AKRON, Ohio — An Akron company is pushing the boundaries of technology by thinking small, proving that bigger isn’t always better.
The latest invention by Tiny Circuits is called Thumby. It looks similar to a scaled-down version of a ’90s handheld video game system, measuring at one-fifth the size of the old-school original.
This one is literally the size of a thumb.
“People are definitely surprised by it,” said principal engineer Ben Rose. “They may have seen pictures, but definitely seeing it in real life, it tends to be smaller than people kind of expected.”
It’s so small that Rose puts Thumby’s pieces together under a microscope.
“Yeah, trying to really just see as small as we can go,” he said. “We make a lot of other small stuff, but nothing as small as this.”
Rose designed the circuit board and some of the parts for the tiny throwback.
“There’s not a huge amount of parts on the board, but it’s a really small space, so that makes it difficult to kind of fit everything.”
But it’s those sorts of challenges that inspired Ken Burns to create the company in the first place.
“Just thought smaller was cooler and so I started to make some really small things,” he said.
Now about 10 years later, the team is up to about 100 different products including Thumby.
“The handheld stuff was big when I was in grade school,” Burns said. “You know, sitting on the bus and playing Game Boy was always a lot of fun. So, it’s kind of cool to kind of recreate that.”
It turns out, Burns isn’t the only one who thinks it’s “cool.”
“We knew there was gonna be some interest in it, but we blew past our goal in under two hours,” he said. “And actually we had 50 early birds that sold out in two minutes.”
Their Kickstarter account was more than 1,200% funded with less than three days left to fundraise.
Burns said the money will be used to buy the components to build the products.
“Now, we have to make at least 3,000, so far,” he said.
The positive response is bringing the company to the next level.
“Until you actually come out and try to sell something, you don’t know if people are even gonna like it,” Burns said. “So, when you’re putting it out there and it did way past our expectations. It feels great.”
Rose said up to around 40 games can be loaded onto the Thumby, providing a tiny trip back in time.
