[00:02.460 --> 00:04.120]  This is the talk of the Arduboy story.
[00:04.660 --> 00:07.240]  If you're not familiar with the Arduboy, this is what it is.
[00:07.720 --> 00:10.160]  I have the special edition which is in a black PCB.
[00:10.440 --> 00:12.480]  It's a game system the size of a credit card.
[00:12.800 --> 00:17.560]  It's open-source, it's based on Arduino, and it's the size of a credit card.
[00:18.180 --> 00:24.340]  It's got an OLED screen with 128 pixels, 128 by 64 pixels.
[00:24.540 --> 00:25.460]  It's black and white.
[00:25.460 --> 00:31.760]  It has a 32U4 microcontroller, which is the same that's in an Arduino Leonardo or micro.
[00:32.120 --> 00:38.620]  And it has only 28 kilobytes of space on board for your application.
[00:39.020 --> 00:46.660]  And now with the Arduboy FX, which is the newer version, we have external memory that allows you to expand it to a full 16 megabytes.
[00:47.240 --> 00:53.840]  There are over 400 homebrew games available, and they're all made by members of the community.
[00:53.840 --> 00:55.760]  They're all free and they're all open-source.
[00:55.880 --> 00:58.720]  You can go to the website, you have an online emulator, and you can play it all there.
[00:59.420 --> 01:04.900]  So I launched it on Kickstarter 10 years ago, and since then we've sold 30,000 units.
[01:05.900 --> 01:13.900]  Now the community is an online forum with over 10,000 page views per day, and over 40 users who are daily engaged.
[01:14.120 --> 01:17.200]  So if you post a question, many times it's less than an hour.
[01:17.460 --> 01:20.180]  Usually it's only a few minutes before somebody will respond to your question.
[01:20.520 --> 01:22.920]  24 hours a day because you have people all around the world.
[01:23.480 --> 01:28.280]  This is a screenshot of visitors to our website in just one month.
[01:28.700 --> 01:34.120]  So we haven't taught anybody how to code video games in Inner Mongolia yet, but one day we'll get there.
[01:35.180 --> 01:37.700]  This is also an Arduboy because Arduboy is open-source.
[01:37.940 --> 01:41.300]  You can make it yourself out of just the components that you can buy online.
[01:41.580 --> 01:45.340]  That's kind of how I got started, and so I wanted to give back to the open-source community.
[01:46.060 --> 01:49.080]  If you took a workshop yesterday, you could have built this yourself.
[01:50.160 --> 01:53.200]  If you're familiar with Arduino, then you're ready to get started.
[01:53.420 --> 02:06.200]  If you don't know already, Arduino is a development platform for programming C++, where you just download one application and it has everything to compile and upload over USB via C++.
[02:06.320 --> 02:13.900]  We have a Rust wrapper for Arduboy, so if you're into managing your memory and restricting the things that you can do, you can get into it there.
[02:14.300 --> 02:19.980]  And then in addition, there's a scripting language that's been written by some of the members of the community that's bespoke to Arduboy.
[02:20.080 --> 02:32.640]  And it runs an interpreter on the main microcontroller that interprets bytecode on the external memory, allowing you to effectively run program space, address program space in the full 16 megabytes of the external memory.
[02:32.680 --> 02:37.360]  So that does a huge improvement over your available space.
[02:37.360 --> 02:49.960]  And the library that's available is fully optimized that they've done cycle counting in assembly to make sure that every draw operation mathematically cannot be performed any faster.
[02:50.660 --> 02:53.640]  And then for beginner, we have online tutorials and examples.
[02:53.860 --> 02:55.600]  And everything, as I mentioned, is open-source.
[02:55.680 --> 02:58.100]  So you can take apart everybody's games and change it.
[02:58.140 --> 02:59.260]  But of course, it's all about the games.
[02:59.920 --> 03:01.040]  We have over 400.
[03:01.180 --> 03:04.000]  Here's a few examples have been made.
[03:04.000 --> 03:13.020]  Pretty much if there's a game out there that you remember from your childhood, there's probably a very faithful representation that somebody, you know, spent a couple of weeks of their life to develop.
[03:15.820 --> 03:18.020]  So, here's the outline of the talk that I'm going to give you today.
[03:18.140 --> 03:25.240]  I'm going to tell you a little bit who I am, what my background is, how I created the Arduboy, how I made it into what it is today, and what I've learned.
[03:26.400 --> 03:28.200]  So first off, my name is Kevin Bates.
[03:28.300 --> 03:30.060]  I'm the founder and the creator of the Arduboy.
[03:30.520 --> 03:33.120]  I've been the full-time CEO of the company for 10 years.
[03:33.700 --> 03:40.200]  My background is in... I went to Oregon State for mechanical engineering and business.
[03:40.480 --> 03:44.760]  Graduated with a business degree and started building and selling turbo kits.
[03:44.980 --> 03:49.680]  So you can think of fast and furious anything to make your car go faster, handle better, lower.
[03:50.000 --> 03:52.300]  I was selling those things and I really enjoyed that.
[03:53.600 --> 03:56.400]  My next career that I took was as a wind turbine technician.
[03:57.000 --> 04:05.580]  So I would climb up 150 feet in the air to repair these 100-ton machines and change the oil and troubleshoot how they work.
[04:05.620 --> 04:11.240]  So I got a really good respect for Ohm's Law as I was working with enough of it to fry a whole herd of elephants.
[04:12.340 --> 04:17.320]  What fascinated me about this is these multi-million dollar machines are actually controlled by tiny little microchips.
[04:17.320 --> 04:21.140]  I thought it would be like a super computer, at least like a PC or something at the base of these.
[04:21.340 --> 04:25.380]  But in many cases, they're just these little tiny little chips, these 8-bit microcontrollers.
[04:25.480 --> 04:29.620]  I actually worked on a few of them that were powered by relay computers, simple logic computers.
[04:30.200 --> 04:32.740]  And it was around that same time that Arduino became popular.
[04:32.740 --> 04:39.940]  In 2008, it was actually a few years earlier that they launched, but really in 2007, 2008, their platform really started to gain steam.
[04:40.060 --> 04:53.300]  And again, if you don't know what Arduino is, it's a microcontroller board that's designed for development, primarily for artists, for beginners, so that it removes all of the, or as many of the pain points in getting to hardware development.
[04:53.300 --> 05:01.100]  So if you're a beginner and you have some experience with C++, that to get your code running on a remote device really couldn't be any easier.
[05:01.100 --> 05:06.020]  You just plug in a USB, download one program, follow an example, and you're off and running.
[05:06.980 --> 05:09.760]  And then many of you, if you do know Arduino, will know some of these things.
[05:09.900 --> 05:14.640]  The first one here is how to blink an LED, and then blinking multiple LEDs.
[05:16.020 --> 05:19.180]  Made a little Christmas card, and you can start to see we're getting a little bit of theme.
[05:19.280 --> 05:25.420]  This one on the lower right-hand corner is a video game system that used the trackball from the Blackberry.
[05:26.960 --> 05:38.840]  But one day, I had a fortuitous event where I was developing with the PCB I was making, and I dropped the surface mount component inside of a hole, and I started to think, well maybe what if you could actually mount that somehow?
[05:38.860 --> 05:41.240]  If you could actually embed the components on the inside.
[05:41.420 --> 05:46.700]  And I started to think about how many of the things that I was working with were basically the same height as the PCB.
[05:47.200 --> 05:50.840]  And what if I cut holes inside the PCBs and mounted things inside of it?
[05:50.840 --> 05:53.560]  And I developed this, which was the original Artaboy.
[05:53.840 --> 05:56.340]  And it was a project that I made myself.
[05:56.460 --> 05:59.540]  And my goal at the time when I created this was...
[05:59.900 --> 06:09.160]  I was creating all these cool Arduino projects, and every time I wanted to show somebody or tell them about it, I had to bring a Tupperware box or maybe show them a YouTube video on my phone and have trouble pulling it up.
[06:09.340 --> 06:12.040]  I really just wanted something that I could hand to people and say, this is what I do.
[06:12.200 --> 06:20.080]  So my mission that I set out to build this was make something that I could store in my wallet, and I could easily show people what it is that I like to do.
[06:20.740 --> 06:24.320]  So my goal was really just to get on the Adafruit and Hackaday blogs.
[06:25.180 --> 06:28.180]  These were kind of where I learned or where I got a lot of inspiration from.
[06:28.600 --> 06:34.080]  And maybe if I could meet a few people that were into the same kind of stuff, I'd get the post and then have a couple of people.
[06:34.080 --> 06:35.100]  Let's make a game together.
[06:35.500 --> 06:36.540]  Maybe get a cool job.
[06:36.980 --> 06:38.640]  I looked at it as a business card.
[06:38.940 --> 06:41.920]  The original post online was my business card plays Tetris.
[06:42.600 --> 06:44.700]  And it ended up getting half a million views.
[06:46.080 --> 06:52.040]  It was not only covered by Adafruit and Hackaday, but it was covered by pretty much every single Internet news media blog on the face of the planet.
