Kevin Bates - The Arduboy Story

uh I want to thank you all for being here this is my first time in Knoxville this is first time at a bsides event it's first time at a security conference um what I'm talking about today has little to do with security has a lot to do with open source and has an immense amount to do with creating a community and passion so um without any further Ado I'm going to go ahead and get started but I do have a few questions so first off how many of you got the aroy as part of their badge thank you very much that's awesome uh how many of you knew about aroy before coming here okay some of you any of you own an Arta boy

of your own before okay so nobody all right I just wanted to figure that out so I could tailor the talk a little

bit okay so what is the aroy it's a 8-bit gaming system it's credit card size it's like I mentioned it's open source and it's based on Arduino so if you know what Arduino is you're ready to get started if you don't we have tutorials on our website I'll launch 10 years ago on Kickstarter I sold over 20,000 units and there's over 400 games that have been made by members of the community they're all free and they're all open source a community is a forum that has over 10,000 daily visits and over 40 daily engaged users from all over the planet uh this is a screenshot of uh just one month of visitors uh to our

website and so you can see that it's in virtually every sing single planet or every single country on the planet we're still trying to teach people in Mongolia how to code but we're not there yet uh this is also an aroy uh because aroy is open source not only the software but the hardware itself you can buy all the pieces and put it together yourself this is actually from a post that came out shortly after I launched the community and one of the members of the community gave instructions to uh the people how to make their own so they didn't even have to buy the arti boid to take part um as I it's in Arduino we

actually have a rust wrapper as well um I'm not a software guy so I can't really elaborate on that uh there's also bespoke uh scripting language some somebody in member of the community had created a scripting language so you can actually uh get started right away it's got a lot of shortcuts for um creating Sprites and you know making sound and things like that um and then there's a fully optimized uh Community developed library that has been optimized cycle counted inline assembly um and then like I mentioned if you're a beginner there's tutorials to just get started so what does an art boy game look like you don't have to be a C++ programmer to see most of some of

the things that I've got here but you got functions for initializing the hardware for clearing the screen we got some basic math just to set it in the middle of the screen and printing some text hello world and you get this with a little bit more math we'll bring in the math library and we'll say when the a button is pressed we'll do some senoidal motion and you get this and then pretty soon you'll be able to do uh full immersive dungeon with Sprites and characters inventory uh we actually have a four uh four color grayscale and software this is a game called uh dark and under from one of our uh developers called garage Collective

and it's one of the newest ones that's available so we all know that magic happens by thinking outside the box and making games for PC or console or traditionally very difficult requires millions of dollars a huge team to be able to maximize the use of the hardware uh aroy shrinks that box and makes it easy for anybody to do something new and creative who am I I'm Kevin Bates uh I went to Oregon State and I studied engineering and business management uh after college I was a turbo kit salesman so I sold parts for race cars uh you can think like Fast and Furious anything to make your car faster or look cooler that's that's what I was

doing and and I really love that uh my second uh career was in the wind industry so I was a wind turbine technician and I would travel climb uh travel around the country and climb 150 ft up in the air to diagnose the problems uh fix the gearbox or reprogram the controller and what was fascinating to me was that these multi-million dollar machines I I figured would be controlled by these supercomputers or at least something on analog to like a PC but actually in most cases they're controlled by tiny 8bit microcontrollers and this fascinated me and this was around the same time that Arduino became popular and I started to ask myself is can I do this how does anybody like move

motors with with with electricity how do you type something into a computer and have it represented in the real world and that's what Arduino is is great at and what it boils down to is basically a standard C library that is uh can be ported to a whole collection of microcontrollers so you can think of it like a standard CIB but targeted uh to many different uh end targets so it's got an integrated development environment so that's nice because you can write the code you can compile the code and you can upload it to the microcontroller just with one button they manufacture their own boards that they sell and support but what's great about it is that anybody can be

arbino compatible so you can use their software with your own product and that's what I've done why Arduino because it's easy it's a single install you can plug it in via USB there's a massive Community with millions of users all around the world and there's tons of Li liaries and examples anytime you buy one of these little modules or kits from uh online retailer they almost always have uh examples for you in Arduino so these are a few things that I built was a blinking LED a bunch of blinking LEDs uh this was like a little tiny game system that had uh the Blackberry track ball and then over here was a little digital Christmas card that I made and

