought it would be easier than it is. Manufacturing production is much more difficult kids. I'd say it is not for the fan part.

Chris Gammell: And so. That's right. Um, so, well, okay. So, so first off, what kind of equipment did you decide to buy? How did you, how did you, so you're coming in completely fresh? Did you talk to people? What was completely fresh? And so you're basically doing research online, like that level of fresh.

Ken Burns: Yeah. For a year I had been again, cause I, again, this is kind of the dream. Uh, I mean, I wanted to do this. Um, so I was looking on eBay for pick and place machines and reflow. Sure. Sure.

Chris Gammell: Let me ask though, is, was, I don't need details on whether or not it was, you know, okay, but like, was this an escape as well? I mean, was this like, I need to get out of my old job?

Ken Burns: Um, I think there was some of that.

Chris Gammell: I think it was just a crazy plans to get out of old jobs, at least in my head. I just didn't follow through on them.

Ken Burns: You know, there was certainly that, I mean, I had been at Avid for 10 years at that point. Uh, at the time I finally left. Um, and so I, I think it was also because I was working with startup companies a lot. I worked with the company Mac tech, which is one guy that started on his own and he went out and he was making very good revenue per year. I saw what he was selling these things for in the industrial market and the margins he was making. I'm like, if this guy's doing it, not that he's a great guy, but I'm just saying. Was he, was he manufacturing though or no? No, he completely outsourced. He was strictly, he's basically in sales. Um, yeah, not technical at all.

Chris Gammell: You know, you never see people dreaming about going into sales. No, but again, so he went into a manufacturing business. He used to be in Rockwell. I could call people all the time. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Yeah. I don't dream about going into sales at all. Um, yeah, right. But, uh, yeah. So I kind of had that, uh, that dream for a while. Um, again, looking at pick and place machines and all that kind of stuff online. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So once it actually, I think I, even before it hit a hundred thousand, I think I actually ordered the equipment. And so relatively quickly as a four week campaign, I think two weeks in, I went out with my former coworker and friend Roy, uh, who owns a small electronics consulting firm. So he worked with me at Avid. He kind of spun off and did his own thing, but he needed space because then he's just working at his house. And so, uh, that's kind of when we found our original space, uh, here in this old rubber factory, um, it was really cheap. I'm like, okay, got a space lined up. Uh, I'm going to get some machinery. And so did a lot of research online. Again, I've been doing it for a long time. So I contacted a company that basically sells refurbished SMT equipment.

Chris Gammell: I would like to just take a quick pause. Do you remember earlier in the episode when you were talking about startup companies coming in and talking about how easy things are going to do and that everything's going to be fine. And oh man. Oh, believe me. The irony is perfect. Perfect book ending. Thank you, Ken. Thank you so much.

Ken Burns: So, uh, it was a lot of ways it was dumb, but on the other side, it wouldn't work if we didn't do it that way. Because again, it's part of the original Kickstarter. Yeah. We raised 110,000, but we had to ship an insane amount of boards. Some of these boards were just a couple of bucks each. And again, because they're so small and they might only have a few components on it. Um, and a lot of the things were relatively low volume and with the outside contract manufacturers, it's, it's all about volume. So yeah, if you, you have one product you're launching on Kickstarter, do not manufacture it yourself. If you're doing a million different development boards, you're kind of stuck in a way, unless you know, you, you've got huge volumes, but some of the things we're making 50 of and in contract manufacturing, it's all about the setup charges and whatnot. So, uh, the setup charges alone would be more per board than what we can even sell it for. So it could be 20 or 30 bucks just to set the machine up. If you amortize it across how many aren't you're making. Um, well, you were also amortizing you though.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Ken Burns: Yeah. Certainly the design. And actually the design is one thing, but in the production world, the hours of labor actually putting these things together was significantly more than design by far. Um, so yeah, there was that. Um, I like to say we, we raised cause a lot of people this year 110,000 like, Oh, that's great. That's a lot of money. You're rich. I'm like, yeah, we only lost like 50 grand after that. You know, it only costs us about 160, 170 to actually ship all that product. But again, it got us started.

Chris Gammell: Um, but yeah, it's like seed money at that point. Right. I mean, that's effectively what it was. Yeah. We've done it. And it, and it worked in that way because it also doesn't work like that for a lot of people.

Ken Burns: It, that's true. And so, uh, I think one thing, at least I did right in that first Kickstarter was that really everything was done design wise. And a lot of people that do Kickstarters screw this up where they use the money, uh, to finish the design and then they run into problems and it costs more than they expected. And then they don't have enough to actually manufacture it. Not to mention they usually run into manufacturing problems too, that they don't understand, which we certainly did. So we ran into manufacturing problems, mostly now in the design. So the good thing was, again, I had enough experience doing electronics that I kept it extremely simple. Each board was, you know, relatively the max board was probably the main processor. They had maybe 20, 25 parts on it. So nothing was very hard. Uh, so if one failed, you can usually figure it out pretty quickly. Um, and if, if you had to scrap something, it really didn't cost that much as opposed to like if you had a big board that has a thousand components on it, if you screw that up, it's, you know, a lot of money. Um, right. Yeah. Uh, I forget what we're talking about. I'm just getting scared now about the old days.

Chris Gammell: I know, I know. Yeah. You got some flashbacks here. That's cool. Um, so quickly let's, let's step back to the, the construction of these things. So what is on board? So like, what is this, uh, sample stack up of these different boards that you might have? And then we'll talk about how you, how you actually manufacture them.

Ken Burns: Yeah. So typically in our system, there's a processor board. So originally it was, we call the tiny Duino is basically an Arduino Uno just shrunk down. So it was, uh, at mega three 28 P processor. And then separately we had another USB and we call them tiny shields. Again, everything's tiny. Uh, you know, great. That's an engineer marketing for you. We just put tiny in front of everything. And, um, so instead of Arduino shields, we had tiny shields. And so we had a USB tiny shield and then you could add, let's say GPS or wifi or, or different things to that stack. Uh, so one of the earlier things we did, I made a GPS cat tracker for a cat. It was actually in make magazine years ago. So it was a SD card and GPS module and you can put it in a Tic Tac container cause it's so small. Um, and that actually, we had a bunch of people bought those and made that as a kit. Um, but again, most of these boards are relatively simple. And so like, again, the, the processor board might have 20, 25 components. Nowadays, we've got like an Arduino zero based processor board, uh, where it has a USB and lithium battery and everything, lithium battery charging built in. Right. That's so it makes it much more compact. And then we have one with the actual OLED screen as well that has the processor and everything in it. So you can make little watches and whatnot. Um, but yeah, again, most of the, our standard boards are relatively simple from electronic standpoint. And again, that's good too, from a lot of our users cause everything we do is open source. So they, uh, if they're more commercial using, they might want to actually take that design and then integrate it into something they're designing. Uh, and so all that stuff's published against standard open source, uh, type situation. Uh, but again, it's, it's easy enough in some cases that somebody could then take that and manufacture it if they want to like adjust something for their needs. And people have done that. Um, it's not insanely complex where only we can make it. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: So, okay. So, so you had a high mix of your products, right? So you had, let's just say 20 boards. I don't know what it actually was. It's something like that. So you had 20, yeah, 20 different boards. But then what was your mix of the parts that were on those boards? So like mostly because I'm wondering how many, you know, you're starting from scratch. You are having to buy a reflow oven, but then you also have to buy a pick and place and then all the feeders, which is always the restrictive thing. So how many feeders did you need for, for all that manufacturing?