[06:52.280 --> 06:53.900]  It was covered on broadcast news.
[06:54.100 --> 06:56.600]  So even the BBC would talk about it.
[06:56.720 --> 07:01.060]  You know, in other news, Portland programmer Kevin Bates creates a business card that plays Tetris.
[07:01.180 --> 07:02.160]  I don't know if I'd play...
[07:02.160 --> 07:05.200]  I don't know if I'd give him the job, but I sure would enjoy playing that game.
[07:05.280 --> 07:06.560]  In other news...
[07:06.960 --> 07:09.840]  So I had a friend of mine call me up and tell me, he says, Dude, you won the Internet.
[07:11.160 --> 07:17.820]  But my attitude towards it at the time was, you know, people's cats do stupid things and they end up being way more viral on the Internet.
[07:18.000 --> 07:19.360]  This is just a flash in the pan.
[07:19.800 --> 07:22.120]  But it was actually in conversation with my father.
[07:22.320 --> 07:24.360]  And he invited me to seize the moment.
[07:24.480 --> 07:27.060]  He said, Look, you've built something here and it's resonating with people.
[07:27.160 --> 07:34.280]  And you built it because of the open-source and it allowed you to create something and learn from other people's examples.
[07:34.580 --> 07:41.140]  And so now if you build and create this thing, other people can then take that and learn and create the same way that you have it.
[07:41.220 --> 07:42.640]  They don't have to even know anything about Arduino.
[07:42.800 --> 07:43.820]  They can learn about Artiboy.
[07:44.040 --> 07:48.060]  And if they are interested in it, then it expands the capability.
[07:48.260 --> 07:51.980]  That if you learn how to make an Artiboy game, you can then start developing IoT devices.
[07:52.220 --> 07:55.720]  You can start making, you know, devices of your own to...
[07:55.720 --> 07:58.380]  Whether you want to make a business out of it then is a totally different story.
[07:58.380 --> 08:04.980]  But at least to be able to enrich your life or to understand the things that are around your everyday life is a valuable thing.
[08:06.940 --> 08:08.620]  So there's a 30-minute phone call.
[08:09.140 --> 08:13.740]  When it went viral, I actually got an email from over 10,000 people in the first couple of days.
[08:14.760 --> 08:16.000]  And one of them was a guy.
[08:16.000 --> 08:18.660]  He worked in the video game industry for over 20 years.
[08:18.660 --> 08:20.260]  And he said, Hey, I like what you're doing.
[08:20.340 --> 08:20.940]  Would you like some money?
[08:20.940 --> 08:25.900]  And we had a shared vision of what Artiboy could possibly be.
[08:26.060 --> 08:30.200]  This concept of teaching electronics through video games.
[08:30.400 --> 08:35.820]  That the concept of developing video games and learning how the hardware works and optimizing it.
[08:35.980 --> 08:40.420]  Is exercise in critical thinking, problem solving, goal skating.
[08:40.540 --> 08:44.940]  And these are the kinds of soft skills that traditional education can struggle to develop.
[08:46.160 --> 08:47.340]  Education through play.
[08:47.340 --> 08:51.780]  Many of you may know that naturally all animals learn through play.
[08:52.080 --> 08:56.640]  So it's a natural way for people to develop new skills.
[08:56.860 --> 09:01.460]  The opportunity to make and create and fail and try again is critical.
[09:01.880 --> 09:06.820]  And at this point that I took the investment, the company actually was just one laptop and a YouTube video.
[09:06.820 --> 09:12.480]  So the fact that I managed to score $50,000 for 15% of what I had seemed like a good deal at the time.
[09:14.240 --> 09:17.240]  I took the prototype to Bay Area Maker Faire.
[09:18.560 --> 09:20.280]  And this was the stage of the prototype.
[09:20.500 --> 09:22.060]  You can see a little bit of advancements.
[09:22.220 --> 09:27.080]  I used a larger screen and created a little battery door.
[09:27.320 --> 09:31.920]  At this point I was still using a coin cell battery and trying to figure out how I could make that removable.
[09:33.620 --> 09:36.680]  When I went there, I found out there's a real audience and that they have money.
[09:36.680 --> 09:39.580]  I had $100 bills waved in my face to take these things away.
[09:41.260 --> 09:54.900]  I had this revelation that maybe at the time I was actually working as a data analyst at a shipping logistics company, making software to save pennies on the dollar for companies like Intel and Disney on their multi-million dollar shipping bills.
[09:55.060 --> 09:59.020]  And I hated telling people that's what I did when I had these cool jobs like being a wind turbine.
[09:59.020 --> 10:00.760]  I'd actually previously been a beekeeper.
[10:00.820 --> 10:01.900]  I was a photographer.
[10:01.900 --> 10:12.760]  So I'd worked in all these different industries and it was really getting to a point where this thing that had found me was seeming like it was a better opportunity than my current course in life.
[10:14.040 --> 10:15.100]  It had a lot of this.
[10:16.500 --> 10:19.000]  But actually from my side it was more like this.
[10:19.320 --> 10:24.700]  Where Homer finds a dollar bill, but then finally realizes that money can be exchanged for goods and services.
[10:26.400 --> 10:27.960]  So I got some great advice in the beginning.
[10:27.960 --> 10:33.120]  My dad introduced me to an investor in the medical industry in Portland.
[10:33.320 --> 10:36.680]  And he said that advice is inherently neither good or bad.
[10:36.780 --> 10:39.140]  That people, when they tell you things, they've got their own motivations.
[10:39.140 --> 10:40.480]  They've got their own background.
[10:40.500 --> 10:42.760]  They've got things they want to see for you.
[10:42.880 --> 10:45.060]  And they're going to tell you things based on their perspective.
[10:45.300 --> 10:50.700]  And it's your job to determine whether or not that information is valuable for you and what your vision is.
[10:50.700 --> 10:57.320]  That you might meet somebody who's your hero, who is really like powerful or smart, has a lot of money and influence.
[10:57.500 --> 10:59.120]  And they may tell you something and give you advice.
[10:59.120 --> 11:01.840]  But you need to then step back and say, is this the right decision for me?
[11:01.940 --> 11:05.640]  Or am I just being influenced because of the things that are in their world?
[11:06.220 --> 11:12.220]  This is incredibly important to understand once you take investors because they're going to tell you to do all sorts of different things.
[11:12.660 --> 11:16.680]  And you need to realize that at the end of the day, you need to look at the look at their votes.
[11:16.840 --> 11:19.080]  You know, it's interesting you want to influence me in that way.
[11:19.160 --> 11:19.880]  Well, let's go to a vote.
[11:20.000 --> 11:20.840]  You only have 15%.
[11:20.840 --> 11:21.940]  Well, sorry.
[11:23.820 --> 11:30.040]  And then the other advice that was very critical was after going to the Maker Faire, I called a lawyer that I've been working with through my dad.
[11:30.300 --> 11:32.960]  And I said, look, can I do this during my lunch break?
[11:33.060 --> 11:33.920]  Can I do this after work?
[11:34.020 --> 11:35.520]  Are they going to end up owning any of this stuff?
[11:35.720 --> 11:41.280]  And he says, look, it's more important that many people will try to find the perfect time and then miss the opportunity.
[11:41.280 --> 11:42.940]  That there's no better time than now.
[11:43.880 --> 11:45.080]  So I started working in CAD.
[11:45.280 --> 11:51.040]  I hired a mechanical engineer with over 20 years in the medical industry.
[11:51.200 --> 11:55.420]  My dad was a medical engineer, medical technology engineer.
[11:55.540 --> 11:59.160]  So that's where I kind of might be sensing a theme on where I got a lot of experience from.
[11:59.500 --> 12:01.900]  And we spent over a hundred hours designing the buttons alone.
[12:01.980 --> 12:07.400]  So if you tried the art of way and you say that it's got good buttons, we put over two weeks of work between the two of us into making it just right.
[12:09.460 --> 12:11.660]  So at this stage, I started doing some 3D printing.
[12:11.880 --> 12:14.340]  I was trying to figure out how I could make it so it was actually durable.
[12:14.460 --> 12:16.360]  People could put it in their pocket and carry it around.
[12:16.900 --> 12:19.060]  How I could mount the parts to the plastic.
[12:19.060 --> 12:22.120]  I was dealing with like a double-sided tape.
[12:22.220 --> 12:27.720]  And I was really starting to kind of worry whether or not I'd gotten in over my head, leaving my day job trying to manufacture this thing.
[12:28.260 --> 12:33.680]  It was kind of fortuitous that at this time I went to OSCON.
[12:33.880 --> 12:38.020]  OSCON is an open-source convention and it's held in my hometown of Portland, Oregon.
[12:38.840 --> 12:41.900]  And Zach Supella at the time was Spark, but they're now Particle.
[12:42.040 --> 12:46.500]  They make a collection of IoT development boards.
[12:46.500 --> 12:51.480]  So it's similar to Arduino, but they're all connected devices, whether it's Wi-Fi, cellular or Bluetooth.