you can start to see the evolution and where we might be headed um every time I created a little uh project in Arduino I had to carry it around in a tupperware box or had to show people YouTube videos so I wanted to create something that I could hand people and say well this is what I do is a digital business card um back in this was 10 years ago 2014 it was in the news was are are business cards still a thing do people need business cards in the in the land of QR codes it was just kind of in the news cycle and others have created digital business cards before I wasn't the first one but I

wanted to put my own spin on it and like I mentioned I wanted to hand it to people and tell people this is what I do originally it was just be Simon says uh have four buttons um but I had that OLED controller that you saw and I I found out that it was possible to power it by a coin sell battery and for this original prototype my goals were just to get on hack a day and adaf fruit and that's really it and if you know what that is that's kind of that's actually quite a quite a good you know place to be for like the hacker Community um I I thought i' meet a few

people on the internet make a couple games together um maybe get a cool job um but instead the thing went viral in a way that things don't really do anymore uh it was covered by virtually every uh single news media Outlet on the planet it was in broadcast media uh BBC News ran stories about it I had friends I hadn't heard from in five years calling me up and saying dude you won the internet so uh um it was in all over the world as I mentioned before this was 24 hours in it had already generated 10,000 results on Google uh it was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me I I couldn't

believe it I had 10,000 emails in my inbox over the next two weeks but cats do stupid on the internet all the time and they're way more popular so what does this even really mean I didn't I didn't want to do it I didn't want to do anything with it I figured this was my 15 minutes and that I should enjoy it and then move on but this point here at the end was brought to me by my father and he said people can find aroy the same way that you found Arduino and they can learn and code and enrich their lives in the same way that you have and they don't have to build know anything about

Arduino and one of the first emails I got was uh an offer for investment um somebody says hey you got something cool here how about some money okay that's pretty strange um we shared a vision we had a phone call we had a shared vision of of what it meant that it wasn't just a video game system that the point of artab boy was to get it into people's hands and intrinsically you look at it and you know what it is but then you can expand upon it that um art boy is a game system the size of a credit card but realistically it's a game system the size of your imagination at this point the company

was a little more than that video and then and then this laptop that's that's all it was and he invested $50,000 into the company uh I took it to maker fair if you guys have ever been to a maker Fair it's a very eclectic place for people that do stuff like I do um you can think of like burning man type exhibits and things like that people are able to have booths and and show it off so I I I went down there and uh basically I I had a little booth and people were shoving $100 bills in my face and it really blew me away and I thought okay maybe there's a chance that there's something

here so I took some advice in the beginning and after finishing maker fair I called my lawyer and I said can I do this can I like am I going to get in trouble during my lunch breaks or my is my is my day job going to end up owning this because I'm like working on this on the side but he told me this and he says that actually the the important thing that he's seen is that entrepreneurs will often wait too long wait for the per perfect moment but the truth is is there's no better time than the present and this this if you take almost nothing else away from this speech this has guided me through life and through

my company more than anything else and I was very very fortunate to have this advice in the very beginning that advice is neither good or bad it's your job to decide um you're going to have a lot of if you run a company or if you really do anything um that puts yourself out there you're going to have a number of people who tell you their way of doing it or a better way of doing it but if you don't have hold on to your vision then you can be led astray it's your job to decide what is right for your vision for your company so so I took that investment I hired a mechanical engineering we

started working in CAD uh he had over 20 years of experience in the medical electronic industry and between us we spent over 100 hours alone just designing the buttons uh started doing some industrial 3D printing and was developing the circuit board into something that could be manufactured and at this point I had something that I knew I wanted to produce but I didn't know how so I had gone to an event uh called oscon in Portland Oregon which is a open source convention by the same people the O'Reilly the same people that have little animals on their software books um and I had the Prototype but I just didn't know where to start I needed a

printer effectively like a copy machine for this thing that I'd built so he invited he he int he introduced me to his investors and I said hey uh I got this prototype how about some money so I can hire people to make it he says well have you heard of this thing called hacks and hack is a hardware uh accelerator incubator that gives investment to companies in the early stages in order to bring them to Market um what I knew about hacks was like I just mentioned they were offering that investment and that other companies that I knew uh Zach from from part the particle they were spark at the time they make the iot uh chipsets and um and

