Jeri Ellsworth Wiki, Biography, Age, Spouse, Height, Net Worth, Fast Facts

Ellsworth was hired by Valve Corporation to develop augmented reality hardware, but was terminated in 2013. She co-founded CastAR to continue the work—with permission—but the company shut down on June 26, 2017 without completing development. 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 and grew up in the towns of Dallas, Oregon and Yamhill, Oregon. Her mother died when she was one. Ellsworth was raised by her father, Jim, a car mechanic and Mobil service station owner.

When she was eight years old, she disassembled her toys to learn how they worked. In response her father stopped buying toys, put an empty box at his work saying “bring your broken electronic gizmos”, and every few weeks, gave them to her. She started making simple modifications to them. She persuaded her father to let her use a Commodore 64 computer which had been purchased for her brother. She taught herself to program by reading the manual. She earned spending money working for her father, pumping gas, cleaning wrenches, replacing oil filters, and other “mechanical things”.

In high school, she drove dirt-track race cars with her father and began designing new models in his workshop, eventually selling custom race cars. She dropped out of high school to continue the business.

Computer stores

In 1995, at the age of 21, Ellsworth tired of race track social atmosphere, so she and a friend started a business assembling and selling computers based around the Intel 486 microprocessor. When she and her partner had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition. This became a chain of four stores, “Computers Made Easy”, selling consumer electronics services and equipment in the Willamette Valley towns of Canby, Oregon, Monmouth, Oregon, 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.

Hardware design

In 2000, Ellsworth unveiled a prototype video expansion for the C64 at a Commodore Exposition. Ellsworth then began designing digital circuits that mimicked the behavior of the Commodore 64. In 2002, she designed the chip used in the C-One as an enhanced Commodore 64 which could also emulate other home computers of the early 1980s, including the VIC-20 and Sinclair 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-emulating 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 didn’t receive payment, nor the commission she was owed, but a story in the New York Times brought her to the public eye.

On December 3, 2010 Ellsworth released information on how to build a TSA “naked” scanner using repurposed satellite antenna parts. Ellsworth has worked on numerous subjects as diverse as homemade semiconductors (2009), homemade electroluminescent (EL) displays (2010), EL phosphor manufacture from common ingredients and ways to make transparent EL backplanes and phosphor without using expensive indium-tin-oxide coated glass and hard-to-obtain chemicals.

Ellsworth was named “MacGyver of the Day” on February 25, 2010 by Lifehacker. Ellsworth is a freelance ASIC and FPGA designer.

Public speaking and webcasts

Ellsworth was a keynote speaker at the Embedded Systems Conference on May 5, 2011.

From December 2008 until March 2009, Ellsworth hosted a weekly webcast, Fatman and Circuit Girl, together with musician George Sanger. 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. In 2016, she became a licensed amateur radio operator, holding an Extra Class license with callsign AI6TK.