[12:51.480 --> 12:54.400]  And they excel because they offer a cloud-based service.
[12:54.860 --> 12:55.660]  I met him.
[12:55.820 --> 12:57.780]  I was a big fan of their platform and I met him.
[12:58.340 --> 12:59.600]  And I showed him the prototype.
[12:59.720 --> 13:00.440]  He was really impressed.
[13:00.520 --> 13:01.780]  But I says, hey man, you've made stuff.
[13:01.800 --> 13:02.520]  You've gone to China.
[13:02.520 --> 13:03.900]  How do I do this, you know?
[13:04.240 --> 13:07.900]  And I says, do you got any investors that I can talk to, you know?
[13:08.300 --> 13:10.900]  And he introduced me to a couple of them.
[13:11.020 --> 13:12.360]  But they said, well, do you really need money?
[13:12.440 --> 13:13.380]  What is it that you need?
[13:13.580 --> 13:19.900]  And I says, well, I have money still, but I want to, you know, like I need a copy machine for what I've made one of.
[13:19.960 --> 13:20.820]  How do I make more of them?
[13:20.820 --> 13:22.720]  And he says, well, there's this thing called Hacks.
[13:22.820 --> 13:24.720]  It's a accelerator incubator.
[13:26.720 --> 13:29.260]  And they offer investment for hardware creators.
[13:29.560 --> 13:31.140]  I knew people had gone through it.
[13:31.240 --> 13:35.060]  I knew that Zach and some of the other companies had gone through.
[13:35.540 --> 13:38.620]  And so I filmed the five-minute interview video.
[13:38.760 --> 13:39.660]  It had two Skype calls.
[13:40.080 --> 13:45.400]  And what I didn't know about it was that the entire program took place over six weeks in Shenzhen, China.
[13:45.880 --> 13:50.120]  So I packed up everything that I had, put it in storage, applied in October.
[13:50.420 --> 13:51.600]  I was interviewed in November.
[13:51.680 --> 13:53.060]  I was accepted in December.
[13:53.240 --> 13:55.640]  And then I bought a one-way ticket to China in January.
[13:57.240 --> 14:02.140]  China is a subject that could be a talk for probably even three hours on its own from the stories that I have.
[14:02.300 --> 14:09.780]  I don't even think I'm the right person to talk about it because there's other people who've had even more stronger and deeper experiences than I have.
[14:09.780 --> 14:13.480]  I think maybe even somebody who is from there should be giving these stories.
[14:13.700 --> 14:18.420]  But I can tell you a couple anecdotes is that it's a country of incredible dichotomy.
[14:18.580 --> 14:19.820]  These are two pictures that I took.
[14:20.040 --> 14:32.240]  One was from a... I went on like a hiking tour in rural China and got to see this village where little kids, you know, stared at me with their eyes wide open, mouth wide open, because it's probably the first white person they'd ever seen.
[14:32.240 --> 14:39.840]  And then also on top of one of the tallest buildings in Shenzhen at the top of like a hundred foot, you know, the bar and everything else like that.
[14:41.120 --> 14:47.880]  This first saying, terribly awesome or awesomely terrible, is somebody else told me this, trying to... how to describe China quickly.
[14:48.600 --> 14:55.320]  And then on the bottom, it's in Chinese, and it says, and that means I love China and China loves me.
[14:57.720 --> 14:59.040]  I really should have seen this coming.
[14:59.620 --> 15:04.720]  My first investor, when we had that phone call, he's like, you're going to need to go to China because that's where they manufacture all this stuff.
[15:04.900 --> 15:07.780]  And I said, no, because you can do email.
[15:08.040 --> 15:12.000]  And anyways, you can see in this picture, this is a view of my apartment in China.
[15:12.000 --> 15:13.120]  So I was wrong.
[15:15.080 --> 15:18.580]  So the program was a six week incubator accelerator.
[15:19.180 --> 15:23.500]  Each week, they gave me a milestone to improve the prototype or improve the business plan.
[15:25.480 --> 15:33.480]  They gave investment, which I mentioned, had access to visa support, office space, basically everything for a warm landing to come into China, everything that I needed.
[15:33.480 --> 15:36.360]  So I didn't need to worry about translators or finding the factories.
[15:36.540 --> 15:43.440]  They had a whole like a spreadsheet of like hundreds of different factories that I could go and tour and access to mentors.
[15:43.600 --> 15:49.200]  And that was one of the real reasons that I tried to join the program was because some of you may know this gentleman here.
[15:49.200 --> 15:52.200]  He's famous for hacking the original Xbox.
[15:52.520 --> 16:00.520]  Bunny has also designed the Chumbie, which was kind of like something before your smart speakers that you have in your house, but maybe over 20 years ago.
[16:01.160 --> 16:03.860]  Novena was an open-source laptop that he created.
[16:04.200 --> 16:11.320]  And then if you've been over by the crowd supply table, they've got the precursor, which is his open-source cell phone with a full trust model.
[16:11.720 --> 16:14.300]  And then check out his check out his blog.
[16:14.640 --> 16:20.060]  If you pick up anything from my talk today and you think, oh, hardware manufacturing is really interesting.
[16:20.200 --> 16:20.880]  I'd love to learn more.
[16:21.360 --> 16:22.180]  It's not for me.
[16:22.340 --> 16:23.580]  Pretty much everything I could learn.
[16:23.580 --> 16:26.420]  I learned from him and he can everything that he's learned.
[16:26.520 --> 16:27.720]  He's he's shared with other people.
[16:27.880 --> 16:32.200]  So without Bunny, I don't I don't know if I would have been able to get as far as I did.
[16:32.340 --> 16:38.280]  The resources he's provided, I think, has helped people all over the world access to the markets.
[16:38.280 --> 16:45.660]  So if you've heard a little bit about China and what's going on over there, they have these electronics markets where they're just thousands and thousands of the booths look like this.
[16:45.740 --> 16:48.280]  And they they they'll tell you that each booth represents a factory.
[16:49.040 --> 16:51.560]  And and sometimes it's true, but often not.
[16:51.560 --> 16:53.760]  It's more often that they know a guy that knows a guy.
[16:53.920 --> 16:56.300]  And so you'll buy a part from them and say, hey, just one second.
[16:56.500 --> 16:59.200]  And then I'll go and I'll run up two floors and buy it from another guy.
[16:59.320 --> 17:00.360]  And he may buy it from another guy.
[17:00.480 --> 17:02.100]  So you stand there and wait for like two hours.
[17:02.260 --> 17:03.880]  And eventually they come back with a bag of parts.
[17:05.140 --> 17:08.300]  And it's this kind of organic nature, this this this.
[17:09.040 --> 17:12.320]  I mean, it's a truly the way of human markets have traditionally evolved.
[17:12.440 --> 17:17.920]  But with instead of selling, we might be used to seeing this kind of behavior with like fruits or something like that.
[17:18.000 --> 17:19.320]  They're doing it with electronics.
[17:20.060 --> 17:25.440]  It's great for prototyping because you can touch and feel and you can see what it is that they got.
[17:25.740 --> 17:27.540]  You can get samples right away if you want to.
[17:27.620 --> 17:29.880]  Hey, one of those, I'd like to put that on my circuit board.
[17:29.880 --> 17:32.800]  So we could walk literally downstairs, grab a motor, try it on a board.
[17:32.900 --> 17:33.560]  That one doesn't work.
[17:33.640 --> 17:34.940]  Go downstairs, get a different one.
[17:35.200 --> 17:40.500]  And what's even cooler is that if you do manage to find one of these guys that represents the factory, they can customize.
[17:40.760 --> 17:42.720]  So you can say, hey, I want to have the shaft a little bit longer.
[17:42.720 --> 17:45.440]  I want to have this be a different color and no problem.
[17:45.620 --> 17:50.280]  I mean, it's it's asking if they can do it is almost a waste of time because the answer is always yes.
[17:50.420 --> 17:52.880]  The question is, is how much and how long is it going to take?
[17:54.780 --> 17:55.600]  So we built this.
[17:55.680 --> 17:57.160]  This was the development kit.
[17:57.380 --> 18:00.860]  So the goal of this was to start the library and game development.
[18:01.040 --> 18:06.340]  So while I was still in China, we produced and sold and shipped the development kit, get hardware from the community.
[18:06.740 --> 18:09.240]  And we just wanted to get, like I said, get it out there.
[18:09.400 --> 18:14.280]  We put up an online forum and gave people the opportunity to share with each other the development.
[18:15.420 --> 18:16.880]  I sold 100 pieces of these.
[18:17.200 --> 18:20.660]  It seemed like kind of cool, but that was out of a waiting list of over 100,000.
[18:20.660 --> 18:24.420]  So actually, if you're doing this kind of stuff, that's not totally unusual.
[18:24.800 --> 18:25.640]  It's a little bit low.
[18:25.740 --> 18:27.320]  That was a year after it had gone viral.
[18:27.360 --> 18:28.600]  So it had been a little bit stale.