I know that and then I applied I uh filmed a 5-minute video and had two Skype calls but what I didn't know about hacks was the entire program takes place in Shenzhen China over four months so I applied in October I interviewed in November I was accept in December and I bought a one-way ticket to to China in January um I I cut out so much of my talk about what China is for time um there's really no way to I could talk for three hours about my experiences there alone the shortest way of explaining it that was somebody else told me that I think is really interesting is this first one and it says it's terribly awesome or awesomely

terrible depending on kind of how you look at it and the second part is uh wo i Zango Zango I wo which means I love China and China loves me and um people that live there they like clap when they when you hear they say that so it's great but really I should have seen it coming my first investor he told me you're going to have to go to China I didn't believe him I says cuz you can you know you can email people and you don't actually have to get on an airplane but anyways I was wrong uh this is my view out from I had an apartment in China for four months and this was a

view outside of my door the hacks program it was a six we incubator accelerator uh each week had a milestone so you had to get a little bit further with your prototype a little bit further with your business plan and they had um people there to help you with that so they had a uh obviously they gave you the investment which was critical um Visa Support Office Space uh translator so you can hit the ground running when you get into China and then the main thing that I was interested in was the access to mentors so you may already know this guy uh he is who I consider to be my hero uh he's famous for having hacked the

original Xbox and getting in trouble with the federal government for that uh he's gone on to design the chumby which was a smart speaker before that was an even thing um the Novena which is an open source laptop and the precursor which is an open source cell phone that has a complete trust profile all the way from the transistor to the user level he's shared almost everything that he's ever learned there's nothing that you could learn from me that I didn't learn from him um he's got a great blog and if any of this resonates with you uh I definitely would recommend checking out he's got books he's got blogs he's got speak speeches so uh this guy's my

hero um when I was in China the first thing to do was with that prototype was to create a developer kit and the reason for this was to get it out there get it into people's hands so that they can start developing the library get feedback on the hardware and like I mentioned just get it out there so that people can can share it I had a friend of mine Phil in the beginning and he said uh I was thinking a lot about the videos and the ways I was promoting it and he says you need to get it out into other people's hands because they're going to promote it for you and this was

10 years ago of the concept of social media influ was was still in its infancy so I was able to take advantage of that organically I sold 100 pieces of these things which was pretty cool but it was actually out of a waiting list from 100,000 people so that was a 0.1% conversion rate and actually for things like that that's not unusual anywhere from single digit to fractions of a percent as far as collecting cold emails uh and that's why you see a lot of places will actually ask for a deposit now these days is because once you have a little bit in you know in in for a pound in for a penny in for a

pound I started testing with lithium ion because I had been on the coin sale for a while this is a big unknown for me because I I was you know I heard you know lithium ion like catch on fire and things like that and that's the last thing I wanted was people buy these but it was actually a chance discovery that I found this this thin film battery which you can see on the bottom and that's similar to what we have in our final prototype and I purchased one for $25 a of a sample quantity and I actually went to Market without actually knowing what the full price was so it was a little bit risky I hired an uh

industrial designer he came up with these renders and this was about the time where I started to think this could be a real thing and really started to get excited about it because this is what I was making and I wasn't super confident that it was going to turn into anything that anybody would actually want to buy but it worked it worked great I started getting samples from the CNC Machinery so we got it out of different colors and different kinds of metal and then this was the basically the progression so one year from the original prototype to being able to have something that was ready to go to production uh it ended up being 6 mm

thick from the original 1.8 mm and then we launched on Kickstarter so this was a little over a year after it originally had gone viral and as you can see it was wildly successful uh afterwards I went on a world tour for different events uh this was at oscon uh maker Fair Bay Area New York Rome actually went to Shenzhen China Tokyo Belgium Berlin any I was going all around the world promoting it but I had 10,000 people who were waiting to get it this is a plug for OSH Park if you guys don't know these already these are actually the my hometown of Portland Oregon as well um they make p purple pcbs and the original prototype was

