Jeri Ellsworth

Jeri Ellsworth, 2008

Jeri Ellsworth (* 1974 in Yamhill , Oregon , USA ) is an American entrepreneur, computer chip designer and inventor. In 2004 she gained fame when she developed a complete Commodore 64 system on a chip within a joystick , the C64 Direct-to-TV . 30 video games from the early 1980s can be played on this “computer in a joystick”; Within one day, 70,000 copies were sold in the USA via the shopping channel QVC . Ellsworth lives in Palo Alto and is President of Technical Illusions.

Life

Ellsworth was born in Yamhill, Oregon and grew up in Dallas, Oregon with her father, a gas station owner. As a child, she persuaded her father to give her a Commodore 64 computer that her brother was supposed to get. She taught herself to program by studying the C64 manuals. During her high school days, she drove dirt track car races with her father and began developing and selling models of her own in her father's workshop. She dropped out of high school to pursue her own business.

In 1995, at the age of 21, she decided to leave the racing car business behind and started a computer business with a friend, which she left after a difference of opinion. Your now founded competing company "Computers Made Easy", a business for computer equipment, grew into a chain with four branches in different cities of Oregon. In 2000, she sold the chain and moved to Walla Walla, Washington to study circuit design at college. However, she dropped out of this course after a year.

In 2000, Ellsworth took part in a Commodore exhibition for the first time and presented its prototype of a video expansion for the C64. The CommodoreOne (C-One) and the C64 Direct-to-TV emerged from this project. She developed computer circuits that mimicked the functionality of the Commodore 64, her first computer. In 2002 she developed the chip that was used in the C-One as an imitation of the Commodore 64, but which also imitated other home computers of the early 80s such as the Commodore VIC-20 and the Sinclair ZX81 . After Ellsworth and her co-developer presented the C-One at a tech conference, she was offered a position at Mammoth Toys. She was employed there to develop the " computer in a chip " for the joystick imitating the Commodore. She started the project in June 2004 - it was ready for sale by Christmas. More than half a million copies were sold in the US and Europe. In 2010 Lifehacker Magazine named her “ MacGyver ” of the day.

Ellsworth contributed significantly to the development of DIY - transistor prototypes and thick film -Fabrikaten electroluminescent displays from household chemicals at. On 3 December 2010 Ellsworth published the blueprint of a TSA - body scanner based on repurposed parts of satellite antennas. Ellsworth published various technical articles online on various topics such as self-made semiconductors (2009), self-made electroluminescent displays (2010) and electroluminescent phosphor components with commercially available components and transparent circuit boards without the use of expensive indium tin oxide coated glass. Ellsworth was the keynote speaker at the 2011 Embedded Systems Conference.

In spring 2012 Ellsworth was hired by Valve Corporation (along with other respected hardware hackers ) to work on a game hardware. Ellsworth and a few other employees were given notice again the following year. On May 18, 2013 Ellsworth announced that they have a with the retired also from the Valve Corporation engineer Rick Johnson augmented reality - development system called Castar have invented. Your startup, Technical Illusions , is developing castAR. Ellsworth later revealed that she had secretly worked on building a virtual reality dimension into the castAR system in addition to the augmented reality dimension . The castAR Kickstarter project, which started in October 2013, reached its goal of collecting 400,000 US dollars for the project within 56 hours and ended with 1.05 million US dollars at the end of its term.

presentations

Demo Coding with FPGAs: We Don't Need No Stinking CPUs . In: Notacon 5 . April 4, 2008. Retrieved September 2, 2014.

literature

Steven Osborn: Jeri Ellsworth: Founder. Technical illusions. In: Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time . apress , Berkeley 2013, ISBN 978-1-4302-5993-0 , pp. 195-220 , doi : 10.1007 / 978-1-4302-5993-0_15 .