[18:28.860 --> 18:37.560]  But if you're ever interested in trying to do like a mailing list or something you want to produce or sell, expecting single digit turnover from your mailing list is pretty normal.
[18:39.620 --> 18:42.260]  I started dealing with the lithium at this point.
[18:43.220 --> 18:46.160]  I'd been scared away from it because like I didn't know how to charge it.
[18:46.220 --> 18:48.740]  And I didn't know about protection and fires and things like that.
[18:48.740 --> 18:52.600]  But the feedback that I was getting was like, people don't want to have to change their coin cell.
[18:52.740 --> 18:54.240]  Everybody wants to plug it in via USB.
[18:55.200 --> 18:59.760]  So I sort of went to market without having full knowledge of how I was going to solve this problem.
[18:59.900 --> 19:03.400]  I knew that I could put it in there, but I didn't know how much it was going to cost.
[19:05.100 --> 19:08.020]  But I managed to kind of the skin and the teeth make that.
[19:08.100 --> 19:09.480]  That's almost a whole other story in itself.
[19:09.920 --> 19:12.620]  At the same time, we had an industrial engineer do some renders.
[19:13.000 --> 19:17.620]  And I was really starting to get charged up at this point because I was like, oh man, now I want one of these things.
[19:18.620 --> 19:25.360]  Because up to this point, it was like, this is the things that I was building and like, you know, hand 3D printed and hand built.
[19:25.580 --> 19:26.760]  And so it didn't really look very cool.
[19:28.500 --> 19:29.700]  But it worked.
[19:29.700 --> 19:31.940]  And I started getting CNC samples back.
[19:32.240 --> 19:34.040]  We produced it out of different materials.
[19:34.040 --> 19:37.500]  You can see it's out of like a chrome aluminum back.
[19:37.840 --> 19:42.360]  And then this is the kind of the progression of the prototypes from where I started and where I ended up.
[19:42.780 --> 19:45.480]  So this was one year from prototype to production.
[19:46.000 --> 19:53.460]  And it was ended up, it started at six millimeters thick or 1.8 millimeters thick from and went all the way to six millimeters.
[19:53.460 --> 20:00.540]  I spent a lot of time trying to keep it as thin as possible, but to make it actually durable and house the battery and everything else like that.
[20:02.040 --> 20:04.340]  But I've never actually heard any complaints that it's too big.
[20:04.460 --> 20:07.680]  And I literally spent six months trying to, every last 0.1 millimeters.
[20:08.300 --> 20:09.280]  So we did the Kickstarter.
[20:10.280 --> 20:11.880]  And it was tremendously successful.
[20:12.160 --> 20:16.620]  As you can see, it was over 1,700% successful.
[20:16.820 --> 20:18.180]  It was a half a million dollars in under a month.
[20:19.520 --> 20:21.740]  So give a shout out to my friends over at Osh Park.
[20:22.220 --> 20:24.080]  They're also from my hometown of Portland, Oregon.
[20:24.240 --> 20:28.460]  And if you build and make your own PCBs, you can get three pieces.
[20:28.900 --> 20:30.640]  It's like $8 per square inch.
[20:31.240 --> 20:32.660]  And a really quick service.
[20:32.800 --> 20:34.580]  Some of the highest quality PCBs you can get.
[20:34.740 --> 20:38.620]  But what was cool is at the time I was on the back of the PCB.
[20:38.840 --> 20:40.840]  Underneath the case, I wanted to do like an Easter egg.
[20:40.840 --> 20:44.560]  So I put all these little cool pixel graphics on the back side of it.
[20:44.640 --> 20:46.900]  And I was prototyping that with Osh Park.
[20:47.020 --> 20:48.420]  Where I built the original prototype from.
[20:48.520 --> 20:50.660]  And I got this cool little note from them.
[20:50.800 --> 20:52.260]  And I actually think about this all the time.
[20:52.420 --> 20:57.080]  Because it really showed me that there were people following along in my process.
[20:57.300 --> 21:00.100]  And some of these people were also foundational in the maker industry.
[21:00.160 --> 21:02.380]  So I really felt like I was doing the right thing.
[21:03.980 --> 21:07.700]  Here's some kind of tidbits about the details of manufacturing.
[21:07.700 --> 21:11.600]  So the Artaboy features a gold plated snap dome button matrix.
[21:11.800 --> 21:15.060]  And you may have seen these on like you take apart a remote control or something like that.
[21:15.260 --> 21:17.480]  But it's a custom made thing.
[21:17.520 --> 21:20.620]  You have to have a factory actually, you know, die cut this and then place these.
[21:20.760 --> 21:21.720]  And a machine has to do it.
[21:21.920 --> 21:23.580]  And I figured that that'd be too expensive.
[21:23.580 --> 21:26.360]  So I was using just a discrete surface mount components.
[21:26.580 --> 21:29.380]  But one day I was walking through the market and I see these things.
[21:29.540 --> 21:32.440]  And I just casually say, hey, am I really, really broken Chinese?
[21:32.640 --> 21:34.300]  I'm like, how much does this cost?
[21:36.840 --> 21:40.300]  And I had to have the translator finish the conversation.
[21:40.300 --> 21:42.200]  But it was only a few cents.
[21:42.700 --> 21:45.140]  It was like 10 cents for the matrix.
[21:45.400 --> 21:47.520]  And I thought for each little snap dome.
[21:47.640 --> 21:48.900]  And then like, no, the whole sticker.
[21:49.020 --> 21:51.600]  And I'm like, that's more than one single button cost.
[21:51.720 --> 21:58.080]  And so that was a 600%, over 600% cost savings, just by some casual conversation that I had walking through the markets.
[21:58.560 --> 22:03.860]  And in the United States, if you're doing something that you'd have to talk to advisors and you'd have to, you know, have meetings.
[22:03.900 --> 22:05.660]  And it would take you forever to get that.
[22:05.720 --> 22:08.300]  Just that little piece of information that was just by chance.
[22:09.080 --> 22:10.760]  This is at the injection molding factory.
[22:11.380 --> 22:14.180]  They were trying different plastics and like weren't...
[22:14.180 --> 22:16.960]  They had like black plastic that they were laying around.
[22:17.080 --> 22:18.020]  So they just shoot that through.
[22:18.960 --> 22:23.020]  This is the plastic comes in for the part that I'm holding and then goes down into the buttons.
[22:23.140 --> 22:25.460]  And then when it cools, they snap off each little bit of it.
[22:26.940 --> 22:30.140]  The big one that I'm holding, if you want to know, is that's called a sprue.
[22:30.320 --> 22:33.380]  And then as it comes down into these, these other ones that hold it are called gates.
[22:35.580 --> 22:38.120]  These are examples of when it doesn't go quite right.
[22:38.280 --> 22:42.100]  Whether the speed that they inject at the temperature isn't quite right or something like that.
[22:42.260 --> 22:44.580]  You can see areas where it doesn't quite fill.
[22:44.780 --> 22:47.200]  And it was kind of cool to grab these and touch and feel them.
[22:47.920 --> 22:49.200]  Our product has insert nuts.
[22:49.760 --> 23:00.800]  These little metal nuts that are in the corners of the product, which are really nice because they allow you to assemble and disassemble the Artaboy without stripping the plastic.
[23:01.600 --> 23:05.980]  And what was great about that was it's good for the end user.
[23:06.020 --> 23:10.680]  But what I didn't realize when I went to the factory was they have to be inserted by hand.
[23:10.880 --> 23:14.700]  So there's a worker who has to sit there and put each individual one of these things in there.
[23:14.780 --> 23:17.040]  And I says, well, how much would it take to get a robot?
[23:17.180 --> 23:18.660]  Like I expected to see a robot, right?
[23:18.720 --> 23:21.660]  And that's probably the biggest mistake many people go to.
[23:21.660 --> 23:24.220]  China or even learn about manufacturing in general.
[23:24.340 --> 23:25.820]  You think, oh, everything's made by robots.
[23:25.960 --> 23:34.840]  But if it's not a bottle of shampoo or like a can of beer, every single piece of hardware electronics that you have is touched by human hands.
[23:35.020 --> 23:37.880]  I mean, when you assemble an iPhone, it's done by hand.
[23:38.020 --> 23:46.360]  And so I asked, if we wanted to build a robot, I'd have to make a million units, at least for them to even think about like the costs and trying to figure it out.
[23:46.360 --> 23:50.300]  Because the amount of time it takes to hire the engineer and test it and get it to work.
[23:50.460 --> 23:58.420]  I mean, that could be more cost in building the machine to put those nuts in than there is in actually building the mold in the first place.
[23:59.180 --> 24:03.120]  Just casual note, that mold, that was the biggest investment up until that point.
[24:03.220 --> 24:06.400]  And that cost me $15,000 to buy that mold.
[24:06.820 --> 24:08.720]  And I had to produce...
[24:08.720 --> 24:14.360]  In order for them to go through the trouble to produce at the minimum order quantity was 10,000 pieces.
[24:14.600 --> 24:20.540]  And I actually told them I was going to end up making 100,000, but the first order was 10,000.