manufactured through them and uh I was testing out this silk screen it's kind of like hidden uh Easter egg on the back of the circuit board and they wrote this little nice letter to me so it was really cool to have people uh you know sharing the journey with me uh I was in the markets in China and I just happened to see these you've probably seen stuff like this before and I just casually asked a market vendor says how much would it you how much would it cost if I got some of that and then in a volume it turns out it was only a few cents each but this turned out to be cheaper than one of my single

buttons so just by casually asking some lady in the market I was able to save 600% on the cost of my buttons uh injection molding uh this was I was at the factory testing out uh the different this is when they're um figuring out the settings for the machine how much plastic to add how much uh what temperature to set um anytime you do another round of production they have to go through this all over again because invariably the guy who knew how to do this no longer works there anymore um we have insert nuts um inside the injected mold of plastic and that's to be enable you to unscrew and rescrew it back together and not damage the

plastic CU I I wanted people to be able to open it and not have to worry about it but I came to find out that some poor unfortunate soul has to put each and every one of these things in by hand so when we made 10,000 these units this guy had to sit there 4,000 or 40,000 times and I asked well can we do that with a robot I said sure but she got to order a million of them so wasn't happening I took all these these Rejects and I just shoved them in my backpack and made the first production samples and this was out of the first uh the final tooling of from the factory

and this was a year and a half after it originally went viral and 6 months after going to China uh we went through production scaling so we had one so we needed to hit 10,000 I think originally we built one well we built like five and then a thousand and then 10,000 and that's what 10,000 AR boys look like uh this is Selene bender she worked as my production manager and she grew up in Singapore and spoke fluent Mandarin and she was indispensable to our company because I met her when I was in the hacks program and I stole her away from another another startup CU she was way too awesome and the truth is is

there would be no art boy without Selene because in the beginning she was the one who was interfacing with the factories she was the one doing all the projects project scheduling uh she kep me uh she allowed me to be able to do the things that I needed to do to run the business and uh so big shout out to Seline uh this is in the factory this is the assembly line um you know just checking out the quality making sure everything's looking good I even caught the factory worker just you know goofing off playing a little bit of games on the time and uh this is me in a anti-static SMU some people think the pink is for

safety other people's know it's for style um we're working on packaging ideas uh seline's family worked in the printing industry so she knew all about how to do all this stuff so she kind of dragged my arm around the the the printing printing Villages and we went into different different places and asked them for samples uh this is a picture just outside my factory so this is actually my factory here on the left and then on the right just growing rice and these kind of dichotomies existed everywhere in China and I guess the biggest thing to note about that is as a Westerner somebody comes from a developed Nation you might look at this and think this is

quite strange but the way that it was explained to me by somebody who lived there was that we already went through this and we called it you know the wild west right U many other countries had periods in their history where they were able to a vast expansion and where anything goes mentality they just happen to be doing it at a time where their cell phones so we had inventory so we finally could have a real booth and we were selling and it went really good we sold out in the first day and got to enjoy the rest of the maker Fair all by ourselves we went to Target they had this cool little uh like a demo may we

could be in a little popup in the store and get feedback from customers and evaluate their interest and Target was ready to buy 100,000 units and I go wow here we go um but retail is actually very very scary and so this is a very rough retail math for you um if you don't know uh if you sell to retailer a distributor if it gets stolen or is uh returned that's your loss so anything that they fall off the shelf they'll come back and they'll bill you for um this is specific to large retailers and it's something that they were doing new at the time again this was 10 years ago but if they buy 100,000

units and then they don't sell uh other other distributors or retailers will liquidate and they'll sell it they'll take the hit but um larger retails like Target you have to buy it back in the contract that you have to buy it back um if you want to put a display case in all the Target stores in the United States they have 1,00 stores uh the display case you know because it's a new product you got to have like a you know a little video you know explaining what it is and kind of have a display and the industry rates for that's about a th000 bucks so you have $1.8 million that you're never getting back just by

