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Meet The Maker

REGULAR

lectronics kits are a staple of the

maker community – both for creators

and consumers. They’re the most

accessible route into creating custom

electronics and help us share our

creations without getting too bogged

down in manufacturing. HackSpace magazine

sat down with Jason Hotchkiss, the man behind

Sixty-Four Pixels, to find out what it’s like making

electronics kits for musicians. This is the wisdom he

had to relate...

GETTING STARTED

I used to do aimless tinkering with stuff just for

fun. I did a bit of MIDI, I did a lot of things with the

Novation Launchpad (a grid controller). I was putting

the videos up on YouTube and some of them were

getting quite a few views and people were asking

if I was selling the things I was making, and some

of them were... no! One of the things was a clock

made out of hard disk drives where the digits were

etched through (hsmag.cc/TJChgv). With careful

timing and everything, you could make it light up.

I wasn’t going to sell it because it took me about

a week to make, but some of the things like the

strum controller and the arpeggiator – which were

two of the first things I did – I thought ‘yeah, why

not?’. I had to go through some things, like how to

get PCBs made up in a factory. I was doing stuff on

stripboards or etching my own PCBs at home, so I’d

got into Eagle, which is a PCB layout program, but I

had to go through a bit of a learning process just to

get started to know how to get PCBs made. Even

just etching your own PCBs – when you first start

out and you think ‘what do I even Google?’ –

you start from nothing. I started going through

that process and making my own boards and

I had quite a lot of interest on YouTube and I

found out how to get boards made up. I got in

with Tindie very early on and I stuck with them

because they’ve always been good to work with.

Especially at the beginning, it was a nice fairly

close-knit thing. Emile Petrone, the guy who started

it, used to have Google Hangouts every week and us

Tindie sellers would all get together and have a chat

• it was a really small thing then. I guess now they
  have hundreds of sellers and thousands of products.
  Certainly at the beginning it was like a little club.
  Things have just gone from there. It’s been quite
  slow growth ... Having said that, a couple of the
  products, when I first put them out, sold quite
  quickly – it’s surprising how many they sold straight
  away and I was almost not ready for the volume.
  We’re talking like 50 or 100, which for me is still
  quite a lot.
  I started that way around – I didn’t start from the
  aspect of wanting to sell things, more I was just
  tinkering and I was just making my own projects for
  fun and sticking them on YouTube. It’s always good
  to have a bit of attention, isn’t it? – people giving
  you feedback. And people wanted to buy them and
  that’s where it started. I never really thought about
  it being a business, but now I’m trying to work my
  way out of the day job and do it full-time – because
  I enjoy it more than wanting to be a millionaire. As
  long as it can pay the mortgage, I’ll be happy.
  I started with electronics projects about five
  years before that, about 2008. I’m a computer

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Meet The Maker:

Jason Hotchkiss

Building your own music