[24:20.540 --> 24:23.340]  And I still haven't did 100,000 yet.
[24:24.040 --> 24:26.020]  But we're getting these cool samples in.
[24:26.200 --> 24:35.420]  I grabbed a bunch and put them in my backpack and hand assembled the first prototypes that came out of the factory a year and a half after it first went viral.
[24:35.680 --> 24:38.420]  And six months after going to China.
[24:39.780 --> 24:40.760]  We built...
[24:40.760 --> 24:43.660]  As I mentioned, the first production batch was 10,000.
[24:45.040 --> 24:46.960]  I want to introduce you to Celine Bender.
[24:47.100 --> 24:48.700]  She was our production manager at the time.
[24:49.200 --> 24:50.460]  She grew up in Singapore.
[24:50.720 --> 24:51.660]  And I met her in China.
[24:52.040 --> 24:52.980]  I spoke fluent Mandarin.
[24:54.000 --> 24:58.060]  She's originally from Switzerland, if you're trying to figure out that ethnic disparity there.
[24:58.560 --> 25:00.200]  But there'd be no Artaboy without Celine.
[25:00.300 --> 25:01.360]  She was absolutely instrumental.
[25:01.360 --> 25:02.540]  So I really want to give her credit.
[25:02.680 --> 25:06.400]  Because she spoke Chinese, she was able to go to the factory and speak their native language.
[25:06.660 --> 25:15.220]  And that's really critical because the cultural gap in understanding what is said, there's little nuances in every language.
[25:15.220 --> 25:21.100]  But Chinese in specific, where just understanding those differences inherently opened up so many doors.
[25:21.340 --> 25:26.380]  She knew how to, how do I say, grease the gears to a certain degree.
[25:26.380 --> 25:27.680]  She used one phrase with them.
[25:27.740 --> 25:36.220]  And when we were behind on schedule, she said in Chinese, by hook or by crook, which is a phrase that's quite impactful over there, which means you get this shit done no matter what.
[25:36.220 --> 25:41.520]  But saying that phrase in Chinese, in their native language, just made everything better.
[25:41.760 --> 25:45.500]  And so I just wanted to say that without her, there definitely wouldn't be any Artaboy.
[25:46.960 --> 25:48.400]  So here we are at that factory.
[25:48.540 --> 25:50.120]  I mentioned the human hands putting it together.
[25:50.760 --> 25:53.960]  Sometimes we'd even catch them playing the games at the assembly line.
[25:54.100 --> 25:56.160]  That's me all dressed up in the pink smock.
[25:57.320 --> 25:58.600]  It's anti-static gear.
[25:58.780 --> 26:00.060]  Some might think that it's for safety.
[26:00.060 --> 26:01.600]  Others know that it's for style.
[26:04.320 --> 26:05.340]  We were doing packaging.
[26:05.660 --> 26:06.340]  Her, Celine's...
[26:10.560 --> 26:10.960]  Chesting?
[26:11.140 --> 26:11.260]  Okay.
[26:11.920 --> 26:12.320]  Yeah.
[26:12.740 --> 26:14.260]  Celine's family was in the printing industry.
[26:14.400 --> 26:16.160]  And so we, she had some experience with that.
[26:16.220 --> 26:18.700]  And so we were building samples of what we thought the packaging might look like.
[26:20.380 --> 26:22.160]  This is actually right outside our factory.
[26:22.320 --> 26:23.420]  Our factory is here on the left.
[26:23.460 --> 26:26.940]  And then on the right is a rice field.
[26:27.520 --> 26:38.500]  And again, China is just a place of incredible dichotomy where you'll have people who are basically subsistence farming and may have lived on the land for hundreds, if not even thousands of years.
[26:39.100 --> 26:44.780]  And then you have these high-rise towers that have only been here for maybe even a few months.
[26:46.040 --> 26:48.540]  But what was great about that is we finally had inventory.
[26:48.760 --> 26:49.960]  So we went back to Maker Faire.
[26:50.660 --> 26:51.180]  What's that?
[26:51.900 --> 26:53.120]  Yeah, that's likely air pollution.
[26:53.280 --> 26:55.040]  I mean, it's very humid there as well.
[26:55.160 --> 26:56.380]  And so that's playing into it.
[26:56.460 --> 26:58.160]  But this isn't even half that bad.
[26:58.300 --> 27:02.800]  If it was truly air pollution, I've been in situations like this where maybe you wouldn't be able to see to the end of the block.
[27:02.800 --> 27:03.840]  And it was brown.
[27:04.400 --> 27:05.560]  So yeah, it's gnarly.
[27:05.720 --> 27:09.000]  They have a different PPI scale there.
[27:09.320 --> 27:14.400]  I mean, usually 300 is considered unhealthy or whatever there, but their scale is totally different.
[27:14.500 --> 27:16.840]  They go to like 800 there, so it's different.
[27:18.160 --> 27:20.320]  But yeah, actually, it's much better now.
[27:21.060 --> 27:24.980]  The city of Shenzhen that I was in has gone through a period of great change.
[27:25.120 --> 27:30.940]  I mean, only 40 years ago, it was a fishing village, and now it's one of the most populous regions in the entire world.
[27:32.100 --> 27:37.060]  But yeah, the best way that I can explain it about China in my experience is there may be that...
[27:37.060 --> 27:45.100]  It was from a native person there that said, every culture around the world goes through a period where you have this kind of rapid expansion.
[27:45.380 --> 27:47.500]  And in the United States, we called it the Wild West, right?
[27:47.620 --> 27:50.260]  So they're going through some of the same things that we did in the Wild West.
[27:50.260 --> 27:52.080]  They're just doing it with cell phones and concrete.
[27:52.480 --> 27:56.440]  So yeah, so back to where we were, we're selling the Artaboy.
[27:57.620 --> 28:01.140]  Even on our first day that we were there at Maker Faire, we sold all the units that we had.
[28:01.240 --> 28:04.140]  And so it was a really good feeling to finally start getting these things out there.
[28:05.440 --> 28:07.180]  We went to a Target House open event.
[28:07.180 --> 28:11.980]  So the Target store in San Francisco, they've got like a little like experimental demo space.
[28:11.980 --> 28:15.180]  So we brought the product there and tested the customer interest.
[28:15.180 --> 28:19.660]  So they had their like suit people with the clipboards, testing how people reacted and things like that.
[28:20.060 --> 28:23.680]  And from this actually, Target was ready to buy 100,000 units.
[28:23.800 --> 28:25.180]  They said, just let us know when you're ready.
[28:25.920 --> 28:27.100]  And wow, it's like, whoa.
[28:28.800 --> 28:30.980]  But I found out that retail is actually really scary.
[28:32.000 --> 28:34.280]  So if you don't know anything about retail, many people don't.
[28:34.740 --> 28:45.320]  One of the first things that's kind of a surprise for people that if you're a manufacturer, that if a product is returned or stolen from the store, that you have a contract with like the manufacturer, they'll say, hey, so many of these things walked out the door.
[28:45.500 --> 28:46.800]  You got to pay us back.
[28:46.980 --> 28:51.860]  Or if a customer returns us, then they say, okay, customer returned us.
[28:52.060 --> 28:52.860]  We want our money back.
[28:53.020 --> 28:56.440]  And then if you want that product back, you actually have to then pay for shipping.
[28:57.380 --> 29:08.060]  So what's even more interesting is that if the retailer is big enough, like Target or Walmart, and this is 10 years ago, so I understand some retailers are now picked up on this, but any unsold inventory.
[29:08.060 --> 29:13.980]  So the traditional model was that a retail store would just buy a bunch of inventory and then they would own it and then they would sell it.
[29:14.820 --> 29:16.800]  But then that's where you see things liquidation.
[29:16.920 --> 29:17.720]  They go on sale, right?
[29:17.800 --> 29:21.420]  They try to sell it at the paying price and then, okay, it's been sitting on the shelf for a while.
[29:21.540 --> 29:22.680]  We reduce the price.
[29:22.800 --> 29:28.200]  But Target and Walmart are in such a good position that people want to be in their stores that they flip the model.
[29:28.320 --> 29:31.640]  They say, look, if we don't sell it, then you got to buy it back.
[29:31.640 --> 29:39.980]  It says if it sits on the shelf when you'll buy it, then basically you are almost paying for the opportunity to be on Target's store shelf.
[29:40.100 --> 29:42.340]  That's how you kind of look at that retail model.
[29:43.500 --> 29:45.880]  Target has 1,800 stores in the United States.
[29:46.000 --> 29:55.200]  If I wanted to put my product in the stores there, since it's kind of something different, people don't know what it is, it'd need to have like probably a little video screen and a little end cap, you know, kind of explain what it is.
[29:55.200 --> 30:01.020]  The going rate for those things, give or take $1,000, and that includes the cost of like having it installed and shipped and everything.
[30:01.340 --> 30:06.400]  So you're at $1.8 million just to get it into every Target stores, and you're not getting that money back.
[30:06.440 --> 30:08.920]  So if you don't sell enough units, then that's gone.
