Prototyping Iconic Fictional Objects

Zachariah Peterson
|  Created: April 12, 2022  |  Updated: August 18, 2024
Prototyping Iconic Fictional Objects

The Hacksmith proves that everything is possible through science, one project at a time.

In this episode, Ian Hillier, the COO, and Co-founder of Hacksmith Industry, will share with us what it is like to create a fully working prototype of the coolest and most fascinating objects we see in the movies, comics, video games. He will also talk about how he transitioned from a full-time mechanical engineer to a full-time youtube content creator. Watch or listen through the end! You will hear everything, from the fun, failures, and the success of recreating futuristic, fictional objects.

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Show Highlights:

  • Ian talks about his mechanical engineering background and how he and his friend James Hobson founded Hacksmith Entertainment Ltd
    • James has been publishing his engineering projects on his blog and videos on Youtube for 16 years and decided to do it full-time in 2015 when he reached about 70k subscribers
    • Ian quit his job and joined James just six months before getting married
    • The duo focused on getting more views by posting viral videos, one of which was the Captain America Shield project
  • Hacksmith’s growing team
    • From 70k subscribers, they immediately grew to 100k in 2016 and now 12.4 million and still growing
    • Their team now consists of 24 full-time members, which includes mechatronics and electrical engineers, videographers, and the merchandise team
  • From creating simple, fun projects to upscale mind-blowing lasers, Hacksmith’s bread and butter are turning fictional objects in movies and games, portrayed through special effects, into a working prototype. Some of their coolest projects are:
  • Hacksmith's goal as an organization is to encourage future generations of engineers.
  • How does Hacksmith operate as a team?
    • Each project is assigned to a team, and they can bring additional resources as needed.
    • They create and customize everything in-house; their shop is equipped with all the machines and toys they need
  • Ian talks about their most extreme and powerful project, the Hoverboard
  • Ian’s favorite projects include high current electronics. His personal favorite is the Rebar Crossbow–it pumps 2000 amps through the rebar until it glows red hot, and then you shoot it
  • A retractable Lightsaber created with a modified oxy-propane torch
  • Ian explains how designing their PCBs contributes to the success of their projects

Links and Resources:

Visit Hacksmith Youtube Channel to watch more of their mind-blowing engineering projects.
Connect with Ian Hillier on LinkedIn
Connect with Zack on LinkedIn

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Transcript

Zach Peterson:
Can we fire it up on video?

Ian Hillier:
I can't right now, I have the fuel tanks over here right now, but they're empty and my office is a little flammable.

Zach Peterson:
Hello everybody. And welcome to the [inaudible 00:00:16] On Track podcast. I'm very happy to be speaking with Ian Hillier, COO and co-founder of Hacksmith Industries. If you've ever seen any of their videos on YouTube, you know that they make some pretty crazy stuff. And that's some of the stuff that we're going to be talking about today. So it should be a very fun conversation. Ian, thank you so much for joining us on the On Track podcast.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah, absolutely. I've watched some of your videos and I've watched a number of videos from folks that do electronics online and they have different projects that they do. Your stuff is really unique. And I noticed that a lot of it is we're taking the movies and making it real. And I even saw that in some of your videos, you have a Marvel intro where it says "Make it real," which is actually kind of cool. If you could tell us a little bit about your background and then how you got involved in doing all of this.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. So my background is mechanical engineering. I met my business partner, who is the CEO and the front man of the organization. We met in high school grade nine tech class. Ever since then we've been working on projects either extracurricular through the school, or just in our garage, working on building cool things. And that led us into the robotics club. And then after that, we went to college together, studied mechanical engineering, graduated, continued doing projects together. And we wanted a way to continue making the cool things that we want to make and be able to monetize that. And that's where the channel came from. We just wanted a way to make cool things and YouTube was a way to enable that. And I can hop into the history a lot more if you're looking for that, but [crosstalk 00:02:14].

Zach Peterson:
Oh yeah, definitely.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. James has been on YouTube for 16 years now.

Zach Peterson:
So basically since it started?

Ian Hillier:
Yeah, pretty well since it started just making videos for the fun of it and seeing... Just a hobby making videos. And then as we started working on projects together, he would make videos about the projects, about that sort of thing. And post them online. I was only interested in the engineering. I just wanted to make cool things and he would make blog posts or videos about things. He grew the channel to about 60 or 70,000 subscribers. And at that point he decided to quit his full-time job and focus on YouTube full-time. And at the time everyone thought he was crazy. That why would you quit a full-time job to do YouTube? This was 2015. And so he quit his job.

