There’s no better way to make my ears perk than to start a story with a tidbit like “I am at the end of a 25 year career in nuclear weapons design at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory”. This is how Kris Winer starts of his interview with Maker.io.
Our friends over at Digikey have been in contact with several Tindie sellers and are beginning to publish interviews. I think it’s wonderful that our community is getting this recognition: if you want people who are building unique and bleeding edge hardware Tindie is the place to look.
Kris’ story is indicative of a rising engineering culture. While engaged in a challenging and fulfilling career by day, he started to look at how easy it had become to build electronics as a one-man shop at night. His 8-year old is to blame. Dad and son first bought some kits, quickly working through them before submitting to the siren song of their own custom boards. Kris’ company, Pesky Products, was born and the rest is history. Here are few of his own words on where this has taken him. Don’t forget to follow the link at the top for the entire interview.
I still do everything by myself but I have learned to reach out to collaborators for my more ambitious projects that require more skill than I currently have. Pesky Products is still my core business and one I still greatly enjoy, but it has led to several consulting jobs for customized electronics for startup companies all over the US. In some ways, Pesky Products is the marketing arm of my rapidly growing electronic design business.