doing this deal so the short version of the math is that anything more than 7% would have bankrupt the company as far as returns now if you have a good product in an established Market people know what they're getting four to 5% is about average like the iPhone gets returns of about two to three four 5% so I was expecting probably something like 17 to 20% would be realistic people would buy this and realize it's not a Game Boy and then want their money back so I had to pass so we went back to our existing Network so what we did is we had a developer who was creating a full featured RPG that had items and a map

and all this other stuff and so we wanted to celebrate that and what we did is we went back to Kickstarter and we created a a special edition of the hardware and we launched that and that was also very successful um seated the expectations uh As Time passed the community U got even more participating in the story of aroy a member of the community created something that was a add-on so he added external flash memory and it uses a custom bootloader to access the games on the external memory so by default this get a little nerdy here but by default the Arduino bootloader allows you to load code onto the microcontroller via USB but you can

only store one game at a time uh there is a application space of 4 kilobytes that you can write that bootloader in and this was what you basically get in order to get your Arduino compatibility as that's what's interfacing with the software now Mr Blinky uh he he wrote this entirely an assembly and so in the same space that Arduino was able to uh load one game he's got you're able to navigate all the games that are in the external memory it can Flash itself and it enables you to store um 300 or 400 games which is which is if You' got one of those badges you have over 300 games that are all on there and it's from a

member of the community I never paid this guy I never asked him to do this I showed up one day and it was it was just there so what we did is I turned it into a mod ship so if you had one of the uh one of The Originals you'd be able to buy this printed circuit board this flexible circuit board and actually this is also from Ash Park uh around the same time they were releasing their flexible circuit uh service so that allowed us to do this and so for like I think it was at the time was like 15 or 20 bucks you could just upgrade it and you'd have access to

all the games I made it a little bit different shaped and we added an external microcontroller to do the bootloading and I programmed them all myself and because that was so successful we had uh during the chip shortage uh actually declared art boy is dead so I went on the community one day and I says I I got to we got to stop guys because I can't get the chips anymore I just tried to order them and they told me it was going to be three years so I'm going to go get a job um I was working through my existing inventory with these mod chips and I was selling them as pre-modded so I would go

ahead and unscrew it and i' solder it together myself and then I'd ship it back out but these were so successful I was able to restart production again and this time it was the coolest part of the story was that Arduino who I had actually based my platform on their company actually I I contacted them hey hey remember me and they sold me uh a thousand of the micro chips that went into the production so they were actually instrumental in in Saving aroy and getting us through the chip shortage and we created the aroy FX we uh did not do a Kickstarter for this one as I mentioned because the pre-order sales were so successful but

that includes all the games on board and it's a great way to celebrate all the contributions that the community had so we got more examples of home build arti boys this was getting really popular because as I mentioned during the chip shortage it was impossible for me to produce these so people just started making them themselves because you could get the modules still on Amazon or Ebay or whatever and it was really taking off and so I really uh focused on this and I created a homemade section of the community and so people could post theirs and this really became a new life for aroy in a way around the same time I started to become aware that teachers

were buying aroy or even building the kits themselves um creating the curriculums themselves and incorporating it into a computer science actually the University of Central Florida has a two-day Bill drone art boy as part of their uh CS 101 class and that's just a just one example of thousands hundreds of of teachers around the world using this but I wanted to get involved and I wanted to make my own homemade version of the art boy so I just created what I called the aroy mini it was just for fun I just hey you know let's let's let's flexx let's Flex a little bit you know let's try something new um but I like I said I I couldn't

actually produce it this was actually before the the Prototype but three years later uh somebody in the community just posted on the on the form he's like hey could you add USB to this and it kind of like brought it to the top and I was I started thinking about it and then at the same time PCB way emailed me out of the blue and was like hey would you like a sponsorship and I go oh yeah okay and that made it possible because uh what they did was uh work with me very closely to not only offer the printed circuit board but in different colors um they did the 3D printing in the case if

