When Kevin King and his two kids decided to start a “just for fun” family project of building a robot, they didn’t necessarily anticipate creating a new company. Yet, here they are, three years later with a team of three to five people, building educational and hobby robotics under the name Plum Geek Robotics in Vancouver. The best part: they’re having a blast doing it.
King and his kids started their endeavor by building a small programmable robot they named “Ringo.” With a prototype in hand, they launched a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to see how things would go. In just three weeks, they raised more than $80,000. Now, their pint-sized robots are used in many schools and they continue to be popular with hobbyists of all ages.
The company is based out of a 2,000-square-foot shop near Pearson Airfield and everything happens there – design, prototyping, manufacturing and shipping. Having a shop where everything is completed under one roof allows the team to be flexible and operate with minimum overhead.
“We’re all about designing tools to help educate others in understanding electronics and programming and enabling them to apply this knowledge to their own projects and further higher learning,” said King.
Recent projects
The company recently completed a campaign to fund their newest line of miniature robots, known as Spirit Rovers. Affectionately named after the NASA rover that’s now on Mars, Plum Geek raised $170,000 on Kickstarter in three weeks. A bit larger than a credit card and running a full Linus operating system, these robots are scheduled to ship in March or April of this year.
“This robot is easy to understand and grow with as students and hobbyists learn to build and program a complex robot,” said King. “Users will learn to do simple things like driving around a desk while sensing and avoiding edges, or more complex things like control and program over the internet, or recognize objects with the vision system.”
Beyond the Spirit Rover line, the company has also worked on revising their popular Ringo and Wink robots. Wink includes free open-source lessons that are geared for students ages eight and up to learn written programming code, which makes them popular in the classroom. The Ringo has been popular with high school and college classes, and the University of Oregon has recently integrated them in some of their coursework.
The future
The technology industry is continuously changing and Plum Geek Robotics plans to be right in the midst of it.
“We’ve got a few new ideas in the pipeline for this summer,” King said. “We do well with niche products so wherever we see a need in the education, robotics and ‘Maker Space’ markets, we’ll be there.”
King went on to explain that part of the fun at Plum Geek Robotics is not having a fancy five-year plan, but instead making things up as they go.
“I like to keep options open,” he said. “When one of us has a good idea, we produce it and see how it does.”
So far, that concept has proven very successful.
King and his team love what they’re doing and they’re open to outside projects as well as collaborations with others, especially those in the educational community. He says, “I see a lot of growth for small businesses like ours going forward. It’s an exciting time.”
Plum Geek Robotics
229 E. Reserve St., #102 Vancouver Founded 2014 www.plumgeek.com
