#194 – An Interview With Todd Bailey – Embedded Embrasure Engineering

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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. 
• 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; 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).
  [tube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEkPHPiHuio[/tube]
• 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!