[30:10.320 --> 30:17.140]  So I did the math on this, and basically anything more than 7% of the units would have been returned or stole, then the company would have gone bankrupt.
[30:18.340 --> 30:26.100]  And a good product like towels or iPhones or something like that, people know what they're getting, that has a return rate of like 3% or 4%.
[30:26.100 --> 30:28.580]  So I would have almost definitely been in this territory.
[30:28.780 --> 30:31.260]  New products, something that's new, like...
[30:31.260 --> 30:35.980]  Gosh, I'm trying to think of something that's like a hairball product or something like SodaStreams or something like that.
[30:36.060 --> 30:37.980]  People get it, it doesn't quite work right, and they give it back.
[30:38.100 --> 30:39.180]  That's like 20%.
[30:39.180 --> 30:50.680]  So it's kind of interesting to learn these things the hard way, because it's like, oh, we were ready to buy $5 million of your product, but if it goes wrong, then you won't exist next year.
[30:50.680 --> 30:53.920]  So I decided that I would take a different path.
[30:55.080 --> 30:58.600]  Returned to my existing customer network, and we did another Kickstarter.
[30:59.600 --> 31:11.100]  One of the developers was working on a full-featured role-playing game that took advantage of the entire memory space that had a map that was larger than Link's Awakening, and just tried to grow organically, celebrate the community.
[31:11.300 --> 31:14.160]  So we went back to Kickstarter, and again, we did really great.
[31:14.320 --> 31:17.920]  Not as good as the first time, but you've got to remember, these are all follow-on sales.
[31:20.640 --> 31:23.560]  Then, it was just about time during the pandemic...
[31:23.560 --> 31:29.060]  Actually, I had declared Artaboy dead, because it was difficult to get chips, and I couldn't go into production.
[31:29.520 --> 31:36.920]  But somebody in the community, you know, didn't give up, and they were looking at a way to add more gains to what they already had.
[31:37.040 --> 31:42.000]  So they were taking the Artaboy, and they were adding an external flash chip to the device.
[31:42.000 --> 31:44.100]  And you can see here the wires being added.
[31:44.540 --> 31:56.300]  And they wrote, in assembly, a custom bootloader within only 4 kilobytes of memory space, a bootloader flash that would allow you to access this external memory that I talked about.
[31:56.380 --> 31:59.800]  And so in this picture, you can see here that the blue is the bootloader that he wrote.
[31:59.900 --> 32:02.300]  And originally, the games could only address the 28.
[32:02.300 --> 32:13.700]  But now, because he spent his wizard time to create this amazing thing, we can now load all 400 Artaboy games on it, and you can reprogram them on the fly without the need for the PC.
[32:14.540 --> 32:18.820]  Our friends over at OSH Park were also making flex circuits available to people at the same time.
[32:18.820 --> 32:20.900]  So I went ahead and built a little mod chip.
[32:21.960 --> 32:22.940]  And I had them produced.
[32:22.960 --> 32:27.840]  For whatever reason, I was able to find the flash chips, but I couldn't get the chips I needed for the Artaboy.
[32:27.840 --> 32:30.540]  So I actually went into production for these little mod chips.
[32:30.740 --> 32:33.200]  So I emailed all my existing Artaboy customers.
[32:33.200 --> 32:37.940]  And I said, hey, if you want to upgrade and get all the games, and you don't have to put it in your PC.
[32:39.360 --> 32:42.040]  And what I was doing is I was selling these as pre-modified.
[32:42.040 --> 32:44.540]  So I had about 100 or 200 units in inventory.
[32:44.580 --> 32:49.800]  And I was offering, okay, if you don't want to solder it yourself, I'll modify my existing inventory.
[32:49.900 --> 32:52.500]  And for an extra like 10 bucks, I'll solder it and send it out to you.
[32:53.800 --> 32:58.780]  And that was actually so successful, I left the pre-orders open that I had enough units to go into production.
[33:00.980 --> 33:06.320]  But the problem was I still couldn't get the chips.
[33:06.480 --> 33:11.040]  But the Arduino, the actual Arduino company, they saved the day.
[33:11.220 --> 33:18.380]  I actually hit them up on Twitter and I said, hey, I got like 1500 orders and I can't find any chips.
[33:18.520 --> 33:20.500]  Do you got any 32 U's laying around?
[33:20.780 --> 33:25.240]  And actually David Cartelius, one of the founders of Artaboy, he emailed me and he says, hey, yeah, sure.
[33:25.320 --> 33:25.960]  How many you need?
[33:25.960 --> 33:31.600]  And so I have an invoice from Arduino SRL shipping chips they had in Italy to my manufacturer in China.
[33:31.800 --> 33:37.560]  So it was a really proud moment for me to be this company on which I based my product on for them to be helping me out.
[33:37.660 --> 33:42.460]  And I really think it's a great way of representing the open-source community in the way that we all help each other out.
[33:42.920 --> 33:47.240]  So I built that mod chip onto the board and we created the Artaboy FX.
[33:49.020 --> 33:50.860]  Yeah, so it's got... this is the Artaboy FX.
[33:50.980 --> 33:54.480]  You can see it's got the flash chip and it's got all the games built on.
[33:55.180 --> 33:56.660]  But this is also the Artaboy.
[33:56.780 --> 34:01.240]  As I mentioned before, Artaboy is open-source and you can buy the parts yourself and build the kits.
[34:01.480 --> 34:05.940]  And if you search Artaboy online, you're going to see thousands of examples have built these things like this.
[34:07.400 --> 34:09.720]  It was starting to be used in schools as well.
[34:09.840 --> 34:13.200]  People were building these kits and using them in education.
[34:13.200 --> 34:16.300]  Teachers would have as part of their curriculum.
[34:16.460 --> 34:22.680]  Actually, this is pictures from CS101 in the Central Florida University.
[34:23.420 --> 34:27.780]  And they have like a couple day workshop where they build the Artaboy, learn the games.
[34:28.960 --> 34:30.560]  And they're doing this all on their own.
[34:30.680 --> 34:37.180]  And I get contacted by teachers and says, Hey, can we buy, you know, so many Artaboys and put it on, you know, can you give us a discount?
[34:37.740 --> 34:41.480]  But because they're injection molded and I have a minimum order quantity, it's very difficult to do.
[34:41.720 --> 34:54.120]  So I was working on this device that was cheaper and easier to produce and designed so that I can maybe make one or 20 and that there's an ability because it doesn't have the case and it doesn't have some of the custom-made battery and things like that.
[34:55.220 --> 35:03.600]  So I added USB-C and at the same time PCBWay, our favorite friends, seems to be sponsoring everybody these days, contacted us about sponsorship.
[35:04.020 --> 35:06.540]  And so this part of the talk is sponsored by PCBWay.
[35:06.660 --> 35:13.660]  And they're a CM manufacturer and they just offer perfect timing for me because I was looking to manufacture something and they wanted to sponsor it.
[35:14.400 --> 35:17.800]  It made it possible to offer more than just the PCB.
[35:17.960 --> 35:20.920]  So they have more services that you can do 3D printing as well.
[35:21.200 --> 35:24.540]  The cases that I made for it were industrial SLA 3D printed.
[35:25.000 --> 35:27.860]  And then they spray varnish it so you actually get a really clear finish.
[35:28.080 --> 35:31.200]  And it's something that you can't even do necessarily at home.
[35:32.440 --> 35:35.120]  And one of the things that I like about them is they're easy to work with.
[35:35.200 --> 35:37.000]  The best thing is that they catch my errors.
[35:37.920 --> 35:40.840]  Sometimes you'll submit a design to a factory and then they'll just make it.
[35:41.080 --> 35:50.460]  And even if you've placed a component in the wrong spot or you have a short or trace, they'll just produce it because they know that you'll probably come back and order again because you still need it.
[35:50.460 --> 35:54.080]  But PCBWay, they always email me and say, hey, we found this component.
[35:54.240 --> 35:54.640]  We're not sure.
[35:54.780 --> 35:56.300]  It needs to be rotated with this or that.
[35:56.640 --> 35:59.040]  And that's been really critical in a lot of times.
[35:59.740 --> 36:02.600]  And by so far, they've also been the fastest that I've worked with.
[36:02.720 --> 36:07.280]  I've worked with about eight or nine different CMs in China, contract manufacturers.
[36:07.820 --> 36:11.760]  And by far, I'm sponsored by them.
[36:11.860 --> 36:14.980]  But this is true that they're actually the fastest out of everybody that I've used.
[36:15.520 --> 36:16.480]  And so we built this.
[36:16.560 --> 36:17.540]  It's the Artaboy Mini.
[36:17.540 --> 36:20.120]  It's a smaller, cheaper, easier to produce version.
[36:20.400 --> 36:22.920]  And this is the 3D printed case.
[36:23.580 --> 36:25.100]  It's 100% compatible.
[36:25.100 --> 36:26.740]  So all the games can come over to it.
[36:26.800 --> 36:28.360]  We added a couple of features to this one.
[36:28.460 --> 36:29.940]  So it's got an I2C port.