Ken Burns: Um, we didn't need that many, but we actually got a lot more feeders than we needed. And one of the reasons for that was we bought used. And again, I, I'd recommend anyone, if you're going to get into this and I, again, I'm not saying do, um, buy a used machine. There are new machines are prohibitively expensive. And even the low one and grand there's these new like Chinese ones on eBay and whatnot, um, that a lot of people are kind of getting into. And that might be a good thing where you're only paying a couple grand, but like there's these machines, let's say man corp in different places, um, that add a fruit and people used early on. And it might be a $30,000 machine. And then each feeder is 500 bucks. And so now you're up at $50,000 just for a machine that frankly, uh, pick and place machines, at least the real industrial ones are used to make big volumes of boards. Um, they're designed to last a long, long time. They're like 20, 25 years of service is not uncommon on some of these type of situations. So we bought a machine that was from 1996. So at the time, 16 years old, maybe, uh, we got 80 feeders with it. We also got a reflow oven. So, uh, Chris has seen it. It's like a 14 foot long reflow oven. It has seven temperature zones, the top and bottom. Each one's individually controlled, PLC controlled. It's got a nice beautiful windows 95 computer that came with it. And, uh, we also got a manual stencil printer. And so this is, um, basically you load a stencil into it. And so it had squeegees and you could align it kind of with these knobs. Uh, we got all that delivered for 25,000. Um, wait, the entire cost was that much? The entire cost with delivery was 25,000.

Chris Gammell: Whoa, that's not bad.

Ken Burns: No, that is not bad. And so because of that.

Chris Gammell: I mean, you'll pay more in electricity for the first year on the reflow.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And again, I would put that, that machine up. So it's a, it was a Japanese machine. Uh, this is actually the American version. It's called Ziva tech, but Juki is still around. And we actually have a newer Juki I can tell you about. Um, so that machine, uh, could place a four or two is no problem. And you could actually do a two or one's with a special nozzle. We never did on that machine, but everything we did was mostly a four or two size components, uh, for our resistors and caps and whatnot.

Chris Gammell: And you started with a four or two.

Ken Burns: Yeah. We used to, okay. Cause we kind of had to based on the size. Yeah. Right. Cause again, we're trying to differentiate ourselves and everybody else was doing a six or three or eight or five. So it's like, okay, how do we go smaller? Uh, cause again, that was kind of our claim to fame. Um, so yeah, the machine could do it fine. And it had a boatload of feeders and we got it super cheap. And again, the company that we got it from is a reputable company. So I wasn't just buying this off eBay, you know, sight unseen. These guys gave support. Uh, but again, when it showed up, it was, you know, a 1996 machine and with paper manuals that I spent many nights cause I was still working full time at the time. So I was here to two or three at night reading manuals with loud music playing and, you know, getting really excited when I got the head to move and pick up a part. And it was, it's really a good month of tinkering with it. And again, it's, it's a lot of fun, but again, it's not for the faint of heart. It was not just plug it in. And now I'm making a board, um, right to really get that thing up and running. And then we obviously had to get electricity installed because the oven is a 43 phase beast. Um, and all this kind of stuff to, even before we could start building the first boards. And so it was, it was a huge learning curve, but even though the worse, the bigger learning curve was then actually producing consistent product. Again, it's one thing you get it to place a few times and like, Oh, this is cool. You know, the machine's moving back and forth, but then when something screws up, which it commonly did, or the pace isn't perfectly aligned, um, and pace by far, this is a hard lesson learned. I don't know how much money I wasted on pace mistakes. Paste is by far the most critical step of the process. Um, you use fresh pay, always use fresh pace and always make sure your stencil is really nicely aligned. Um, and it doesn't matter. Yeah. It doesn't matter how good your placement is. If the pace is no good, it, things just going to come out. Like crap. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Um, I had to, I was making boards for probably a solid two months where I kept getting like upset. Like, man, these parts look like crap. They had nothing reflowing. Right. And then someone like, is like, uh, do you want to like just borrow my pace and see if it's any better? And I was like, uh-huh. And every, everything got better immediately. It was just like, I was using like crusty old pace that I just should have thrown away. And that's what I did too. Cause I was cheap.

Ken Burns: Cause again, I'm like, I got this money and it's like, you know, pace is 50, 60 bucks a jar. Stitch in time will save nine. Right. Yeah. And I'm like, I'm not throwing this paste away. I mean, this is expensive paste. And then you learn that lesson. Actually, uh, but five and a half years ago, we brought a guy on board who, a day of who runs our manufacturing operation. Now that worked in industry. And he basically said, you can't, you can't be doing this. You got to use fresh paste every time. And we kind of learned that before. But when our yields in, in the early days, our yields were about 40%, which is insanely low.

Chris Gammell: Whoa, that's not great. And that was, yeah.

Ken Burns: So what that would mean is, again, we have the small 32 pin Hirose connector that there'd be a short or an open on that. Usually what's the problem.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Uh, and so that is the basis of the entire system. We should say too.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And so then we had to buy like an expensive solder iron with a really fine tip and then have somebody reworked boards, which is much more expensive than whatever I paid in paste. Um, and after when Dave came on board, it actually, it got quite a bit better, uh, in the meantime, we were not doing 40% that long, but Dave came on board. Now we're doing like 99% first pass and all the things that fail is usually just like an open or something that we have to touch up that we usually, you can catch in, you know, a 10 second inspection on a board. Um, right. So it's insanely better. Uh, but again, it comes down to paste. We always use fresh paste. The good thing is our, our volumes are up considerably now, so we don't really waste a lot of paste. But, uh, if you're doing it at home, get fresh paste or you can get them in cartridges now, which is really nice. And so it's not exposed to the air. You kind of push it out almost like a caulk gun. Um, so it only dispenses the paste you need and the rest of the paste is still kind of contained and not exposed to the air, which is, is the killer of it.

Chris Gammell: Um, anyway, as soon as that flux goes here, it's trashed. It's trashed.

Ken Burns: Don't, don't bother using it. Just get new paste. Yep. Yep. Mm-hmm.

Chris Gammell: Wow. Okay. Well, uh, have you upgraded to a, uh, automated paste system now or?