you come see me at the booth you can check that out and they're easy to work with uh they provide great feedback and what I like most about them they catch my mistakes I always get an email saying hey I think this is supposed to be rotated and I'm like you're right it always saves me money saves me time and they're great quality and actually out of everybody that I've worked out of China and and and different houses and stuff like that they've always been the fastest so uh this this section is sponsored by PCB way so I just wanted to let you know a little bit about their services and this is what the art boy

mini looks like uh we did do this one on Kickstarter as well and to celebrate the developers uh on the back side we used the silk screen of the circuit board to do little um graffiti for all the developers names on the back there so that was a great way to do a little little shout out this was also very successful and you may begin to see a pattern here it's about the community there's there's a certain group of people out out there who are very passionate about this platform and I see my mission is doing everything that I can do to support them be a kind of servant leader if you will this is the art boy FX Special

Edition and this is uh partially in due by you guys because uh the organizers of the event contacted me and said hey we'd like to offer this as a badge and I say that's great let's do it and that was actually what allowed me to start a new bad production cuz they ordered 200 units and then I knew I had about 500 that I could sell to my community and cash could fill the rest so I owe you guys are great thank you because when we I go jump back a little bit when we did this one and I have these on display at my booth we uh split the proceeds so I I contacted the developers some of our

biggest ones and I says hey let's make some box art and we split the profit of these units and so we made $7,000 for the open source developers through that campaign yeah I like say I just glued an OLED to an Arduino and the kind of the world went nuts so I'm going to do some some Community shout outs here and these are usernames so they get a little weird so parap he's a moderator in coding support if you go on the Forum and you say hey I got a question on C++ he'll come right away and he'll answer it for you ml xxxp he's a moderator code Library documentation manager so he runs a

doxygen and runs the library uh dreamer 3 he was uh in the very beginning he created some a lot of the library contributions uh crate he's a moderator game developer and one of my friends of the community uh filot he's another game developer uh he manages the cart which is like the collection of the games so he kind of is a curator for that and he's also a good friend of mine F manga there's an online emulator so you can actually go and play all these games online for free in the community uh he was the one who created the first one and then Eed he was the first one to create a repository and independent

upload tools so if you didn't want to use Arduino he's got a tool you can just upload it by one there's only two more people hold on or three uh brow 0167 as I mentioned before we have a a scripting language what that does is it runs a interpreter on the micro controller and the 32 kilobytes of application space and allows you to run the script from the external memory so you can have 16 megabytes of effective application space and you only take about a 20% performance hit to run that way and again just came out of nowhere just showed up one day in the community and wake up in the morning having my coffee and here's this huge value

ad and hupti uh created an aroy tool set it's crossplatform GUI so if you want to configure your Hardware it allows you to do all that and then Ace Dent he's one of the earliest community members helps in a small important ways and like this presentation so postmortem long live the aroy um int intrinsic versus extrinsic motivated that you you can't force somebody to be intrinsically motivated it's it's actually one of the most powerful uh things if somebody has with inside themselves a desire to do something that there's little that you can do to stop them but it's almost impossible to create this inside of them in fact it's very easy to destroy this because if somebody's intrinsically

motivated to do something and then you offer them money to do what they're already doing they'll start working for the money and then you stop paying them and they'll stop working I can't tell you how many times there's people in the community that have done this work and I've gone to them I say hey can I hire you can I bring you on board I'm like no this is just a hobby I'm good and I'm like I got this valuable stuff for me but I can't I can't get them to move but what I've come to find out is that by creating the community by creating the environment for them to become motivated themselves is the real

true value of art boy um I take a moment to talk about customer service just because I actually didn't have the slide in here but I spent like the past 3 days having to keep up with customer service as I'm trying to write this so I just wanted to say that it it's very difficult to do and and many times the people who create businesses from Hardware they may not have this soft skill and it's it's it's very important to have because that communication with the customers is effectively everything so I've got some business advice for you get a good accountant I mean it sounds simple but I'm on my seventh accountant now so if you're

going to start a new business try to make a partnership with an accountant you know be like hey I want to try to start a business and like find somebody you can have coffee with or something like that it may not be possible but if you can this is going to pay dividends um I feel like lawyers are completely useless I've had them other than that bit of advice he gave me in the beginning I've I've hired them to negotiate contracts but if you're working with a company who's larger than you you have no negotiation skills so you're just wasting money on redlining something um chat GPT now I just use chat GPT anytime I need a non-disclosure

