Jeri Janet Ellsworth (born August 14, 1974) is an American entrepreneur, computer chip designer and inventor. She gained fame in 2004 for creating a complete Commodore 64 imitating system on a chip housed within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. She started another company, Tilt Five, to create AR hardware based on the same principles.

Ellsworth has publicly talked about various homebrew projects, such as how to manufacture semiconductor chips at home.

Early life

Ellsworth was born in Georgia Ellsworth was raised by her father, Jim, a car mechanic and Mobil service station owner.

In 1995, at the age of 21, Ellsworth tired of race track social atmosphere, Monmouth, and Albany, Oregon.

When profit margins shrank, she sold the chain in 2000 and moved to Walla Walla, Washington to attend Walla Walla College, studying circuit design. She left after a year because of a "cultural mismatch". Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon. Ellsworth then began designing digital circuits that mimicked the behavior of the C64. In 2002, she designed the chip used in the C-One as an enhanced C64 which could also imitate other home computers of the early 1980s, including the VIC-20 and ZX81. She and a fellow developer displayed the C-One at a technology conference, which led to Mammoth Toys, a Division of NSI International, NSI Products (HK) Limited hiring her to design the "computer in a chip" for the C64 Direct-to-TV C64-imitating joystick. She began the project in June 2004 and had the project ready to ship by that Christmas. It sold over a half-million units, in the US, Europe, and elsewhere. She did not receive payment, nor the commission she was owed, Ellsworth has worked on numerous subjects as diverse as homemade semiconductors (2009),

Ellsworth is a freelance ASIC and FPGA designer.

Augmented reality

In early 2012, Ellsworth and other hardware hackers were hired by Valve to work on gaming hardware. Along with several other Valve employees, Ellsworth was terminated the following year.

On May 18, 2013, Ellsworth announced that she had developed an augmented reality development system named castAR with fellow ex-Valve engineer Rick Johnson, with the blessing of Valve's Gabe Newell, and would be funding it via Kickstarter later in the year. Her start-up company, Technical Illusions, started developing castAR.

Ellsworth later revealed she had been secretly working to make castAR have "true VR and true AR" in addition to the previously announced projected AR capabilities. The castAR Kickstarter, launched on October 14, 2013, reached its goal of $400,000 in 56 hours and finished with $1.05 million, 263% of the original goal. The project didn't deliver the devices and paid back the funds to backers before shutting down the company in 2017.

In September 2019, Ellsworth initiated a Kickstarter for a new device based on the same principles of the castAR, called Tilt Five. This Kickstarter exceeded the previous one, hitting its initial target of $450,000 in 17 hours, and eventually gaining $1,767,301. Initially scheduled to deliver Kickstarter product by June 2020, the manufacturing was delayed by the Covid pandemic, but has continued to sign gaming contracts.

Public speaking and webcasts

Ellsworth was a keynote speaker at the Embedded Systems Conference on May 5, 2011. On May 30, 2009, Ellsworth demonstrated her Home Chip Lab at Maker Faire Bay Area 2009.

Personal life

Ellsworth is a pinball aficionado and owns over 80 pinball machines. with callsign AI6TK.

References

Bibliography

  • The Life Story of Jeri Ellsworth, American Entrepreneur & Inventor