Ken Burns: Yeah, actually, uh, so around that time, cause again, that, that early stencil printer was so bad, uh, cause you had to visually align it. The pressure was never good on it. Uh, it was just much easier just to hand stencil, uh, which isn't that hard once you get the hang of it. Um, but again, it's inconsistent then between consistent and it's fine for like really small boards, but if you have bigger things and small QFNs, uh, it's not great. Cause again, a QFN, you do your pressure a little bit wrong. You know, one, one pad's not going to get any paste or not much paste and it's just not going to reflow. And those are a pain to rework. So yeah, we got a deck, a deck two 65. And again, this was an older machine than our pick and play. So this I bought for three grand off eBay. Didn't know if it worked. It didn't work. Uh, drove to Pittsburgh in a big truck, picked it up, uh, drove it back. Um, and ended up, you know, playing around with it again, kind of the same mentality. This is probably six months to a year after the original stuff. Um, got it kind of working and then ended up paying a guy that used to be a deck engineer or deck field tech. He came up and kind of calibrated and made it work, uh, which was almost as much as what we paid for the machine, but as well worth it. Cause we use that machine. We still have it actually working. We use it today. Uh, but we just bought a brand new stencil printer. Cause this thing, again, stencil printers, there's a lot of pneumatics in it, a lot of air. And so all these old tubes constantly break. And so you get a hiss and then something doesn't work, doesn't clamp down. And so we're constantly going in there doing surgery on the deck where you got to like cut out a piece of, of tubing and then, you know, put a little coupler in there. So it's kind of a Frankenstein machine. No sides are on it. Uh, but again, it's worked for us for five years. Um, but again, that was always our biggest, biggest risk. Cause if this thing really goes down hard, you know, we're, we're kind of screwed. Cause you can't just get a stencil printer next day, uh, installed. So we bought, no Amazon prime on that. Yeah, no. So we, we bought a new machine actually in May and we just got installed as a Panasonic, uh, SP 60. So it's so much better. Now we actually have it. Um, so it's automated. So we have a conveyor system, whereas before we basically had to take it out of the deck and kind of like manually look at each, each board as it's pasted to make sure everything was good. And you also had to like manually wipe down the stencils, which is really painful, uh, and time consuming. So now the new machine has an under stencil wipe that works really nicely and just kind of, uh, you know, it's super cool. Um, again, then they're nerding me loves it because it's like, this saves so much time and the pace quality is so much better when it prints. It's like, and we can do much smaller boards consistently now, potentially. So we want to do Oh two ones and other things. The other big thing is we got a new, uh, pick in place about two years ago. So again, it's from Juki, but this machine is less than 10 years old when we got it. So to us, that's a very new machine. Uh, but it can do like 13,000 placements an hour can do BGAs, uh, very fine BGAs. It can go down to a one Oh five components, which we're not doing. It's crazy, but, um, it's a super sweet machine to much faster, much better than the old one. The old one, you know, it was, you know, getting a little long in the tooth that started to break down a lot. Uh, new machines, much better. And so basically we've kind of improved our line incrementally. Uh, but now, I mean, the machines are kind of so advanced and so fast, like to do one of our panels, a typical panel that we make for our products is usually like 30 boards on a, on a panel. That's about six and a half by six and a half inches. Maybe it takes three or four minutes to go through the pick and place. If it's like something that's got, um, like 600 components on the total panel, uh, which is really kind of cool.

Chris Gammell: So do you, do you have to start to do like calculations now on like, like when you were deciding to buy this new machine then too, like, so first off, I think it's amazing. You're just, uh, you started an electronics company, right? But then you became a manufacturer, right? That that's very interesting to me and maybe a cautionary tale. I'll get your take on that in a bit, but like, do you start to calculate now like utilization rates and all that stuff and like, like return on investment of, of the actual, of buying the machine and like the capital cost of it?

Ken Burns: Um, in a way we, we do in terms of the ROI on the machine. The one nice thing is it keeps extremely good statistics about placements and whatnot. So that's kind of cool is the tech geek to see, okay, how many actually placed. Um, I think the bigger thing is enables us as a business to kind of do things that we couldn't do otherwise. We can do extremely small runs or big runs of different things. Um, and we don't have to worry about that outside expense. Um, you know, again, I've gone to a contract manufacturer. We can kind of do, you know, things on the fly, which, and it lets us kind of test out all sorts of different products that again, might not take off. But if we were to have to pay an outside CM to build up a hundred or a thousand something, it would just be cost prohibitive. Cause again, we're, I guess we're kind of past the startup stage, but we, we don't have any outside funding. Um, right. It's basically just myself as a sole owner. And so all our monies come from sales because essentially Kickstarters are sales. Uh, and so we've kind of grown organically that way. Um, and again, I kind of look at like Adderford or spark fun is kind of, uh, I guess setting the, the road for that because again, they, that's how they did it. And so that was always kind of my mindset about how do we do this without having to raise money. And there were certainly some times where we considered it and we had some interest. Um, certainly glad we didn't. And, uh, but yeah, the, the manufacturing capabilities, although it was extremely painful in those early days, uh, I think it's definitely paid off in terms of, I don't have an actual number amount I can say, but, um, I don't think we'd exist if we didn't have that capability to do.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. It makes you wonder. Well, so like, I mean, I think about my prototyping, right. Maybe not at the a hundred, 200, like you're talking about, but like I could pay to send it out or I could do it myself. You know, and there's like, there's like all of these curves that kind of cross over at some point of like, when, when should you send it out to a CM? When should you keep it in house and do it yourself? When should, you know, like it's like these weird calculations. And I think in my case, I'm just always defaulting to doing it myself.

Ken Burns: But the thing is, it's gotten much cheaper to send it out. Cause again, there's true, true, uh, these online services. And again, it comes down to printing circuit boards too. At least back when I was avid, we'd always go with these, these places and you order a circuit board and it's like, okay, we're paying 500 bucks. That's just what you pay for a circuit board to get five circuit boards.

Chris Gammell: Look at it. And then that was cheap. Advanced circuits rather. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Advanced circuits or Sierra circuit, all these different places. And that's just what you would pay. And we do that for our customers. I'm like, okay, we're buying a circuit board no matter how simple it is. Right. Right. It's like 750 bucks for that. Yep. Yep. Now you can get that same board for five bucks, you know, and get 10, say, you know, for these things from China, which is crazy cheap. It's going to change things. But now that a lot of these services to offer assembly, whether it's advanced assembly or someplace screaming circuits in the U S to all these places overseas, it's gotten very competitive. And so now you can do small runs, get them assembled. And I know a number of people have done it successfully and have had good results. I still like, I think does Osh Park do it now? Did they team up with somebody advanced assembly or someone?

Chris Gammell: Not as not that I know of. Okay. But there's, yeah, like a lot of the Chinese board houses, they all have assembly. And like you said, I mean, and then there's all the online ones like Macrofab and Circuit Hub and PCVNG got bought. I don't know what's up with them.

Ken Burns: And so maybe if those existed back six, seven years ago, or maybe if I knew about them, if they did exist, I would have gone about things a little differently. But, um.

Chris Gammell: Well, but then maybe you would have changed the product mix too, right? So that's the other interesting thing is that like you might not have gone as wide. Or as, you know. It'd probably be much, much narrower.

Ken Burns: Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: Because again, those low volume things.

Ken Burns: Because we did a, on the first one, we did an Ethernet shield, which was a bit crazy. Um. And that, we maybe made 50 of them. And that was a, that was a huge pain as we discontinued that. Because again, with this side of the platform, it doesn't really make sense. We kind of learned Wi-Fi and wireless is what people want. Um. And it just was insanely due to a lot of power. It's just pain. Right.

Chris Gammell: Um. Well, I think it's interesting too about like the, it's, I mean, it is kind of like, like you said, like your contemporaries are Adafruit and SparkFun. Maybe they're like slightly larger scale, but like it's making breakout boards effectively. And you can do that in a cost effective way.

Ken Burns: Exactly. And they kind of, they kind of show that. Because again, when. Yeah. When I was starting this originally, you know, SparkFun, uh, was kind of the big guys out there, at least in this world. I think Adafruit at the time was a little bit smaller. And then I think. Right. They probably overtake them now.