agreement or a contract or something like that um I mean I have a little background in legal so I I have to proofread it and stuff like that but I've I've almost never run into a circumstance where it was absolutely critical for me to have a lawyer now your mileage may vary if you're doing something that's a little more serious than like a little video game system that may be different but uh I think that's a misconception as far as like how much you really need the lawyer at least that's been my experience um seems very obvious maintain your vision um there's going to be people who are going to try to convince you to go this way or

that way so you have to be confident where you're going uh failure is inevitable I've probably heard this maximum before in startups is you want to fail fail fast and fail small the fail fast gets a lot of attention the failing small doesn't get nearly enough as attention because that's the important thing if you're unsure about something just test it out you know find a smaller market and if you screw up then you learn something you don't bet the farm every time as I mentioned communication is key and don't hire friends and family I mean you also may have heard that one before but I can tell you from personal experience you will regret it um so this is hardware and production

advice um Quality cost and time you can choose two of those and uh that's why Aro is always late because I don't have any money and I'm not going to sacrifice sound quality cuz that's why people buy uh and I've had people wait up to a year and a half for these things and it blows my mind when they're like it was worth the wait and I'm like okay um as order as much inventory as you can again these all things like sound simple but I mean in the beginning I actually had more cash and I didn't buy as much inventory as I needed and I'm effectively 10 years later still like catching up from

that um being at the factory is for you and not for them so uh I thought I would go there and I would like crack the whip and you know make him do better and faster and all that stuff but realistically I was always doing getting in the way uh every time that I've done production and not been there it's gone faster but the lessons that I learned about how they do what they do help me Shaped my role so that before I submit things to them that's that's my time that's what I learned from my experience was that you have to make everything ready before and trust them to do their work because if you if you feel like

you're going to catch stuff at this stage it's it's too late something will always be wrong uh and almost always like I mentioned your job as the Creator is to put it in the specification anytime that I've had something in the specification and it's come out wrong the factory has owned it so that's why you want to make sure because if you don't specify and it's ambiguous then they're welcome to screw it up in a way that will potentially destroy your your uh your product um start small validate obsess over quality I like to go by by magnitudes of 10 so start you know build 10 units build 100 units thousand 10,000 uh try new things and ask

difficult questions push the boundaries just because somebody tells you you can't do that thing doesn't mean that it's true at all just means that they don't think so and this is specific to soldering uh flux is a resin that you can add to uh reduce the oxidization when you're doing a solder joint and I've been soldering now for 20 years and 10 of it is quite professionally every time I'm struggling with a solder joint I go and I I get some more flux and I add it on there poof it's like magic man so if you do any soldering and all get an extra tube of flux dude in China man they just like they paint it on the thing and then you

just it's like magic and it sounds silly but if if there's people out there that are nodding their head so I I know um so this is personal advice uh be open to change if you want to change the world let the world change you uh you might be wrong this is an important one um anytime you're about to do something it helps to stop and think maybe I'm completely 100% wrong you know am I am I if that's the case what what what could be the outcome now don't dwell on that because again you got to maintain your vision but it can it can stop you from from from making some some big mistakes uh this is related to what I

mentioned before but if somebody else can do something so can you there's no difference between you and them uh nothing is possible it just means that nobody else has yet found a way and be grateful so I say thank you a lot and if you're tired slow down don't stop so this is a conclusion I got a couple more slides for you what made Aro successful well I think this is this is really critical is a single object with a self- descripted design you look at the aroy and instantly you know what it is give users as much power to create and modify as you the Creator have it empowers them and provide a structured

space for users to communicate and share and I think that this could apply to not just the art boy but really anything and that's really kind of the direction that I'm heading is I I created aroy in the beginning because it it went viral and it was better than my day job but over the past 10 years I've discovered I've kind of accidentally discovered this uh thing that works people have said that aroy is not if not the best way to learn how for beginners to learn how to code and again these are all contributions from the community I I feel like I'm just representing the work that they've done but I'm very interested to see can

