Jeff Murchison describes himself as a “one man maker, tinkerer, and experimenter”. His most recent product is the TinyLoadr Shield, which allows you to program microcontrollers using Arduino. He shares his projects and experiences on his own blog, where you can also find tutorials and open source code.
What first got you excited about electronics? Do you remember your first project? When I was younger my dad had a large workshop that had drawers and drawers full of electronic components. While I never really learned more than how to make an LED turn on, I always thought electronics in general were interesting. As for my first real project, that was my automatic foosball scoreboard which came to fruition a couple of years ago when I finally decided to start learning about electronics.
How did you decide to start selling the products you’d built? The first PCB that I designed was for an Arduino shield that I made for programming ATtiny and ATmega microcontrollers. I used a Chinese PCB fab where the minimum order was 10 PCBs. When I had assembled my own I still had 9 PCBs left over that were just going to go in a drawer. Tindie had launched shortly before that so I decided to take a stab at trying to sell the remaining boards. I bought a bunch of extra components, listed them for sale, and people bought them!
Why Tindie and not somewhere else? To be honest I never even really considered selling them other places. Tindie had launched itself as a marketplace for makers and that seemed like the perfect fit to me.
Any new products on the horizon? I’m actually just waiting on some new PCBs for a personal home automation project of mine, which may make their way onto Tindie in the future.