Chris Gammell: I think it's inverted. Yeah. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Um. But again, if you follow the path of what they've done, they did that exact same thing. Um. And again, I think, I think you were there at the open hardware summit. We took a tour of SparkFun, which is kind of cool to see their line. And actually the shocking thing was, I was there with Ben Rose, kind of our lead engineer. We were kind of shocked at how small their line was. Or it was kind of crammed in this back little space. I'm like, I think our line is actually bigger than this line now. Yeah. So we actually have more. Um. I think they ship more product. Um. I would guess they ship a little more product than we do. But, um. Yeah. It was kind of cool to see just, uh, you know, how they came up. And also they've been very forthcoming with. And so is, uh. Uh. Attafruit. It's just sharing. Right. You know, what machines they've bought over the time. What, you know, mistakes they've made. And again, that was kind of, uh. You know, just some encouragement that, hey, this can be done. So why not try it?

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, and so that's an interesting comparison too. Because I would say that the SparkFun's and Attafruits of the world, they fund themselves through manufacturing. But their main product is actually, uh, IP based. And it's tutorials. And it's knowledge. And it's basically stuff that generates online. And, uh, uh. Clicks and, you know, stuff like that. Not saying they're clickbaity. I'm saying that they. They do so much content based stuff that it draws people to their sites. And that's what. That's what their real product is. Exactly. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Yeah. I agree with that too. I think SparkFun too is more of a distributor as well. In terms of they. They sell a lot of other products as well. Right. Yeah. That's a good point. But no. I definitely agree with that. And it's probably one place we're not as good as them. By far.

Chris Gammell: Well, and I, but I, but what's interesting about that is that you actually ended up doing some CME type work as well. Exactly. And so, so how did that then balance against doing stuff yourself versus doing stuff for other people?

Ken Burns: Yeah. So I like to say we're not a CM, um, but we've done quite a bit. Unless you pay a lot of money. Uh, or it's gotta be the right mix. So I like to tell you, because again, we're not, if you look at the kind of contract manufacturing landscape for electronics, um, you, you kind of have in the U S you have, you have all these shops that are basically focused on, okay, we have all these standards in place where ISO, we do these military air, you know, aerospace tech specs and whatnot. Yeah. Yeah. And certain quality things. We're kind of a maker mindset here. Again, I think so much like an Adafruit or SparkFun. So, you know, we don't have ISO 9001 for our, you know, our processes and things. We're kind of a small little startup, a scrappy place. Um, so we try to shy away, uh, depending on the customer, like say, you know, you know, this is, I think we can make it, but again, we're, we're not that kind of shop and it's super competitive too. So it's like, do we want to be a CM where you're fighting for every little penny? Um, and once the volumes get up, it's just going to go overseas anyway. Um, right. Cause again, that is very true. And I've seen that happen many times. Yeah. And so we, we know a lot of CMs in this area and I refer people to them if they have a particular need, um, where it does make sense. And what we've done in the past is again, people use our product or they come to us and they want something custom designed. And we, again, try to tend to shy away from that unless it makes a lot of sense, uh, for us. Cause again, we have a very small engineering team and I'm an engineer, but I don't do a lot of engineering anymore. So it's typically Ben. It's kind of our main engineer. And we have a new, uh, engineer that just came on. That was an intern with us. Reina just came on in May, but it's a pretty small engineering team. So if we take people off to do like consulting work, uh, which we have done a lot of, cause again, it kind of kept us afloat for a number of years. Um, you know, it takes away from our own product. Um, but in the case where we do contract manufacturing, generally it's with a customer that has something that fits in well with the mix that we do. So maybe they've done something with our standard product line and they say, Hey, we want a custom board where we put Bluetooth low energy on their processor and some sensors. And we want to order a thousand of these. I'm like, okay, we can do that. Cause again, that's, you know, similar to what we do anyway. Uh, but if it's somebody who just comes to us with a design, um, right.

Chris Gammell: You're not doing the napkin service like Avid used to do.

Ken Burns: No, not at all. Um, cause again, we just don't have the staff to do it. Um, yeah, that, that being said, we've done, you know, a number of these custom type things and they've, a number of them have worked out well. We're actually doing a huge one for, it's not a tiny device at all. It's a robotic golf caddy, which is kind of cool. Oh, wow. Um, this is something I've worked on at Avid and it's followed me here and now it's actually in production. So we're actually manufacturing the electronics for it. So it's, uh, basically the idea of it. Um, it's not on the market now. I think it's all public. I can share it. Uh, it's called the club car club cars, the biggest golf cart manufacturer in the U S or in the world. Um, and they basically have rights to this product called the club car temple walk. Um, but basically this is a autonomous golf caddy that follows behind you and you can, if you, you can Google.

Chris Gammell: Do you like working out and golf while golfing, but not really, you don't want to carry your bag, but you still want to walk a little bit.

Ken Burns: It's exactly, exactly. Uh, the angle it's going for it. And, but the, if you look at golf, there tends to be older people that play golf and a lot of them can't walk with their bag. And so they're forced to use a carton. So that's kind of the, the mindset. And again, this is not something you'd own yourself. You'd run it at a golf course.

Chris Gammell: Um, anyway, so it's, uh, does it have the same services that like a Ronnie dangerfield would look for in Caddyshack? It does have a cooler.

Ken Burns: I mean, beer, beer dispenser. Nice. It has a tablet on it so you can order stuff from the clubhouse potentially. But the idea is basically where you wear a small wireless transmitter on your back and this thing just falls behind you. Um, so I personally was involved in this development back at Avid and then it continued at Avid for a number of years and then all, basically all the people that worked on it were no longer there. Um, and so they ended up calling here and it says after my, you know, conflict of interest period was over with Avid. Right. Um, and so kind of worked on some stuff. So it's using an ultra wide band wireless system now. And we're, the cool thing is we're doing the manufacturing for the electronics here. And if it takes off and actually it's, it's doing really well right now that the revenue from that, just the CM work of that is more than the rest of the business. Right. It pays for tiny circuits. And so the great thing is it gives us this nice revenue stream, kind of a completely side stream. Um, and again, we designed the board so it fits in well with our manufacturing process. Um, and.

Chris Gammell: Gotta watch out, man. That's, that's a, that's a dangerous drug to be, uh, you know, direct line into the veins. Uh, I've seen, seen startups go, go belly up because they've got one big customer, man.

Ken Burns: It's that is a, that is a fear. And so there's that, but the nice thing is it, um, it complements the rest of the business. So right now we're not living on any of that revenue.

Chris Gammell: Uh, that's good. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Uh, great. And we, we got paid design fees, uh, to work on design, but, uh, the manufacturing, um, again, complements that. Um, and the nice thing is it allowed us to get newer manufacturing equipment that then we can use for tiny circuit stuff. And so now we can do smaller things that we couldn't do before. We can do Oh two Oh ones, uh, very reliably. We can potentially do a one Oh five, which would be crazy. I say, um, I'm not sure we're going to get to that. Tiny can tiny. I mean, there's actually smaller ones in that now too, but, um, I know, again, at some point it doesn't make sense because changing the size of your resistors doesn't really save you too much at some point. Right.

Chris Gammell: Um, what are your customers asking for? I mean, so you've obviously had a lot of customers, you're doing a lot of things. Uh, what are they asking for?

Ken Burns: Uh, I'd say probably the, the number one thing we'd get requests for, um, it's kind of like in the IOT space. So cellular, and I know you got some experience in that. Um, I do.

Chris Gammell: And so the tough thing is that those modems are still monsters.

Ken Burns: Yeah, it is a problem. And generally we, we point people to Adderfruit use the Fona. Um, and you can hook it up to our stuff.