this can this kind of a success be repeated so why uh as I mentioned many times the being able to learn to code is uh very valuable it teaches you critical thinking attention to detail problem solving creativity setting goals self motivic and if you're doing it with other people communication and collaboration and these are the kinds of soft skills that our schools are not teaching and these are the skills that you need to be a successful human being I mean you need information of course but anybody can get information these are the things that you have to incorporate into your very being and it's kind of difficult to access and so that's why I've been very proud to find

that art boy has fulfilled this so I've never actually made any money uh despite it growing over 200% every year it's more like losing money very slowly like gliding uh like kind of crazy gliding um basically I order a bunch of pre-orders and uh get a bunch of money in and then I spend all that money on manufacturing I sit and I wait for six months and hope that my burn rate doesn't put me negative by the time I get that inventory in stock and then there's a period of about a couple months where I'm like making a bunch of sales but then I run out of inventory and the whole cycle repeats again it's

effectively a cash flow problem but it can affect any business because there's no reoccurring Revenue stream no monetization of content you're not going to find any other Hardware out there in this world that doesn't have some kind of a subscription fee or a sign up or you're buying the games I mean game systems are famously known for being lost leaders for their manufacturers and they recruit their cost over the sales of the games money is important but it doesn't have to come first if you do things right you don't have to prioritize it and but if you produce good work it'll still come so what is this open source economy why does anybody want to take part in if

it's so difficult to actually earn a living off of it's it's a it's a strange balance between capitalism and socialism so how do we fund the things that make the world better and bides is you know it's a nonprofit so this is kind of like same idea a a shift in the maker movement that when I was starting there was a big talk about 3D printers going to revolutionize at home manufacturing and we were going to usher in a whole new era of American Ingenuity and that kind of really fell through and it's in large part due to the problems that I faced in in scaling a company that you have companies like Adafruit pyron spark fun I think these

are great examples of what the open source Community uh the industry needs in order order to survive that art boy as a product is wildly successful the pro the product margins from that are great but since I'm only selling one kind of product that all of the overhead from the entire business has to be absorbed by that single product so all these Distributors they have thousands of line items that they're able to recoup their margins in order to to make their their salaries so final thoughts um social accounting the success of art boy can't be encountered in dollars the effects that it's had the way that it's changed the world for the better is incalculable I mean what does it cost to

make the world a better what make a better place what does that even mean I've always looked at aroy as a performance art in the medium of a corporation and that's what allowed me to succeed and and that's been my vision because if my vision was to make money was to you know see myself I would have quit a long time ago I got to tell you I turned 40 last year and I'm not making enough you know savings towards my retirement so it's coming times where I need to sell this company but in the past the sacrifices that I've made personally in order to see the world become a better place fits much more

under the scope of art than it does business and again that doesn't need to be your goal but I would argue that if you have something that you think can make the world better and you're not sure if you can earn a living off of it try it anyways um the purpose of art boy that it was established in that first investor phone call I'm happy to say 10 years later has been fulfilled and I'm just excited to see where can we go next thank you I'm Kevin Bates this talk has been sponsored by PCB [Applause] way okay um thanks Kevin that was great um since this is a security conference um let me pose this question to you

there is it seems like there's a central repository of games that people can download do you have any vetting process to make sure that no one is like uploading a game that can break the Arduino in subtle ways yeah that's a good point um effectively no uh other the ways the effective way we do have to do that is any way that in any other open source Community is that it's uh uh audited basically is that other members of the community when some posts a game are very interested to go through and dig through the code I think you'd be hard pressed it's it's it's reserved memory space so you'd have a hard time but related to security conference it's

uh it's USB 2 compatible so you can actually write uh USB rubber ducky through it and so you know that is possible um and and we have examples of that too so okay uh if anybody has any questions um come up so that we can get the question recorded on the mic um also I know that uh it is lunch time so yeah go get your lunch and uh Kevin you've got a booth yeah I got a booth yeah you guys go get lunch and then I have a booth so I'm going to be back over there so if you have any questions come see me um you go to Art boy.com and check out everything

you need there but thank you very much I really appreciate you guys' time okay thanks Kevin uh