Ian Hillier:
And I was working at a really cool tech company we were making incredible technology. And then I... He quit his job. I was moonlighting with him and I got jealous and quit my job. And again, everyone thought I was crazy for quitting my job, which was a really cool company. And recently got acquired by Google. So he quit his job, I quit my job. I had six months of runway before I ran out of money. And at the end of that six months I was getting married. So I wanted to buy a house and have the normal lifestyle but of course-

Zach Peterson:
I'm sure your fiancee was thrilled.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. So six months runway and we had no income. Maybe a couple hundred dollars a month. And of course our expenses were higher than that. So had six months to make some money. We figured let's get views and revenue will follow. And so we focused on making some viral videos and fortunately we made a quite viral video, which was the electromagnets Captain America shield, where there was a couple of giant electromagnets on an arm bracer. So you could throw a metal shield and catch it with the electromagnets. And this was right around the time of the Captain America movie release so it... The video went viral. And we were able to make some money. And we were able to continue doing the YouTube channel full-time. And since then the channel's been exploding.

Ian Hillier:
2016, we had a hundred thousand subscribers and now we have 12.4 million subscribers. Back then it was just the two of us, now we have a team of 24 people. Full-time, 24 people, which is incredible. At the time, I couldn't imagine the growth that we went through. I was kind of expecting, "Oh, this is just a job that I can work on my passion projects. And if I can make enough money to get by then I'm happy." And now we're at a team of 24 people and that's engineers, videographers, we have a merchandise team, we have... Yeah, all sorts of people on the team just dedicated to making cool things. That's kind of our... The passion of... Or what drives the [inaudible 00:05:59]. We want to make the fun prototypes that most engineers wish they were doing while they're working at whatever corporate jobs they're at.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah. It's almost like the "Wouldn't it be cool if you could make stuff?"

Ian Hillier:
Yeah.

Zach Peterson:
Not necessarily stuff that's just from the movies, right?

Ian Hillier:
I mean, movies, video games, that's kind of our bread and butter. We take a pop culture idea. And that's usually Iron Man or light sabers or Thor kind of technology. We take that concept that everyone is familiar with and then we make a real working version of it. And then we find the videos tend to perform better when we do it that way. And usually it's pretty interesting technology that way as well. But we also do passion projects that aren't linked to particular IPs as well.

Zach Peterson:
Sure, sure. And I think what's great about what you guys do, especially applying it to something that you would see in a movie. And that seems, I guess you could say, impossible or really fantastic, or just totally infeasible, is it really illustrates the engineering mindset involved in breaking down something like that and linking it with what's available now to try and actually create something that demonstrates some of those same features. I was really impressed by the light saber and the laser pack that was... I think James was looking through glasses and using that to fire the laser on a piece of cardboard. That kind of stuff is really cool. And maybe it's not practical or super practical or anything, but I think it's really great because it illustrates how you guys think and approach these types of things. And my hope with what you guys are doing and what other YouTubers are doing is that it gets kids excited about engineering.

Ian Hillier:
Oh, it definitely does. Hundreds or thousands of testimonials that we've received of people saying, "Hey, I didn't know engineering was that. I'm going into engineering because of you guys." And now there's people graduating engineering because we inspire them to go into engineering and now they're graduating, which is incredible. It's definitely one of our goals as an organization. To inspire the next generation of engineers and inspire people into STEM fields. Show how interesting and how cool engineering can be and the kind of things you can do with it.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, I just read a statistic yesterday in an I-Connect article, I said something to the effect of in 15 years, 70 or 80% of the PCB workforce and the electronics design workforce will have retired. So there's just this massive generational talent gap that needs to be filled. So that's one reason I'm such a big fan of channels like yours and then other YouTubers who are trying to just make electronics fun because I think electronics can be this inaccessible thing. You know it exists. You have a phone, you know that there's chips in there and stuff. But if you're not an engineer, you don't do electronics professionally, you probably don't don't realize the complexity and how much fun it can really be.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah, how accessible it is that... I was the same way of... I'm a mechanical engineer so some of the making PCBs and whatnot, for a long time, I didn't realize how accessible and how relatively easy it is that you can design a board, order every component you need from Digi-Key, with one click and then order the board, have it delivered to you in sometimes three days and then assemble it. And it's there. How quick and easy. And the boards are incredibly cheap as well of sometimes a dollar a board or something like that with a short run.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah, definitely. Now you mentioned something interesting, that you and James are both mechanical engineers. Did I hear that correctly?