Chris Gammell: And the Fona uses a 2g modem, which is, you know, the SIM 800, that thing's going away though.

Ken Burns: Yeah, I know. And so we, we actually designed a SIM 800 board. Um, it just didn't make sense at the time to do it. We actually, we designed probably 30 different boards of different things that we just have never released. Cause again, it's from the business standpoint that the design usually is easy. You got to sell a certain number.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Ken Burns: I like to say too, like, cause Ben does pretty much all our electronics designs. The design of any of our boards is almost trivial in terms of, it's a couple of hours of design. I mean, give Ben some credit, man.

Chris Gammell: No, all right.

Ken Burns: Give Ben, Ben's a genius. Um, but again, we can put a sensor down on a board. Um, and that's why people too, when they talk about open source, like, aren't, isn't somebody going to steal your idea? I'm like any engineer could reverse engineer this in 10 seconds. There's nothing special here. You're stealing my five hours. Yeah. Right. Right. It's more about the manufacturing and the marketing and you know, the tutorials and all those sorts of things that that's really where the time comes in and the expense really comes in. Um, yeah. So I, it's cellular is something we want to do. Definitely. IOT is a big focus. And so this new product line we have is really geared at making it easy to connect up different sensors and whatnot. And so kind of segue. Exactly. So the roadmap forward for our main product line is higher end stuff. Uh, because again, you know, we've got all these boards and we've had our Arduino system for awhile. We're somewhat stagnant for a couple of years. And again, that goes back to the, again, this, this like golf caddy product and different things were, we basically took on a lot of consulting jobs to again, pay the bills. So myself, my time and Ben's time, a lot of that we're getting paid hourly to do other projects. And while it kept the lights on, it kind of really kind of, again, stagnated our product development. So we had, again, these products we're calling whiskers. Now the first ones we had three years ago, and again, they're relatively simple. It was like, okay, you know, we need to have a whole platform. I mean, we need to do these tutorials. And really at that point, we're like looking at our old tutorials. We have interns over the years for five years. Everybody's different. It's like, let's just revamp all that. And so, um, last year we got a number of interns. Actually, right now he just came in full time, kind of manages the interns now. And so we, we have a new wiki out. So we redid every tutorial that we have for the platform and also kind of geared for the future too. So not just our original, you know, tiny Duino, which is kind of an Uno type processor. Now it's zero and potentially with the new whisker platform, also pies using circuit Python and different things. So kind of looking to the future and, um, you know, revamping everything.

Chris Gammell: So that's great. That's great. So what, what is the whisker thing? So this is what's on Kickstarter. Exactly.

Ken Burns: So this is what's on Kickstarter right now. So this is essentially, and again, I, the idea isn't new. It's, uh, we're connecting sensors via, uh, cabling. So, but the, the difference is these are much smaller. So there are other things out there like spark fun quick. Um, you mentioned somebody from, or something from Adderfruit. Uh, there's a new platform. It's a big one out there. There's a C2 Grove system, which is very similar. Sure. Um, sure. So that's same.

Chris Gammell: Well, Grove's a little different cause they do, um, they, so, so the, um, the quick is the, the, it's I squared C only. Yeah. Uh, and it's only a, I think it's only a four pin connector, so they don't have. Yeah.

Ken Burns: Grove can be different things.

Chris Gammell: Grove is, can be analog digital. I always thought that was kind of weird too. Cause like what happens if you plug into the wrong thing? But most of the time it's not a problem. Uh, I think they do analog, digital serial and I squared C.

Ken Burns: Yeah. So in this case, um, basically we, so we, it's a five pin connector. So we've got, you know, 3.3 volts in ground and then also I squared C and an extra pin, which can be an analog input or it can be a digital pin. And actually the I squared C can be driven digital as well. But the nice thing with it, like the I squared C, like, so all our, our breakout boards for this have a mux on there. So you potentially, if you have, let's say a nine axis sensor and accelerometer or something that is on some set I squared C address, you can actually use four or actually in our case, like up to 16 of all these things on the exact same address. Um, because then there's a mux to select which one you're talking to. Um, you can, that's nice. And also again, it's not just I squared C so you can do much simpler things. So like a push button. Um, so again, if you're making, let's say an arcade cabinet, you can wire out a small joystick or a push button. Um, actually more in the case of like a push button. So it's just a digital input, uh, that can go to an interrupt on your micro. Um, so again, it doesn't have to, you don't have to have a processor in that overhead of doing the I squared C communication. But it, you know, we've got like 35 different boards, um, out for it again, most typical type sensors, whether it's a barometric pressure, nine axis color sensors, then, you know, output devices, like little vibrating motors, LRAs, um, buzzers, all sorts of fun stuff. And a lot of little screens too. So the cool thing is like, we've got these little I squared, I squared C screens. So like a 0.42 inch screen up to like a 0.95 inch screen. Um, and so you can kind of add these things really easily to your project. And again, the other thing that we kind of, cause again, our, our main product, you know, the tiny, do we know these stackable boards, it's kind of a niche type product. Um, so we tried to expand this beyond that. So that's why we have a pie hat for it as well, or just a standard Arduino shield. So you're not just stuck into this. And the other thing is it's just I squared C so you can easily hook up to anything if you want to. Right. Um, and it just uses small GST SH type connectors. So it's a nice small connector. The cables are super cheap and it's just. Yeah.

Chris Gammell: How much are the cables? Cause I always feel like that's the, that's the hidden cost of a lot of, a lot of these. Yeah.

Ken Burns: We're going to be selling them for like 99 cents. Oh, that's great. Okay. And then the other thing too, is at least with the Kickstarter and different things, we kind of see if you probably want to get a kit that, and you can certainly get an individual sensor. And the nice thing is too, they're like super cheap that some of the things will be just a couple bucks. Uh, cause again, that's when, one of the things we always run into is like people go on eBay and get these little Chinese things. And you know, for a dollar or two, it's like, well, we can't really compete with that. But so with this new form factor, we can somewhat compete with that and maybe offer some benefits, you know, opposed to just some little breakout boards you get on eBay for 99 cents. Uh, and how do they even do that? You know, they just, I don't know how they do it. Cause again, there's one person touching it.

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah, exactly. Someone's making money. It's just feels like it's must be bought in bulk and they're just already pre-packaged or something. I don't know.

Ken Burns: And then actually the, you met him, we share space with a drone company. He just got, you know, a 3d printer. I think Creel, Creelty or Creality. Um, Oh yeah. The $200 one. Yeah. He didn't get the $200 one. And this thing prints amazingly well. Like we were setting it up the other day and it set up in 10 minutes and we're like, how, how, I don't understand how it's possible. Because again, they have these much, China is insane.

Chris Gammell: They're just really killing it these days, you know?

Ken Burns: Yeah. So, uh, so we just, you know, terror from the death here in the U S at least. Well, yeah. That's actually different issues. That's a, that's actually stuff that we run into too, because we do. Yeah. Oh, let's hear about it. Um, I, we, we source a lot of stuff from overseas. I mean, electronic components aren't made in the U S you don't buy capacitors or, uh, ICs that are, well, I guess there's a few small amounts either.

Chris Gammell: You're not underneath the, uh, the cap. Right.

