Jeri Ellsworth - Biography

Biography

Ellsworth was born in Yamhill, Oregon, and grew up in the town of Dallas, Oregon, where she was raised by her father, a local Mobil service station owner. As a child, she persuaded her father to let her use a Commodore 64 computer which had been originally purchased for her brother. She taught herself to program by reading the C64's manuals. While at high school, she drove dirt-track race cars with her father, and then began designing new models in his workshop, eventually selling her own custom race cars. This allowed her to drop out of high school to continue the business.

In 1995, at the age of 21, she decided that she wanted to get away from the race car business, and she and a friend started an early Intel 486-PC-based business, assembling and selling computers. When she and her partner later had a disagreement, Ellsworth opened a separate business in competition. This new business became a chain of four stores, "Computers Made Easy", selling computer equipment in towns in Oregon. She ran that chain until selling it in 2000, at which point she moved to Walla Walla, Washington and attended Walla Walla College, studying circuit design for about a year. She dropped out due to a "cultural mismatch"; Ellsworth said that questioning professors' answers was frowned upon.

In 2000, Ellsworth attended her first Commodore exposition, where she unveiled a prototype video expansion for the C64. This project later evolved to become the CommodoreOne, a.k.a. the C-One, and C64-DTV.

Ellsworth then began designing computer circuits that mimicked the behavior of her first computer, the Commodore 64. In this way, in 2002, she designed the chip used in the C-One, a board which was co-designed and manufactured by Jens Schönfeld, as an enhanced Commodore 64 which could also emulate other home computers of the early 1980s, including the VIC-20 and Sinclair ZX81. She displayed the C-1 at a technology conference, and she and Schönfeld received enough business to sell a few hundred units. This also led to Ellsworth receiving a job offer from Mammoth Toys, a company which hired her to design the "computer in a chip" for the Commodore-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 USA, Europe, and elsewhere.

Ellsworth is a pinball machine expert and owns over 90 full sized pinball arcade games. She runs the business, Ricochet Pinball.

On May 30, 2009, Ellsworth demonstrated her Home Chip Lab at Maker Faire Bay Area 2009.

Ellsworth was named "MacGyver of the Day" on February 25, 2010 by Lifehacker.

On December 3, 2010 she released information on how to build a TSA "naked" scanner using repurposed satellite antenna parts.

Ellsworth has published numerous technical articles online regarding 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 without using expensive indium-tin-oxide coated glass.

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

In early 2012 Ellsworth was hired by Valve Corporation (along with several other notable hardware hackers) to work on gaming hardware.