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. So James and I are both mechanical engineers. So for quite a while, until we started hiring more mechatronics engineers and electrical engineers, a lot of our projects were definitely more on the mechanical side or the electronics that we were using, were others ready-made things or Arduino-based. We weren't making our own PCBs. Now we make a lot of PCBs because we have the resources to do that. There's a lot of off-the-shelf components that you can make, a lot of things without needing to make a PCB, but it's definitely better with a PCB.

Zach Peterson:
I was wondering, for were a couple of guys who are mechanical engineers, how easy that transition was. And you brought up, off-the-shelf modules like Arduino and I'm sure some other stuff that's out there. I think that's a really good way for people to kind of make that transition into learning about electronics design, figuring out how to put things together, but like you say, eventually you're now designing custom PCBs for the stuff that you build. How hard was that transition?

Ian Hillier:
I would say it was a pretty organic transition, as the channel grew, as the team grew, the complexity of the projects also grew. So we've been doing one video a week for the past six years. And that started with a team of two people doing one video a week to now a team of 20 people doing one video a week. That's either a massive efficiency drop or the complexity. So the complexity of the project and the quality of the video has massively improved over the past six years. So we have more engineering resources to spend on each project. And now with that. So it was kind of an organic transition as we brought on team members that were able to make PCBs and the complexity of the projects required PCBs. It was pretty straightforward.

Zach Peterson:
So, as you're marshaling a group of 24 people collectively to work on a single concept or video each week, what's the process for working with other designers, other engineers, whether they're mechanical, electrical engineers? What does that look like? How do you get all of these heads in different areas to kind of collaborate on one thing that you're trying to build and not just collaborate, but get to a result that's effective in such a short amount of time?

Ian Hillier:
We silo a fair bit. So instead of focusing on one project and getting it done with everyone, working on that single project, we have something like eight projects in the works at all times. So an engineer will have their own project. And sometimes it's a... Let's say, there's the owner of the project. And then they bring in support as they need it. So for instance, I'm working on a... We're calling the Hulk Buster fist. So I own that project. [inaudible 00:13:47] on that project, but I'm bringing in resources as I require. So I have a co-op helping me with some of the design and testing of certain things where I get him to assist with things. And I have a shop tech helping with doing some of the fabrication and I have someone helping make certain things for the video aspect down the line. And it's similar with other projects as well. So usually there's a much smaller team working on the project and there's many projects in parallel.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure you have that many people working on one project, you could get an issue with too many cooks in the kitchen, as they say.

Ian Hillier:
Exactly. Or supply chain issues that sometimes you have to wait a week for a part to come in and then is the whole company on hold while that happens?

Zach Peterson:
Yeah, of course. That makes total sense. And then with having so many people around, you actually have a pretty broad pool of talent to draw from, because I noticed that you guys do your own machining, some of your own components, like with the Halo gun. You guys built your own coils. I was pretty us by that because I think a lot of folks don't go to that level, especially if they're designing professionally simply because it's like, "We've got deadlines, we've got budgets, we've got to get it out the door. We're not doing something super custom with components unless we absolutely have to." And so I like that you guys have the freedom to play around and experiment with what you're going to do when you're building something. And I was pretty impressed by the talent that you have access to.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. It's incredible where we've come from and now where we are today. It's doing things in house. It's kind of because we want to. I want to have all the machines and all the toys and be able to walk out in the shop and make anything I want. That's a personal goal of mine, but it works better for the videos and it works better for prototypes. Every everything we do is a prototype and it's something new and something different. It's easier just to make a one-off sometimes than it is to order a custom whatever it is.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, try doing some of this custom stuff with a company externally, they're going to charge you too much, they're going to take eight weeks. And so it's understandable, you got to build some stuff in the house, but one thing I think that is really great about that is it does really show right down to the nitty gritty of what needs to happen to build some of this stuff. I think the coil, I'll go back to the coil production for a moment, I think that's a really good illustration of how something would actually get built. And that kind of goes back to the education and inspiring younger engineers and really educating folks about what has to go into manufacturing some of this stuff.