Ken Burns: And so we buy a lot of stuff and I mean, we typically buy from, you know, U S distributors. So arrow or Digikey or Mauser and whatnot, but they, they add the tariff charges on there. Um, right. And so we, we do get hit with that and it kind of, kind of ticked. It took me off when there were tariffs on like raw components, but not on finished goods. So it's actually cheaper if you manufacture it all in China and then you can sell, you know, ship the final iPhone and there's no tariffs associated with that. But if you import those raw materials and manufacture it in the U S it's actually 25% or whatever it is. Um, right. Right.

Chris Gammell: So then there's, there's a good for manufacturing, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ken Burns: So like, cause people, like some people came up to me and say, Oh, this has gotta be great for you. You manufacture electronics in the U S I'm like, well, no, because all the raw material, a good chunk of the raw materials come from over there. And so, I mean, that's biting us in some other areas. So like the, the cables, you know, we have basically a Chinese company we're working with. So we're getting a bunch of these cables made custom, but again, they're in China. So we'll get hit with a, a ding there again. Luckily the cables, when we buy thousands of them, they're not, not too bad. So it's, but then we, we buy a lot of batteries too. So we actually, actually one of the biggest things we sell, resell our lithium batteries and it's actually doing really well. Oh yeah. We said, and we sell lithium batteries on DigiKey and Mouser. Um, and that is by far the biggest thing we sell on DigiKey and Mouser.

Chris Gammell: And so we, I will say I bought, I was looking for 18, six fifties and I was like, where the hell do I buy these things?

Ken Burns: We sell 18, six fifties.

Chris Gammell: I was, I went on, uh, DigiKey and I ended up buying it from SparkFun, but I didn't see yours on there, but I have seen that you're sorry, man. I didn't see at the time, but, but like, that's crazy, right? That's why, why is that happening? Is it because people aren't willing to take on the risk and for something? I don't get it.

Ken Burns: Uh, in terms of buying directly from China?

Chris Gammell: Well, no, no, no. Like why? I can't buy them on Amazon, but you could buy them. Like, like, Oh, battery for vaping device or whatever. Right.

Ken Burns: But like, yeah, it's the same lithium battery regulations shipping. Cause there are, there are a number of regulations for shipping. Sure. Sure.

Chris Gammell: You can't air ship them or stuff like that.

Ken Burns: But again, there, it's not really any different, uh, with 18, six fifties. So we, again, we, we found the eight, 18, six fifties cause we saw on eBay and other places too. 18, six fifties are the number one thing we saw on eBay. Um, really? We saw, I'd say on a given day between five and 10, 18, six fifties, which is a huge volumes. But again, we just put it up there. We weren't trying to sell them necessarily. It's just, you know, we're, we're connecting with eBay and we, we list products on there. And again, they're like usually like a onesie, twosie type orders. Um, but then it's people probably for products and maybe for vaping or whatever. Hobbyists or whatnot are vapors. Um, but then, you know, the, the people that buy on a digi key or mouser, they tend to usually buy more. Um, so yeah, we're, we, we're buying a lot of 18, six fifties and importing them. Um, and yeah, paying terrorists on them as well. Um, but yeah, so the, the nice thing about that is, yeah, we, so we certainly have the digi keys and the mousers and just our own customers cause we use these batteries on a lot of things. Um, and so we, we're buying a lot of batteries at a time and it's, it's expensive to ship them and all that from China, but then, you know, once they're in the U S um, cause again, uh, overseas shipping of batteries is, is a little tricky. And actually we have, we have cut people that reach out to us and say, Hey, I use your battery from mouser and I want to buy more. Who's your supplier? No, no. They basically say, or they say, I saw this on mouser. I can't get it cause they won't ship to my country. Can you ship it here? I'm like, well, if mousers, mouser did, she's not shipping there. Guess what? There's a reason, um, that there's all sorts of restrictions. So a lot of times these people say, Hey, I want to buy like a hundred of these or 500 of these. I'm like, uh, I'll look into it. And it's not usually not pretty. Cause actually some countries you can't ship them to others. You pay exorbitant fees with FedEx or UPS to, to ship. Yeah. Yeah. Um, but it's, it's actually worked out pretty well.

Chris Gammell: So you thought you were becoming a manufacturer, but now you're just a battery import export. Exactly.

Ken Burns: That's a, I'm kind of learning from spark fund reselling. And, and the great thing about them is you don't have to, we just put them on the shelves and they're just there and they just go off the shelves. It's great. That's right. That's right.

Chris Gammell: So, yeah, I mean, that's potentially like, you're like the, you're like a new, uh, you're like a new, uh, radio shack. Didn't they, uh, have the battery sales? Yeah.

Ken Burns: Well, uh, it wasn't like a little punch card. You can come in and get a free battery. I think so. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker ?: Yeah.

Ken Burns: Um, no, so that, again, that's kind of, we've looked into reselling more stuff. It's kind of a little complicated. Uh, cause again, if we sell it, we want to make sure that it's good. So at least with the batteries, you know, we're working with, uh, one particular battery manufacturer. We've, we've worked with them for like six, seven years on, and we've bought tens, many, I don't even know how many batteries way over 10,000. God, uh, probably 25 K plus batteries, maybe over 50 K batteries, um, from these guys and they've worked out really well. And so we have like 10 different variations and use them in like little arcade products or just with our kits or whatnot. So, um, but if we're to resell other things, it's kind of that same thing that we've, we've done something on eBay. It hasn't really worked out great. Um, cause again, a lot of these products aren't really things that make sense to sell on our own website. Cause we're not like a resale website. So we'll buy motors or, or different things, but then you buy them on Ali express and next time you buy it, it's not the same thing. So it's like, okay, how do we, how do we guarantee that consistency?

Chris Gammell: Um, yeah, you need like a QA manager.

Ken Burns: So it's worked out well for batteries. Cause again, we have one point of contact and we've worked with them a long time and know their quality and also can purchase in big enough quantities that then we can go back and say, Hey, we need to purchase 5,000 more of this particular battery. And they usually respond quickly. So that's pretty cool.

Chris Gammell: Yeah, that's good. That's good. What about the, um, I mean, so I, I think you're, you're pointing out the fact that, you know, there's the retail side of all this as well. Yeah. I mean, uh, cautionary to any cautionary tales in there as well. And aside from the manufacturing in terms of selling retail. Yeah. Uh, I mean, I guess you're going through distribution now too. So that's the other thing. Yeah. So, um, and I would like, I love to say that, uh, you guys sell at micro center, which I think is awesome. Um, I love micro center. We do. Uh, not every place in the States has it, but no, we, we, we sell at micro center.

Ken Burns: We sell fries. Um, for now. Uh, uh, uh, uh, is it fries closing down?

Chris Gammell: Sorry.

Ken Burns: I've heard conflicting things. Actually, I talked to fries. Um, okay, good. Um, well, we hope for the best. How about that? We hope for the best. Fries are cool.

Chris Gammell: A swift recovery. Um, uh, I don't want fries to shut down. I want micro center. I think I like that's the thing.

Ken Burns: Micro center is much easier to work with. I'll just say that. I'll, I'll put it that way. Okay. Cause I want to, but yes, so we, we sell retail. Our products really aren't geared at like in store type retail. Um, again, cause there's a bunch of different development boards and whatnot. We do have some kits that sell a little bit better retail, uh, but, uh, online distribution. So did you get Mouser have worked out really well for us? I think one of the big things that that gains us is some credibility. Again, as the engineer in me, when we got DigiKey now that we got Mouser before I love Mouser. Um, but when I was at Avid and other places, we just would always go to DigiKey was the place you go to. And right.