[36:30.060 --> 36:32.760]  It's an expansion port that carries a serial protocol.
[36:32.940 --> 36:36.920]  So you can connect different sensors or even do multiplayer over it.
[36:37.400 --> 36:41.080]  And it also allows you to have programming pads and things like this.
[36:41.360 --> 36:44.760]  This version was a little bit special because you can see on there we had some graffiti.
[36:44.760 --> 36:49.660]  And so I took the developers' names and made graffiti tags of him and put them on the silkscreen of the board.
[36:50.080 --> 36:51.620]  And that was also pretty successful.
[36:53.500 --> 36:58.200]  And then, most recently, we've done the Artaboy FX Special Edition.
[36:58.240 --> 36:59.560]  That's the one that I have here today.
[36:59.560 --> 37:00.900]  It's got a black PCB.
[37:02.040 --> 37:16.480]  And basically, what this was is as we made our way out of the chip shortage, and I realized that now with this new product, the Artaboy FX, it's reaching a whole new category of people as they're just interested in the games or the value proposition of a system that can play more than one game at a
[37:16.480 --> 37:20.400]  time, or the catalog of games that are available, or the maturity of the community.
[37:20.580 --> 37:23.460]  For many reasons, Artaboy, now is the best time to get in.
[37:23.460 --> 37:25.520]  To celebrate that, we work with developers.
[37:26.100 --> 37:30.640]  And I contacted them and said, hey, let's put your artwork on the front.
[37:30.640 --> 37:32.740]  Let's do a special edition sale.
[37:32.880 --> 37:37.140]  And so what we did was the first month that we sold these, people could choose which artwork they got.
[37:37.300 --> 37:40.480]  And we split the profits from the sales with the developers.
[37:40.760 --> 37:46.860]  And it maybe sounds like small potatoes, but we were able to share $7,000 back with these open-source developers.
[37:47.060 --> 37:50.960]  But what was cool is these people created these games and already released them for free.
[37:50.960 --> 37:53.640]  And so they had no motivation to get money out of this.
[37:53.740 --> 37:57.480]  It was like a year after they published the game, I kind of contacted and says, hey, remember that thing you do?
[37:57.620 --> 37:58.980]  Let's go ahead and take it to market.
[37:59.160 --> 38:00.080]  And that was great.
[38:00.140 --> 38:05.780]  But more than anything, I found is the people in the community were really just happy to have their work promoted.
[38:06.000 --> 38:16.380]  And the rest of this talk is to kind of dedicate it to the community because I like to say that I just glued a OLED to an Arduino and the rest of the work, everything has been built by the community.
[38:17.740 --> 38:18.100]  Yeah.
[38:19.520 --> 38:23.460]  So I'm going to shout out a bunch of developer names here because I feel it's only right.
[38:23.700 --> 38:24.820]  These are all screen names.
[38:25.000 --> 38:27.480]  So I don't really know how to pronounce some of them.
[38:27.740 --> 38:31.940]  But Parap is our moderator and coding support.
[38:31.940 --> 38:41.340]  If you ask a technical question, coding question on our forum, usually if he's awake, usually in a couple of hours, he's going to give you some code advice, whether you ask for it or not.
[38:41.440 --> 38:43.740]  And that's one of the things I've had to talk with him before, but that's cool.
[38:45.100 --> 38:49.780]  MLXXP, he's our moderator and library documentation manager and hardware design support.
[38:50.000 --> 38:51.860]  The library management is the big thing he does.
[38:51.960 --> 38:56.320]  He manages the Doxygen, if you know what that is, but that's the documentation for the library.
[38:57.980 --> 39:00.900]  Dreamer3, he was one of the original creators of the library.
[39:01.020 --> 39:07.560]  He got us away from using the Adafruit, you know, built-in libraries and started doing some of that original inline assembly work.
[39:08.300 --> 39:09.600]  Krait's one of our moderators.
[39:09.780 --> 39:11.880]  He's one of the more active game developers.
[39:11.940 --> 39:12.880]  He's a good friend of mine.
[39:13.720 --> 39:15.060]  Filmote, another game developer.
[39:15.320 --> 39:16.260]  He manages the cart.
[39:16.460 --> 39:19.600]  So, I mentioned that Adafruit has now all these games.
[39:19.900 --> 39:23.380]  You can load a collection of games, which we call a cart.
[39:23.600 --> 39:28.600]  And so you can customize your favorite games, load those into a cart, and then flash that to your device.
[39:28.820 --> 39:32.520]  And he's the one who kind of orchestrates and manages that all stuff.
[39:32.800 --> 39:36.420]  And so without him, you'd be stuck doing all that stuff on your own.
[39:37.180 --> 39:39.320]  Fmanga, he created an online emulator.
[39:39.700 --> 39:48.840]  It's been superseded at this point, but originally, about five or six years ago, he took the hardware and allowed you to build all your games online on the website.
[39:48.840 --> 39:52.900]  So, you can play all your favorite games of the Artaboy on the website.
[39:53.840 --> 39:56.740]  E-Read created a repository and an upload tool.
[39:57.040 --> 40:06.500]  So, before we had the collection of games, he would just kind of host individually the games and created an individual executable to just upload the games so you didn't have to install Arduino and all that.
[40:07.820 --> 40:13.680]  And then Brow is actually... he's only been part of our team for maybe a couple years, but he's had some of the most biggest impacts.
[40:13.780 --> 40:17.080]  So, he created a simulator, which I mentioned supersedes the emulator.
[40:17.500 --> 40:22.680]  And in addition to emulating the games, it actually gives you a full stack debugger.
[40:23.340 --> 40:29.940]  So, you can go in there and you can see your stack and you can do your debugging, and you can do step through and all that stuff.
[40:30.400 --> 40:33.320]  He's also created a bespoke scripting language.
[40:33.460 --> 40:40.180]  That was the one that I talked about earlier that allows you to access the external memory and run code from it.
[40:40.400 --> 40:42.680]  And then Hlupti has created a tool set.
[40:42.700 --> 40:51.960]  So, we have a set of Python tools that allow you to configure the hardware, and Hlupti created a nice user interface for it that's on both Mac and PC.
[40:52.680 --> 40:55.220]  And Ace Dent, he's one of the earliest members of the community.
[40:55.440 --> 41:03.840]  And he's kind of like this little helper slash thorn in my side, always pushing me to be a better person and finding ways for opportunity.
[41:03.960 --> 41:04.340]  But he's great.
[41:04.420 --> 41:06.760]  He helped me out on this presentation and stuff like that.
[41:06.840 --> 41:09.240]  Whenever I do a live stream or something, he's there to help out.
[41:09.740 --> 41:11.720]  So, we're coming to the conclusion here.
[41:11.840 --> 41:13.960]  And then after that, I can take any questions you might have.
[41:14.640 --> 41:16.040]  So, what made Artaboy successful?
[41:16.240 --> 41:24.620]  And if you guys... like this is the real theme or key of the talk, because it wasn't... it was going to be, you know, a flash in the pan, maybe better, like I said, than the job that I had.
[41:24.920 --> 41:28.880]  But now it's grown into something that's so much bigger than me, so much bigger than the name itself.
[41:29.500 --> 41:31.440]  And what... why... how did it get there?
[41:31.780 --> 41:34.900]  I've only just recently been able to piece this together and put it into words.
[41:34.940 --> 41:42.700]  And I think the first thing is, you may probably pick up this already, if you saw the pictures, if you've seen the Artaboy in person, is that when you see it, you already kind of know what it is.
[41:42.800 --> 41:43.540]  It speaks to you.
[41:43.640 --> 41:45.400]  The design itself is self-descriptive.
[41:45.400 --> 41:46.080]  You want to pick it up.
[41:46.140 --> 41:46.740]  You want to touch it.
[41:49.540 --> 41:49.620]  Right?
[41:50.680 --> 41:51.880]  Nobody has to pitch it to you.
[41:51.980 --> 41:53.560]  You can see it on the table and you can just grab it.
[41:54.500 --> 41:56.120]  This power to modify and create.
[41:56.260 --> 41:58.060]  This also should be obvious from the talk.
[41:58.160 --> 42:03.280]  You can see all the contributions from people and how it's actually grown my business, something that they've also done as a hobby.
[42:04.480 --> 42:10.500]  Empowering other people to add value to what you're doing, whether it's an organization or your hobby.
[42:11.060 --> 42:16.000]  To not put things... restrictions because you're worried about them stealing it or them building their own business.
[42:16.000 --> 42:24.680]  I think that if you can find a way to empower that and build a network that flows back into what you're doing, it's very powerful.
[42:25.620 --> 42:26.880]  And then a space for users.
[42:27.060 --> 42:28.560]  I mean, in my case, it was a forum.
[42:28.800 --> 42:37.540]  But at this point, I'm very interested on how these three concepts can be applied to maybe a new form of hardware or even just things in general.
[42:37.700 --> 42:44.820]  Like, is it possible to take like a business initiative or a nonprofit and apply these kinds of concepts to what you're doing?