Ian Hillier:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Which is [inaudible 00:17:10] fairly high-level compared to some of the manufacturing that's out there-

Zach Peterson:
Oh, sure. Yeah, because you're focused on getting something that it just has to get to the function. We're not selling a million units.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. Which in my opinion, is the fun part of engineering, making the prototype is usually the fun part. And maybe there's some QA people out there that would disagree that QA is the best part of it. But personally, I think the prototype is the best part of engineering and really it's only maybe five or 10% of the work of most places. But it's definitely the most fun making something.

Zach Peterson:
Oh yeah. I was going to say, for anyone that's interested in actually watching the Halo gun video, where they actually do manufacture their own coils, look in the show notes, we'll have a link to that video. We'll also have a link to the channel so that viewers can watch the other videos that you guys have up. One thing I wanted to ask you was what are some of the challenges on some of the more interesting projects? Because I'm sure there's stuff that goes on when you're making all these videos, as you're doing all the engineering, that obviously doesn't get captured on camera, because you've got limited time to put up something up on camera. Nobody's going to sit around for an eight hour video. So, of course, I'm sure there are other challenges that you overcome and maybe boil down to something more concise so that it's camera-friendly. So with the Captain American shield or the light saber, what are some of those challenges?

Ian Hillier:
I mean, often we've tried to show some of the challenges in the videos, but of course it's not always possible. I'd say that the challenging thing is sometimes a project doesn't work. And if you have a timeline of, "Okay, we have this deadline to get this video out" and your parts don't come in time and you design something and it just doesn't work the way that you expect it to, but you still have this deadline and you still need to get the mechanical engineering done. And then the fabrication and then the system integration and then all these things that need to happen in sequential order. And then you need to make a video about it and get it out in time. And sometimes the thing that you thought would be really cool isn't as cool, or it doesn't work as well as you thought it would.

Ian Hillier:
There's times where we do a lot of research and a lot of work on a project and then it just never becomes a video. We've had some projects either start and be thrown out or been in the pipeline for years now. There's a project that's that's currently on the shelf. We're bringing it back this summer, but we've been working on it for about three years now. Just kind of off and on. And maybe it'll happen this summer. We've dumped maybe, I don't know, 20, $50,000 into this project between the components and the labor.

Zach Peterson:
I'm curious as to what this is. Do you want to drop any hints?

Ian Hillier:
It's an evolution of our flying Ironman project. We started with this goal of we wanted to fly like Ironman. And we started doing some of the R&D behind it and then Richard Browning beat us to the punch. There's someone else that has jet engines on his arms and on his back. And he can fly around like Ironman. So once that happens, we shifted the project to now it's flying like Inspector Gadget. So the currents plan is to have two very large electric motors above your head counter rotating and spinning giant propellers. So you're your own little helicopter. 

Zach Peterson:
Man, I loved inspector gadget when I was younger.

Ian Hillier (21:21):
Yeah. So it's doable, but it's terrifying. And we have a lot of the components to do it, but doing it in a safe way is difficult and terrifying.

Zach Peterson:
I was just thinking the same thing. Safety has to be a major factor when filming, whether it's having large rotors spinning overhead or whether it is using two very powerful lasers to burn through cardboard while you stare at the lasers.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. And safety has definitely evolved over the past six years as well. When you're two guys in a garage, you can get away with a lot more than you can when you're a... I think, it's a real company. If you're endangering yourself, that's one thing. But if you're endangering an employee, that's very frowned upon. Our safety protocols have definitely evolved and it's a little more difficult to do certain things than it used to be.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah. And I mean, with what you guys are building, this is, I think... You mentioned that you're having fun building a prototype, you're building quantity one. And I think by taking the prototype mentality and just getting to the functionality that you want, that means you probably really aren't afraid to fail. I mean, as you said, you've got one project that's been sitting on the shelf for, what is it, three years? It's probably been resurrected and it failed multiple times over that time period. So I mean, pushing those designs to the extreme, you have to not be afraid to fail when you're building this stuff. And really just say, "We just want it to work and forget about IPC standards, forget about UL safety." I mean, it's all about getting something that gives you what you want.

Ian Hillier:
A lot of that stuff gets thrown out of the window. Usually when we're... For electronics or something. You run, let's say, the first generation of light sabers that we made. The first one was a nitinol wire wrapped around a insulated metal core. And so we were running that at, I think, 300 volts DC and just turning on until it gets red hot and then using it. It only really needed to work for a minute at a time. And then it would break and we'd have to fix it and then start filming again and use it for another minute or two. And when it failed, it failed spectacularly. If you can imagine a 300 volts DC going through a wire that suddenly bursts, there's a massive arc that happens quite bright and loud and scary.