Chris Gammell: Right. Well, you mentioned like the, the idea of these systems being prototyping tools as well. And like, when I think about, I start a project, I'm usually going to an online distributor and I'm like, now what's here, what can I use? And then if it gets listed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, and like, so now I search for a sensor, I search for BMA 680 or whatever, you know, the sensor might be. And it's not just the sensor anymore. It's the dev boards that pop up too. And then I discover new platforms like this.

Ken Burns: Yeah. And they've been, um, making huge inroads into kind of that whole maker thing. And they're, and they're definitely committed to it. Like whenever we release a new product, they're like, Hey, we want to list this as soon as possible. And yeah, you go there and we search on things and I buy a lot of Adafruit stuff, um, from DigiKey because again, I buy, I buy so much DigiKey stuff. I mean, I don't want to say how much money we spend at DigiKey, but it's obscene. Um, because again, we, we get a lot of combined.

Chris Gammell: I'm sure many distributors get your, get your, yeah.

Ken Burns: Um, so let's just say we buy a lot more from DigiKey than they sell. Uh, I'd like it to be the other way, but, uh, I mean, realistically, um, but yeah, so I'll go on there. I search on something and I'm like, Oh, this is from Adafruit. I trust them. I'll buy this. I just added my cart cause I've got a million other things. So I don't even go to Adafruit site necessarily or SparkFun or wherever because all these guys sell on, you know, Mouser and DigiKey as well. So again, just to have our product show up there is like, okay, you know, we have this, this stamp of approval that we're not just a little garage shop anymore that, okay. These guys have vetted us. Uh, they trust us. We've been on both sites for like two years now. So obviously, um, you know, if we were really screwing things up, they would pull us off very quickly because they, they have very wreckable names to, to maintain. So, um, again, I think it just helps too with, with our overall sales that we can say, Hey, you know, this product is, is kind of backed by the, these, these big names. They trust us. So, um, that was kind of a nice leap to go from.

Chris Gammell: It's better exposure too, right? I mean, you probably, you get more eyeballs that you wouldn't of, of different types of people, right? Not makers necessarily. Yeah. So more, more the engineers.

Ken Burns: And I think too, I mean, the, the maker market, um, frankly for us is somewhat stagnated if not gone down. So the, the question is, and I think that's across the board. Um, I've heard that from other people as well. Um, I mean, you can certainly look at maker media and things like that, but, um, I've had

Chris Gammell: some, some days, um, I'd be interested in the software mix too. Like, so like when I think about platforms like this too, it seems like it's like perfectly set towards people that are like, well, how about I look at Adafruit's platform and I think about their stuff, the micropython stuff. I think that's brilliant from, sorry, sorry. That's what they call it. Uh, from, yeah, right. Uh, and, but like he's brewing it from a targeting, not just beginners. I think it's good for beginners, but then software people coming into hardware. I always talk about software people coming into hardware. I think a lot of our listeners are that too. And, uh, these kinds of platforms are just like, they're just tools to prototype, but then prototype from a software perspective too. And that really helps too.

Ken Burns: Yeah. I remember, I forget how many years ago, there's something called Johnny five. And I've heard of that. It's like node on our, um, and for Mata.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Ken Burns: And so like somebody contacted me about, you know, if our stuff support that's, I look more into it and I'm like following these online communities. I'm like, what, what is that? I don't, I don't, again, I'm the embedded guy. I'm like, you have to be like tethered to a computer and you're using node and JavaScript and all this stuff. What? Why didn't you see? I mean, it's so much easier, but then I see these like node bot meetups in New York city with like 30, 40 developers. I'm like, Oh yes, it's what they're used to and it's getting them into embedded stuff. And then exactly. Yep. Um, again, the embedded guy, I mean, I'm like, well, just, you see, I mean, it just seems to make more sense. But again, um, yeah, you kind of have to go to where the market is. And again, thinking of what these maker type things are, they're generally geared at those newbie types that aren't necessarily engineers, um, that might not have experience. And so I think circuit Python is great. That's actually, we we've talked with actually people from Adderfruit a number of times that mostly like the open hardware summit where they say, Hey, we want other people to develop with circuit Python. And so our latest stuff now support circuit Python. So again, it's all Sam D stuff. And we don't have a lot of it published yet. Um, so that's something we had basically an intern working on that. And then also circuit Python on like a raspberry PI or potentially like a Beagle bone, but where we're, we go board. So we're doing, um, PI right now because we have this new PI hat, but I think circuit Python just offers a lot of ease of use, especially in like educational environments where you now don't have the Arduino IDE. They have to download and install all these drivers. It just pops up as a USB drive and you just copy your file over to it. Um, and that's always, let's say software questions like instillation and comports are like number one questions you get. And it's like, okay, you know, these are very basic things. If you can eliminate that, you kind of open it up. And I think people get frustrated by that too. It's like, I plug this thing in and it doesn't work. I can't see the compor just downloads and says, you know, 10 different errors, whatever they say in there. Do we know I like SDK 500 error, um, get way too many of those emails. It just has this long error string. Like you really should simplify that and just say, Hey, it's not working. Um, check your comp port. But, uh, yeah, I think the, the software stuff is kind of, kind of key. Uh, so making is easier to use. Um, we've done some work too. Um, a lot of people talk about our stuff in education. And actually a lot of people mix us up with little bits, although I think they raised a little bit more money. They just got sold. I think they spent a little bit more money than we did too.

Chris Gammell: They, they raised a lot of money and they, yeah, they got, I don't think they got bought for as much as they raised.

Ken Burns: No, I, I'm super curious to know. I'm just seeing, again, from the, cause again, they, they kind of had a similar trajectory in terms of time. Cause again, they were very small early on and then we'd always get that too about similar names. Like, Oh, do you guys do this magnetic thing? I'm like, no, that's not us.

Chris Gammell: Um, but which was a great connector. I thought, I always thought that idea was really cool, but then the cost per board was tough too, right? That's what they, I think was tough about their selling price.

Ken Burns: It was that. And well, now there's a number of clones or similar things. And then also, yeah, I, again, we haven't raised money, but I, I don't know what you can do with $60 million. I mean, that's a lot of money. I think, isn't that what they ended up raising over the 60, six, zero. Yes. The last round was like 45 million. I think they raised like 15 before that.

Chris Gammell: Oh my, I didn't know that.

Ken Burns: Oh no, it's, it's insanely high. And then I'm like, Oh yeah, I, I got to buy toilet paper this month. Hopefully I got enough money to do that. Um, uh, the life of a manufacturer, but again, it's, I, I say it's worked out fairly well. So we're, we're in a much better place now.

Chris Gammell: Um, that's good.

Ken Burns: Again, I'm not sure why we're on this tangent, but a little bit, but, uh, um, I think just

Chris Gammell: because of the sensors and, uh, I was saying like education.

