Adrian McEwen
“I don’t want to go through the whole venture capital system and go to China.”
Adrian is well known in the maker community, in fact he wrote the book on designing products for the Internet of Things. He’s a keen advocate of independent manufacturing and scaling hobby projects into commercial products.
LXF: Hi Adrian, thanks for taking the time to talk to LXF, can you tell the readers a little more about yourself?
Adrian McEwen: I mostly describe myself as someone who connects strange things to the internet. This could mean a bubble machine connected to Twitter, or a sensors monitoring a wave energy machine sat in the English Channel that send their data over 3G for analysis. My work is really varied and interesting. I am also an author, I wrote
Designing the Internet of Things for O’ Reilly. Lastly I am one of the founders of Liverpool’s hackspace, known as DoES Liverpool. LXF: How long have you been a maker?
AM: I would say at least ten years, but I have always been a maker at some level. But in 2006/2007 I first heard about the Arduino. In fact in 2007 I purchased my first Arduino from the Arduino factory while I was living in Turin. LXF: Would you attribute the Arduino as being your route into being a maker? AM: Yeah, the Arduino definitely helped. I’ve worked in embedded software for my entire career, and it was always internet related projects. For example I was part of the team that made the first web browser on a mobile phone in 1997. In the 2000s I had seen some other single-board computers, such as Sun Spots, but they were always quite expensive and complicated to use. But when the Arduino came along it was only £20 and did not require any specialist software or knowledge to start using it. So if I didn’t like the Arduino, all that I would lose was the £20 and the board would gather dust on the shelf. This price level and ease of use was the point at which I thought that I could justify having a play and start teaching myself electronics.
LXF: Not only are you a maker, but you are an advocate of Independent Manufacturing.
AM: Yeah, I’ve been running my own company since 2002 and we work on Internet of Things projects for clients. Being based in a makerspace means I have access to laser cutters, 3D printers and plenty of tools, which also means that I can make one of almost anything that I need. But the company has always been interested in how we move into product design and make your own product. For example we have been making the Ackers Bell, which is an internet-enabled bell that can be linked to online stores, and will audibly ring when the store makes a sale. So for the product side of things we thought “How do we make more of these?” and I don’t want to go through the whole venture capital system, raise lots of money and go to China then manufacture 20,000 units which I then have to go and sell. I’ve been interested in how you scale things up and how we can get more people who are makers. So the process of scaling up but without this risk is really interesting and the makerspace has those sort of links into manufacturing. We have people who come to DoES Liverpool with something that they wish to make on the 3D printer for sale... now, in the makerspace we can make say around 200 of these objects, but any more than that requires looking at the local supply chain. So as more people do projects in DoES Liverpool, and you get this right across the makerspace network, there is a real community of makers who share their information. So your route into manufacturing is that you come to the makerspace to use the tools, and then learn of this wonderful community of makers and manufacturers that is there to help you realise your project. LXF: For those wishing to become a maker, is there a path that they should follow? AM: No, there are so many different routes into the maker community, everyone has their own story that illustrates the path that they followed to become a maker. For me it was to have a project that I wanted to achieve and that is what made me dedicate the time to go and learn different things for my own benefit. The maker community has such a nice, diverse crowd, the stereotype is men hunched over computers, but the maker community is broad, covering many different skills such as arts, fine arts, engineering, haute couture, and along with the established interests of technology helps there to be more diversity and the male stereotype is not reflective of the community at large.