Thumby – the smallest game console in the world

A Transcript of Mike’s Conversation with Ken

Mike: Ken, thanks so much for taking a moment to talk to me. I’m excited just to kind of pick your mind a little bit on this new product that TinyCircuits is putting out. And I’m just wondering, I got this thing in the mail and I thought, man was the Tiny Arcade too big? And you felt like, “Oh, this is just too big. “I got to come out with this smaller version, like this super tiny game console.” What was the impetus for that?

Ken: Really it’s kind of ridiculous. So our main engineer, Ben Rose, kind of did this as a little pet project to see what’s the smallest possible thing you can make and still play games. And so he actually did this just kind of on the side, and we showed it off as a maker fares five or six years ago. Really almost like a Bring-A-Hack type thing, you know, say, “Oh, we could do this.” And enough people liked it, said, “Hey, you guys really got to do that. “You got to do that.” So we’re like, all right. It’s just kind of always on the back burner. And so this year we decided to ramp it up. And said okay let’s. I mean, yeah, it’s ridiculous to actually try to play a game on it, but it’s cute. And we’re able to do it super cheap too. So we’re making everything here in Akron, Ohio, but we’re for a price point of $19. And so even making it here, I think it was cheap enough that people like, okay, this is kind of a cute, cute little game console I can tinker with. And I’d be surprised if somebody tries to play games on it for five hours straight. It would be quite the challenge. Although I’ll tell you what, we showed it to little kids, 9, 10, 11 year olds, and they will sit there and play it for awhile. They have the hands for it and they love it.

Mike: Yeah. I know. I showed it to my little kids and they thought it was the coolest thing ever. So yeah, I assure you, they thought it was fantastic. And you know, it’s a really fun conversation piece. Like I just showed it to a couple of my friends and they’re like, “What?” And they’re like, Wait, it actually works?” I’m like, “Yeah, it’s not just a tiny little piece of plastic.” You turn it on and it works.

Ken: It’s got a speaker in it too.

Mike: Yeah, I know, it’s crazy, man. Was it a matter of, that five-year period, was it a matter of like waiting till you had the available electronics to do it? Like, they were at a price point where it made more sense to do it? I know it’s using, what, that R Pi chip or something?

Ken: Yeah, yeah. So it’s using a Raspberry Pi microcontroller, the new one, the RP2040. Really a lot of it was, there’s some challenges to it. We realized we’d need like a good case, an injection molded case, which is pricey. And so again, we were just kind of pushing it off, and then when the Raspberry Pi part came out, we’re like, this thing is extremely cheap and it would just make it much more powerful. So the early ones just had an ATtiny in it. So we thought it’s a simple little game system. You use that Raspberry Pi part it’s cheap enough that we can keep the price very low. ‘Cause again, like you say, it’s kind of a little thing. You don’t want to drop 50 bucks on that, but if it’s under $20, then it’s like, okay, this is really cute and I can show it off to my friends and create simple little games for it very easily.

Mike: So you guys are running a Kickstarter, and it’s probably when people are watching this, depending on when they see it, it’s either going off right now, and they can check it out by what? Going to Thumby.us, and it will take them to that page?

Ken: Yeah, right now we have Thumby.us, which is kind of a landing page, just getting email signups. But by the time this runs, the Kickstarter would probably be live, so we’re just gonna redirect that to the live Kickstarter site. And then we also have some tutorials. And we’re gonna focus more over the next month kind of refining the refining ID. It is, I mean, it is workable right now. We do want to do improvements and do a lot more tutorials about making games for it. But yeah, the Kickstarter is live and hopefully doing well. I mean, we’re recording this right before it launches. But we’ve had great excitement. And there’ve been some reviews out there already. And we’re hoping for more. We sent out some early beta units, like when you got. One thing that we did announce, or we haven’t officially announced, but you’re actually able to connect two Thumbys together using a special micro USB cable, and we call it Thumby Link, so you could actually do multiplayer stuff. So that’s kind of new. We haven’t done much with it, but we’ve proved out the concept. Again, it’s ridiculous. But again, Thumby’s are cheap, and so you can actually make a little multiplayer game, kind of like some of those old-little handhelds did back in the day. And so you play against your friend.

Mike: Oh, that’s really cool. Awesome. Well, Ken, thanks so much. Again, I appreciate your time. And everybody definitely go check out Thumby. It’s pretty sweet.