Ken Burns: Yeah. So education is somewhere where we do want to go. I think there's some growth things. And so we've kind of teamed up with other people. We're actually working with a group at MIT. Uh, you might've run across actually they, the maker health group, they're usually at maker fairs. Um, uh, they're never seen them, but yeah, they're doing a small robotics platform. And so they're using our stuff. Um, but again, it's geared at like middle school and high schools. Uh, so the cool thing is we're kind of again, leveraging a much bigger name, a much better name. Well, it was better until, uh, the media lab stuff last week, but, um, this is not media lab we're dealing with. Um, no. Yeah. But, um, yeah, so potentially I think there's some opportunities to take our stuff in education and other things kind of outside the maker realm, but then selling to engineers and selling more than just one Z two Z pieces, um, is really where we want to go. And so kind of these like IOT prototyping platforms. So if we had more cellular or different, like more integrated BLE type technologies is kind of where we're going. So like basically little BLE processor boards you can connect up sensors to really easily. That's relatively low cost. And so you could prototype something in a 50 or a hundred pieces and get that through a digi gear mouser instead of having to design your own circuit board. Same with like cellular and these different sorts of things. Um, we'd really like to sell more into that. And so that's kind of one of our main focuses after this product line is, you know, higher end boards, you know, how can we set ourselves apart from some other people, you know, small, tiny little things and, and also better software support. So things like circuit Python and, um, like that just to make it again, easier for other types of people to use these.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. I think the, I think you're talking about like value add in general. Exactly.

Ken Burns: And yeah, I think that's the only way you can kind of compete. That's a tough thing, you know? It's really the only way you can compete. And again, like you say, SparkFun and Adafruit kind of compete with content. Um, cause again, you, you can go on eBay and buy super cheap Arduino clones for really, really under a buck.

Chris Gammell: You can buy a clone of an Adafruit thing too, but like I choose not to, you know?

Ken Burns: Exactly. And I think a lot of people do that. Um, and hopefully that continues and, uh, you know, people continue to come out with really cool stuff.

Chris Gammell: Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's great. Well, uh, where can people find out more about you and your business and your Kickstarter?

Ken Burns: Well, the, the number one place is at tinycircus.com and, uh, Kickstarter is on Kickstarter, but if you go to tinycircus.com, you can click right through. It's kind of right on the main page. And so, yeah, the Kickstarter, um, started just a few days ago. We've been funded already, but again, that we ideally we'd like to, to get more, to be able to make a lot more cool stuff.

Chris Gammell: And so if, if we hit the stretch goals here, folks, Ken will buy a second pick and place line and stack it directly on top of the first pick and place line.

Ken Burns: It will be a double decker pick and place. I don't think it's ever been done, but we will do it. Never been done before. We do have our old machine. We can, uh, and we've got enough headroom.

Chris Gammell: We could stack it off. You should, you should say, you should say there's an auction. If you, if you put, you, you bought, you back the Kickstarter, you get a raffle ticket for a pick and place machine, pick and place machine. It'll show up on your, on your loading dock.

Ken Burns: I don't want to say we have multiple pick and places we could do that with because we,

Chris Gammell: you could start your own pick. You could start your own manufacturing company. Ken will come to your house and teach you how to do manufacturing. Ah, I don't know if I'm going through that again. You can, you can move to Northeast Ohio and you would have to move right next to Ken and learn about manufacturing.

Ken Burns: Actually, one cool thing is the, um, the Akron makerspace just moved into our floor. Uh, and so that's actually kind of where I shared early ideas was like, uh, at the very first makerspace meetings.

Chris Gammell: Um, and so, oh, we should say that real quick too. We, we said that at the beginning, you guys are in an, an, uh, an old rubber factory, uh, Goodyear, Goodyear fight. It's Goodrich. What is it? Goodrich.

Ken Burns: So Akron in his heyday was kind of the, you know, the world center of rubber, rubber capital of the world. Capital of the world. And so there were four major rubber companies here. So Goodyear, Goodrich, Firestone, and, oh God, I should know this. General Tire. Um, and they all had these huge factories and actually, you know, the Firestone factory is still here. They have some Bridgestone research area. Goodyear is still headquartered here, but Goodrich moved out completely. And so they actually, the place I'm at used to be the largest rubber factory in the world at 3 million square feet of floor space.

Chris Gammell: Oh, it's, it is an amazing building and it's just so old. Yeah.

Ken Burns: So the actual building we're in, so it was actually 70 different buildings. Uh, and in the eighties, Goodrich moved out and actually they stopped making tires here a while before, but that building we're actually in was making like space shuttle tires and aircraft tires at the very end.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Ken Burns: Um, and then obviously those, those jobs left, um, and actually all the tire manufacturing left as well. So I think the city smells better now. I hear it used to smell really good, but, um, yeah. So the facility we're in a lot of it's been renovated actually probably two thirds of it has been torn down. So there's still a million square feet of space. Um, and then there's like an office side, there's a business incubator here by the city of Akron called bounce. Great name. Um, and then the rest of it's privately owned. So we're in kind of the privately owned side. And so we rent space. We've got 7,000 square feet of space here. Uh, it's relatively cheap. It's kind of, we were up on the fifth floor. Um, it's really good. There's a roller rink above us. There's two breweries. You need to come back. There's two breweries now in our building and restaurants in the roller rink these days,

Chris Gammell: but yeah, that's still pretty fun. Yeah.

Ken Burns: So as a roller derby, you'll get, I've seen it. You'll get your ass kicked if you go up there. I would. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's a really cool building that we're in and there's like artists and bands and people like that in here. Um, but it's again, for us, we share space with a drone company called event 38. And then, um, you know, we, like this summer we had 18 people in here for us and they had like six or seven people. Um, and so it's really kind of a cool environment, very startup feely. And, um, again, we're kind of, that's right.

Chris Gammell: Bring the Silicon Valley to the, to the Ohio. Yeah. Why do you need to go there?

Ken Burns: And again, we can make stuff here. We don't have to pay insane rents like you'd have to in Silicon Valley. That's right.

Chris Gammell: Yeah.

Ken Burns: I remember talking with Jeff from, do you know, Tempo Automation? They raised a bunch of money. Yeah. So yeah, Jeff used to come to a bunch of, uh, maker fairs. He was doing a pick and place early on. I remember seeing that he's doing like his own pick and place and kind of pivoted and he's doing quite well, uh, doing a CM service, like a premium CM service in the Bay area. That's right. Right. But I remember talking with him when he first rented space, he says an hour outside San Francisco, a thousand square feet of space was five grand. And he says, it's in a dumpy place. I'm like, uh, yeah, our, our rent is less than a five X that. And we have 7,000 square feet. Granted, it's a rough space, but it works out well for us. And so that's why we can do it here in Ohio.

Chris Gammell: That's great, man. Yeah. Oh, that's good. I will say, uh, I remember the first time I went to Akron, I was visiting a, uh, a college place down there. And, uh, I remember they had a banana tree or sorry, a rubber tree in the courtyard of this building. And I'm just looking at them like, this is the most out of place thing I've ever seen.

Ken Burns: Isn't that some fraternity down here?

Chris Gammell: I think that was a rubber tree in the middle of Ohio is that would not make it.

Ken Burns: So no, I've heard, I haven't seen that, but I've heard of it. Yeah. But no, tires are the big thing around here or were. That's right. So we're, yeah. But the cool thing is there's all this old space here. So like Goodyear is being renovated. So they're, they're still headquartered here, but the old factories, there's like new apartment buildings. And so it's kind of cool to see the whole, the whole area is actually kind of rebounding, uh, which is, so you'll, you'll have to come back, Chris, you'll move back. I will.

Chris Gammell: I will. All right. Well, until then, Ken, I'll, we'll talk to you soon.

Ken Burns: All right. Thanks, Chris. Great talking with you.

Speaker ?: Bye.