[42:45.040 --> 42:49.340]  Because I think that these three fundamentals are what is powerful about Artiboy.
[42:49.480 --> 42:54.020]  The fact that it's video games, the fact that it's open-source hardware is just the path that I took.
[42:54.360 --> 42:55.860]  But I think anything...
[42:56.400 --> 42:58.300]  I believe... and this is the stage that I'm at right now.
[42:58.360 --> 43:04.540]  I've been doing this for 10 years and I'm actually looking at hopefully selling the company or taking majority investment at some point because I can't keep doing this anymore.
[43:04.540 --> 43:06.120]  The company has grown a lot.
[43:06.420 --> 43:15.380]  And I'm trying to figure out how I can take these three things and maybe a new form of hardware or just bigger concepts because Artiboy has escaped me.
[43:15.420 --> 43:16.620]  I can no longer contain it.
[43:17.520 --> 43:18.180]  But why?
[43:19.060 --> 43:20.180]  Why do I keep doing this?
[43:20.220 --> 43:23.400]  Like I mentioned for 10 years, I've repeated that a few times.
[43:23.440 --> 43:28.440]  Every time I go to a new computer that I have to update the dictionary because I get a little jagged red line.
[43:28.740 --> 43:30.840]  I spent about five seconds thinking about the name.
[43:30.960 --> 43:36.600]  I took Arduino and Game Boy and I put it together and I have to say that word all the dang time.
[43:37.580 --> 43:39.600]  But why do I keep doing this?
[43:40.540 --> 43:46.880]  Is that Artiboy teaches things through programming and open-source that traditional schools aren't teaching.
[43:47.000 --> 43:55.640]  Critical thinking, attention to detail, problem solving, creativity, setting goals, self-motivation, communication, collaboration.
[43:56.020 --> 44:11.680]  And these are the kinds of things that really, I feel, make you a better person that especially now with access to information and even through AI, you know, knowing what the answer is, is less important on what does the answer mean or what to do with the answer.
[44:11.840 --> 44:14.460]  How can we make the world a better place with what that answer is?
[44:15.260 --> 44:18.620]  You may be surprised to know that Artiboy as a company has never made any profit.
[44:19.400 --> 44:21.280]  It's grown, it's doubled almost every year.
[44:21.400 --> 44:25.520]  But every time I get any money, I put it back into buying more inventory and I'm almost always out of stock.
[44:26.080 --> 44:29.480]  It's been a roller coaster of just pumping and pumping and pumping.
[44:30.520 --> 44:33.620]  There's no reoccurring revenue streams or no monetization of content.
[44:34.180 --> 44:37.100]  And game consoles are famously lost leaders for the revenue of their games.
[44:37.220 --> 44:41.480]  So I kind of put myself into a little bit of a pigeonhole with how I designed the business plan.
[44:42.380 --> 44:43.420]  But money is important.
[44:43.560 --> 44:44.580]  It doesn't have to come first.
[44:45.300 --> 44:47.920]  There's a saying that says, be so good that they can't ignore you.
[44:48.940 --> 44:51.760]  I'm going to skip here a little bit because I got a five minute warning.
[44:53.320 --> 44:59.780]  So the final thoughts is that I've always looked at Artiboy as a performance art in the medium of a corporation.
[45:00.220 --> 45:03.960]  That the purpose of Artiboy is not to sell Artiboy's.
[45:04.260 --> 45:06.840]  It was established in that first investor phone call.
[45:07.380 --> 45:11.320]  That we're out here to change the world by teaching people how to program games.
[45:11.520 --> 45:20.180]  Because both me and our original investor and I found thousands of people around the world also believe that by learning how to make and code video games, you can actually make the world a better place.
[45:20.440 --> 45:22.600]  So ten years later, I'm happy to say that we did it.
[45:22.740 --> 45:24.400]  I just want to see what comes next.
[45:24.760 --> 45:25.880]  Thank you very much.
[45:32.040 --> 45:32.760]  Any questions?
[45:34.560 --> 45:35.820]  I'm not going into Nintendo.
[45:36.240 --> 45:38.260]  I ran into them actually.
[45:38.420 --> 45:41.240]  I emailed them when it first went viral and I says, hey, you want to work together?
[45:41.340 --> 45:42.120]  Want to buy my company?
[45:42.940 --> 45:51.980]  And I didn't hear back from them except for like three, four months later, I got an email from their lawyers saying, yeah, we can neither confirm nor deny your existence.
[45:52.280 --> 45:54.360]  But then they referred me to their licensees.
[45:54.540 --> 45:56.680]  I at one point went to Japan and I emailed them again.
[45:56.800 --> 45:57.700]  I'm like, hey, we're in town.
[45:57.840 --> 45:58.180]  We're in Kyoto.
[45:58.360 --> 45:58.940]  Can we come over?
[45:59.140 --> 46:00.480]  And they said, don't show up.
[46:00.620 --> 46:02.880]  We'll have security escort you off the premises.
[46:03.040 --> 46:03.840]  And I'm like, okay.
[46:03.960 --> 46:04.920]  I did meet Sega.
[46:05.140 --> 46:06.020]  They were very cool.
[46:06.140 --> 46:06.740]  They were very interesting.
[46:06.840 --> 46:07.560]  Went to their headquarters.
[46:07.800 --> 46:10.520]  And then after I gave my pitch to them, so I'm like, I knew it was a long shot.
[46:10.600 --> 46:13.000]  I'm like, hey, Sonic on Artaboy.
[46:13.160 --> 46:15.280]  And they're like, yeah, we're just fans.
[46:15.280 --> 46:18.920]  We just happen to work at Sega and you could just come here.
[46:19.120 --> 46:20.060]  But no, no, no, no, no.
[46:20.240 --> 46:21.240]  And so, yeah.
[46:21.580 --> 46:21.880]  Anyways.
[46:24.160 --> 46:28.160]  Oh, the question is, is when you're building a kit Artaboy, is there a way to turn down the volume?
[46:28.320 --> 46:30.760]  Now, even on the actual Artaboy, there's no volume controls.
[46:30.940 --> 46:31.840]  It's either on or off.
[46:31.960 --> 46:33.500]  And you can control that in the software.
[46:33.500 --> 46:37.960]  So if you want to do something with the sound, you've got to open up the source code and change it that way.
[46:38.320 --> 46:38.540]  Yeah.
[46:38.600 --> 46:39.160]  What is next?
[46:39.360 --> 46:41.720]  Well, like I mentioned, I am interested in selling the company.
[46:41.900 --> 46:43.700]  I'm interested in trying to...
[46:43.700 --> 46:45.220]  The resources that I have are limited.
[46:45.380 --> 46:49.600]  I'd like to join somebody else who has an existing line card of educational hardware equipment.
[46:49.840 --> 46:51.140]  And then they've got marketing.
[46:51.140 --> 46:52.160]  They've got advertising.
[46:52.420 --> 46:54.640]  And then I'm just coming up with the ideas.
[46:54.780 --> 46:57.340]  I'm the spokesman for it or something like that.
[46:57.540 --> 47:07.600]  A big dream, like for a pie in the sky, like Microsoft, if they wanted to buy me and then turn the hardware into like this GitHub co-pilot marketing tool or something like that, get it into schools.
[47:08.180 --> 47:09.220]  Something along those lines.
[47:09.460 --> 47:11.340]  But again, I'm interested to see...
[47:11.340 --> 47:12.960]  I have background in many different industries.
[47:13.120 --> 47:13.720]  I think turning...
[47:13.720 --> 47:25.280]  I could see this model being applied to like some kind of like an HR program, an internal HR program at some company to try to figure out how they make share and learn with just an idea or something like that.
[47:25.440 --> 47:27.620]  But if you know anybody, send me an email.
[47:29.640 --> 47:30.320]  Anybody else?
[47:31.340 --> 47:32.240]  Okay, one more question.
[47:32.360 --> 47:32.720]  Last question.
[47:35.240 --> 47:40.040]  Well, the question was, is what else can you do with it besides just play video games or what have people done with it?
[47:40.140 --> 47:42.560]  And the answer to that is really anything that you want.
[47:42.700 --> 47:46.540]  I mean, the kit that I built the other day, we added an infrared blaster to it.
[47:46.620 --> 47:47.720]  So it can be a TV be gone.
[47:47.900 --> 47:49.460]  It's our shout out to Mitch, right?
[47:50.540 --> 47:53.060]  And there's other people who put accelerometers in it.
[47:53.140 --> 47:55.140]  They've put rumble packs into it.
[47:56.260 --> 47:57.620]  We just enabled multiplayer.
[47:58.580 --> 48:05.480]  So because it's based on Arduino, that once you learn how to code a game, you actually have all the skills that you need to then go and do IoT deployment.
[48:05.680 --> 48:11.000]  But if you're interested in more, go to artaboy.com and definitely check out the community, community.artaboy.com.
[48:11.080 --> 48:14.720]  If you have any of those questions, me or some of the other members would be happy to help you.
[48:14.720 --> 48:16.980]  Thank you again for choosing to come to the Artaboy Talk.