Zach Peterson:
It makes for a great video though.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. When we're making some of those things, you know that when you're only running it for a minute at a time, you can get away with some allowances that you wouldn't do in a industrial setting.

Zach Peterson:
Sure. I think what makes that different from the professional setting or the industrial setting, or even if it's just the proof of concept is you're eventually thinking, "How am I going to take this and transform it into something that can possibly scale" or "That's going to be reliable over the long." I mean, even satellites have quantity one, and they're not necessarily going to manufacture a million of those, but they care about the long term reliability. I like that what you guys are doing and not being afraid to fail or really push the envelope on designs. That lets you push something to the very edge of what is really possible with modern electronics.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. I'd say one of the most extreme examples of that is our hover board where we... That project was, I think, the most powerful project we've ever made. It was running at around a hundred kilowatts and it was the size of about a snowball with eight electric motors and as many batteries as we could shove into it drawing a hundred kilowatts. So the thing it would run for maybe a minute before the battery pack was completely dead and it was running at maybe 99% where it was very, very close to exploding at all times. And it did explode a couple times.

Zach Peterson:
talk about a safety issue. You said it did explode a couple times?

Ian Hillier:
Yeah, because the video needed to come out and so the ideal situation is that we should have gotten better speed controllers, but the better speed controllers were on, it would've taken too long to get them. So the speed controllers that we could get, they were not as good, but we could get them quickly and we could continue on with the project. We just ordered a lot of those speed controllers and we made due. So it was just very close to exploding every time we used it.

Zach Peterson:
So a hundred kilowatts going into a hoverboard. What kind of batteries are you using? Just stacking a bunch of LiPo cells just-

Ian Hillier:
Yep.

Zach Peterson:
Really?

Ian Hillier:
It was... I forget how many, but [Gen Z's T attoo 00:27:13] is a sponsor. So they send us the batteries that we require. So it's just very high draw LiPo batteries. And there were a lot of them. Quite a lot of them. I think there was four.

Zach Peterson:
Okay. And then-

Ian Hillier:
Two or four batteries per motor pack. And there was eight packs or eight motors.

Zach Peterson:
That's a lot of lithium polymer. Okay, cool. So I think the other thing that I'm wondering is what are some of your favorite projects because you guys have been doing this for a long time, starting with a Captain America shield to get you to really take off. Since that time you guys have sponsors, you guys are just experimenting with what's in the movies. You guys are experimenting with stuff you're interested in. What's your favorite thing that you've done? And maybe what are some of the things that you would love to do in the future?

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. So my personal favorite projects are things that in involve number one, high current electronics. So when we use that, we usually use the high current to make something glowing red hot, and then some sort of mechanical aspect and elegant design. So a couple of examples of that is... My personal favorite project is our red hot rebar cross bow, which is exactly as it sounds, you put a piece of rebar into a cross bow, you press a button, it pumps 2000 amps through the rebar until it glows red hot, and then you shoot it. And that project just works flawlessly every time we pull it off the shelf, which is incredible. We made it three or four years ago now. And we use it every so often, just pull it off the shelf, charge the battery and it shoots a red hot piece of rebar.

Zach Peterson:
That's incredible because that's so much discharge so quickly to get that thing to heat up because it's going to start to cool in what?

Ian Hillier:
Seconds.

Zach Peterson:
Seconds. Yeah, seconds. It'll cool off just enough to probably not to touch it, but not going to be red hot. But you have to get a lot of current in there very quickly. And then you're shooting a piece of rebar. So I'm assuming it's going through an electromagnet.

Ian Hillier:
Well, it's using the spring mechanism of the crossbar.

Zach Peterson:
Oh, you're using a spring? Okay. Gotcha, gotcha. Well, then that's another challenge because you have red hot rebar and you have to mount that against a spring. So how do you keep it from ruining the spring or anything like that? That's extremely interesting.

