The Amp Hour Electronics Podcast
#194 - An Interview With Todd Bailey - Embedded Embrasure Engineering
Welcome, Todd Bailey of Narrat1ve!
- Todd grew up with electronics, his dad was an electrical engineer.
- He got his degree in English Literature from Oberlin.
- A final class there in electronics introduced him to Horowitz and Hill’s Art of Electronics.
- After school he got a job in a stereo repair shop and was building amps.
- He speaks fondly of finding the Jim Williams books. Reminded of the essay “The Importance of Fixing”
- When Todd left the repair shop he started designing synthesizers, sequences, switches.
- Then he moved onto the PIC microcontroller, taught himself assembly.
- He met Dima, now a professor, who offered an interview with a toy company.
- The company Big Monster Toys in Chicago. Made over 200 prototypes a year(!).
- The ones that made it to production were a power law distribution.Â
- His first design was to design a “Beast in a bag”. His mentor, “Big brain Todd” eventually told him a shortcut that helped illuminate how to get things done and move onto the next product (don’t listen when the motor is on).
- After moving on from the toy company, Todd had a wide range of clients: artists and toy customers.
- He started designing products to sell, including a synth kit and a binary display watch.
- Then he design “Where The Party At” (WTPA), a synthesizer meant to help people learn electronics.
- Todd also talked about the classic Casio SK1 and how it was featured at the Bent circuit bending festival.
- Version 2 is on the shelf and ready to get pushed to production, but he is interested in other problems right now, including consulting.
- One project he couldn’t talk about was a design for robot doors in marine environment.
- Todd talked about the experience about doing the engineering for art installations;Â personal investment in the work seems to be higher for art.
- Nam June Paik didn’t design the TV Synthesizer specifically, he designed the art around the technology.
- A more recent personal project has been the Vec9, built on a vector screen from an Asteroids cabinet. It’s unique because the Asteroids controller draws with vectors instead of rasters (like on VGA televisions).
- Andrew Reitano worked on the FPGA stuff, you can read more about it on his site Batsly Adams
- For the past few years you could find Todd at the Analog Aficionados dinner, thrown by Paul Rako. Chris hopes to be out there next year.
- Todd’s image of himself is as an engineer, if someone proved him otherwise, he’d be shaken.
- Other fun projects recently:
- A motor driven flying bed that allows extra space in his apartment.
- A video synthesizer that he showed off at Maker Faire NY
You can reach Todd online at his site Narrat1ve.com or on Twitter by tweeting @ToddBailey. Thanks to Todd for coming on to share his stories!