SparkFun Electronics

And that's when I designed my first board.

Who was the name? So SparkFun had their own PCB service a long time ago, and they kind of gave it up.

And that was like one of the, I used them a bunch of times before basically they said, hey, just use Oshpark.

And that was just kind of the opening.

I started buying every robot I could get my hands on from iRobot Roombas to Lynx Motion, you know, vector set kits for robots to Crustcrawler back in the day to Parallax Components.

This is all pre-SparkFun and Adafruit and Amazon days, right? When you could build a little hobby store, if you will, and hope to survive.

That was

the genesis of the company at that point.

You can't see resistance.

SparkFun calls them the three basic building blocks and points out that they're hard for exactly that reason.

So the kit gives you a lamp and a buzzer and a motor, and suddenly the invisible thing has a visible consequence.

What's the water analogy?

Yeah.

It's mostly, it's mostly SparkFun and the other one is Adafruit is the two places you can buy everything.

But I think it's chapter, like chapter one of the preface.

I go over like, here's all the stuff you're going to use across all the projects.

I didn't know this.

He says he got it from SparkFun, but the SparkFun one is in cooperation with Peter A. Janssen.

This is his own design that he made, like, 10 years ago, and again-

[laughs]

I have to...

I didn't realize that the magnetic imaging tile was his design.

Yeah, right? It's kind of cheating, you know? Like, I saw that and I'm like, "Where'd he get this awesome magnetic imager? Oh, SparkFun.

Oh, cool."