Getting Down To Business...

By this point, I was starting to gain some momentum with my knowledge of electronics.  Though still a novice, I was quickly becoming the electronics expert in this area of West Virginia.  I was churning out cool electronics / robotics projects left and right.  Some of them include a homemade R2-D2 for my son, a set of animatronic eyes, a voice synthesizer circuit, a persistence of vision (POV) toy, and many others. 



Ethan's R2-D2 Project

 In the Spring of 2009, I dug out an old electronics book that my grandfather gave me when I was a teenager: "Getting Started In Electronics" by Forrest M. Mims, III.  For many years, Forrest Mims wrote several series of electronics books for Radio Shack.  He was also one of 4 men who started the company MITS, which created the worlds first desktop computer - the Altair 8800 (which Bill Gates and Paul Allen used to write their famous disk operating system, starting a little company called Microsoft).  ...Anyway, I decided to google Mims and see if he was even still alive.  I found a webpage that he still maintains to this day.  I dug deep into the webpage and found an e-mail address for him.  I shot off an e-mail, expecting never to hear back from him; but to my utter amazement, he wrote back a very nice e-mail just minutes later! :) So of course I wrote back and asked if he would autograph my first electronics book, which he wrote.  He was happy to oblige, and I mailed it to his home address in Texas.  He sent back the autographed book (with a nice, personal inscription inside), a glossy autographed photo, and a few books from his "Engineer's Notebook" series (which I own most of already).  Awesome!  ...Since then, I have written to the authors of some of my other favorite nerd books and asked for autographed photos to hang on my "wall of nerdom"; and they are always very happy to do so.

That's Forrest M. Mims, III top, center.

I believe it was also about this time that I was contacted by Kathy Gillman, Engineering & Technical Coordinator at the West Virginia Department of Education at the Capitol Complex in Charleston.  She told me that there was an upcoming conference at the Charleston Civic Center and asked if I could design some sort of electronics kit which could be passed out to the attendees.  I, of course, agreed to do it - my first paying customer!!!  I had 10 weeks to design, prototype, and manufacture 50 kits!  We (the members of the robotics club) tossed around ideas until we finally settled on making a handheld electronic game very similar to the old SIMON game - so much similar, in fact, that we called it the "Garfunkle".  My friend Bill actually designed the circuit and wrote the code for the PIC chip.  I designed the printed circuit board and had 50 of them professionally manufactured by Sunstone Circuits, a PCB manufacturing house in California.  I also had to order all of the electronic components necessary for 50 kits - bought mostly from eBay.  Packaging is important too, so I ordered cardboard boxes and ziplock baggies from Uline.  I printed off a bunch of labels with the Rainbow Robotics and West Virginia Robotics Club logos on them.  Aimee helped me fill all of the little baggies and boxes with the proper number of components, counting and recounting to make sure that none were missing anything.  And lastly, I had to write an instruction manual describing how to assemble the kit.  I wrote a nice manual with color pictures of every step, printed them so that 4 pages fit on a single 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper, cut all the pages, hole punched the pages, and used comb binding to keep the pages together.  It took me all night long to make 50 instruction manuals!  (The next time, I saved time and money by including a CD with PDF instruction manual and videos!)  I learned SO many valuable lessons about business during that short project!  ...I also lost money on that job.  Before we made any of the kits, Kathy offered $300 for 50 kits.  That's $6 per kit.  Frankly, I knew that I was going to lose money on the deal, but I didn't care.  This was an opportunity to get the business moving and start branding the company name, so I did it.  In the end, it end up costing $600 - all up front out of pocket.  Neil and I split the loss at $150 each. 

Backing up a little bit...  While I was working as a co-op student at Marathon Petroleum in '06/'07, I took some Summer classes at Marshall University.  Among them were a Technical Writing course and one called "Technology & Innovation" where we actually invented, prototyped, manufactured, and tried to market a product.  I was only auditing the T&I class and ended up dropping it mid-course because I just didn't have the extra time.  But in the Technical Writing course, I had to write a business plan, small business grant proposal, and design a webpage for my business.  Of course, I used Rainbow Robotics as my subject.  For the webpage, I needed some graphics; so I drew / painted some water color illustrations which were personified versions of electronic components (see picture below).

As part of my research for the Technical Writing class, I went around to several small businesses around Huntington and spoke with the owners about how they started their businesses.  I later went to the West Virginia Small Business Development Center at the Capitol Complex in Charleston and found out all I could about starting my business.  ...I still haven't applied for a West Virginia business license or Federal Employer Identification Number because I was afraid that I'd get hit with a lot of taxes or something (probably not if I don't make a certain amount of profit).  I need to quit procrastinating and just do it!

Sometime in 2009 a new electrical engineering professor at WVU Tech contacted me about wanting to buy some electronics kits! :) So I sold her a batch of 30 Garfunkel kits (with some left over from before and some from new stock) at $10 per kit.  I almost broke even with that sale!

Another electrical engineering professor at WVU Tech was working on a project designing hydrogen fuel cell charging circuits for electric cars for an automobile company in Chicago.  He called me up and asked if I would design the printed circuit board for his charging circuit.  He offered me $200, and I accepted.  He came back months later after redesigning the circuitry, wanting me to make a far more complicated PCB - and gave me a 1 week deadline!!!  I told him that it would be nearly impossible to design such a complicated PCB (printed circuit board) in my free time after work in just one week.  I told him that I would do it for $1,000 (the largest sum that I had ever charged for any design work).  He agreed, and I busted my hump to get it done in a week - which I did, of course (see picture below - notice the Rainbow Robotics logo on it and my name and e-mail address >> free advertising!).

Needless to say, I was pleased with my progress in 2009!  I was approached by three individuals seeking my services and expertise!  My company name was starting to get around ("branding"), and I was developing a reputation for fast, high quality electronic design work.  And I was finally able to set my own prices!

In addition to my entrepreneurial success, I began volunteering my time with educational programs in the Kanawha Valley.  For the last three years, I have been a coordinator / judge at the annual TSA (Technology Student Association) Conference at Cedar Lakes in Ripley, WV.  I volunteered to help with Charleston Catholic High School's FIRST Robotics Team.  I mentor the Eagle's Nest Robotic Club in Barboursville, WV.  And I served on the board of directors for another educational program in Charleston - the name escapes me right now.

Over the last two years, I have designed several electronics / robotics / animatronics kits.  For my voice synthesizer kit, I decided to up the ante and design a nice plastic enclosure to house the PCB; however, this added $7 to the material cost of the kit.  Unfortunately (and I knew this going into the initial design), I designed the kit around a $25 phoneme chip.  The material costs just to produce one kit is nearly $50, making it prohibitively expensive - not to mention packaging, distribution, overhead, etc.  And to really make a profit, the retail price needs to be about 4 or 5 times as much as the amount of money it costs to produce.  ...I did contact the manufacturer of the $25 chip and checked into doing a source code license (SCL) by which the software would be licensed to me, and I would be able to buy raw chips ($1 each) and program them myself - as many as I want for 2 years.  But I think he quoted me $2,000 for the SCL, and I just didn't have the capital to invest at the time.

Frankly, I haven't really made much progress at all in the last couple of years.  I have gained a tremendous amount of knowledge about many aspects of the product design, manufacturing, and business end; however, I haven't focused my energies toward a solid, marketable product yet.  I've spent all of my time bouncing from one fun project to another without putting much effort into turning out a product to sell.

It's time to get serious!  If I'm going to do this thing, I need to quit squandering away my time and just do it!  I am going to be to the robotics revolution what Bill Gates was to the computer revolution - just wait and see!!! :)