Ian Hillier:
And then some other of my favorite projects are light sabers. I kind of mentioned before, there was the first generation of light saber. The second generation of light saber was a titanium tube with a insulated tungsten core. So the interesting thing about that is the electricity would travel through the titanium tube and then back down on the inside through the tungsten. And the titanium, first off, it's a pretty high temperature, high melting point, but a very high resistance, which is perfect for a heating element. So the titanium would glow red hot and tungsten, which has an even higher melting point. So it's very rigid and high temperatures, but is very conductive. So it was kind of a perfect combination to have that electricity make the titanium red hot on the outside and then keep it rigid with the tungsten core. So I made a few of those lights sabers, and they performed well on the internet. Of course, light sabers work well. And now one of our engineer-

Zach Peterson:
Now I see why a mechanical engineer has an advantage in doing this kind of stuff. Because most of the stuff that you just brought up as far as creating this was mechanical points, right? You cared more about the melting temperature. You cared about the mechanical strength. The conductivity is important, but you want it to perform a specific function. You're taking all of this together.

Ian Hillier:
Yeah. And now we employ mechatronics engineers that have a bit of understanding a bit of everything. So one of our engineers then went up to me with this one, which is actually a oxy-propane torch. So you hook it up to-

Zach Peterson:
Can we fire it up on video?

Ian Hillier:
I can't right now, I have the fuel tanks over here right now, but they're empty and my office is a little flammable.

Zach Peterson:
Of course. I wouldn't want you to burn down your office.

Ian Hillier:
This is a glass blowing torch used for glass blowing, heating up glass and melting it in certain ways. So we just bought this torch off-the-shelf. A lot of what we do is innovating, we call it. You buy existing products and then you modify them into what you need. This is a glass blowing torch that uses oxygen propane. And it creates a three foot long flame that looks exactly like a light saber. And the incredible thing is that it's retractable. So you can press a button and the flame extends, you press a button and it retracts. And so this is an example where we used a PCB in order to get... If I was doing the project as just a mechanical engineer, sure I would've made that. And I would've lit it with a lighter or something and it just would've been on-off, but we wanted to go a step beyond that. We wanted to have a retractable light saber where you press a button and it would extend and press a button and it would retract. So how do you do that?

Ian Hillier:
So number one, fancy valves. You need a way to control the flow of the gases. And with these torches, you need to have a very precise flow of those combustible gases to get the flame profile that you want. If it's not mixed perfectly, then the flame looks terrible or it doesn't work at all. So we got some fancy flow control valves, and then we made a PCB to control it. And in addition to controlling it, then there's also the sound effects. So there's the light saber sound effect as it's extending and retracting and an accelerometer in the handle also when you swing it around, it makes the sound effect as well. Could we have done that without a PCB? Probably not.

Zach Peterson:
Absolutely. Well, whether it's for sound effects or for all of the stuff that we use in our daily lives, I think you're underscoring that electronics is very important and that people who are interested it should definitely get involved by going and watching your channel and learning as much as they can. Ian, thank you so much. This has been a very interesting discussion. I like having guys like you on, anyone who's a YouTuber and is doing some interesting stuff with electronics. I think you guys are doing something very important by helping to get new entrance into the industry and just interested in electronics in whatever way is going to work for them. So kudos, congratulations on all your success and keep doing what you guys are doing. I'm going to keep watching the videos myself.

Ian Hillier:
Awesome. Thanks a lot for having me.

Zach Peterson:
Yeah, absolutely. And to all the viewers out there, you can see some of the best of videos and some of the stuff we've been talking about in the show notes. Go ahead and click through to those videos on YouTube and give them a watch. Definitely subscribe to our channel if you want to see more podcasts and we hope everyone will go and also subscribe to the Hacksmith channel to see some more of their very cool videos. Ian, thank you again. And all the viewers out there, don't stop learning, stay on track.
 

About Author

About Author

Zachariah Peterson has an extensive technical background in academia and industry. He currently provides research, design, and marketing services to companies in the electronics industry. Prior to working in the PCB industry, he taught at Portland State University and conducted research on random laser theory, materials, and stability. His background in scientific research spans topics in nanoparticle lasers, electronic and optoelectronic semiconductor devices, environmental sensors, and stochastics. His work has been published in over a dozen peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, and he has written 2500+ technical articles on PCB design for a number of companies. He is a member of IEEE Photonics Society, IEEE Electronics Packaging Society, American Physical Society, and the Printed Circuit Engineering Association (PCEA). He previously served as a voting member on the INCITS Quantum Computing Technical Advisory Committee working on technical standards for quantum electronics, and he currently serves on the IEEE P3186 Working Group focused on Port Interface Representing Photonic Signals Using SPICE-class Circuit Simulators.

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