This startup says "play with our balls, please!"

Foreign. So who are you guys, huh?

I'm Adam, and this is Ian, and we're a Gearbox. And what.

What are you doing on the sidewalk here?

So we're gonna give a demo of our robotic ball that's controlled from our smartphone. And we built this in about a month, but it's taken a lot longer than that to get good enough to make this.

All right, let get over here. Don't step on your balls.

Don't break my balls, man.

So what is this thing that we're seeing roll around, and how are you controlling it?

So this is the gearbox robotic ball. As I tilt my phone, the ball will roll in that direction. So if I tilt my phone forward, the ball will move forward.

Yeah. So right now we're giving a demo of pretty low speed just to kind of give you an idea of the sensors and how all of that's working.

Turn around and talk to me.

Oh, turn around and talk to you. Okay.

So the crowd's in the background.

The ball fell into the crack.

The ball falls in the crack, and it doesn't go no more.

So how much are these things right now? This prototype is pretty expensive. Well, what are you expecting us in volume? We can sell them at about $40.39.99.

Okay, and do you have any idea of when this thing's going to be product Productized and ready to buy?

We are hoping five or six months. We're ready for production. We. So just in time for Christmas. Yeah, well, it takes about four or five months to do a turnaround on a big hardware sale like that. So, yeah, hopefully really banging for the February tour market, because that's when a lot of these stores and big things buy on that. So.

So what, do you explode it? How do you explode it? Jason, Kyle Canis is over here. So what's inside the ball? What's the technology? And how does it get signals from your iPhone? And how does it know where to roll?

All right, so inside of the ball, there is a mechanical device that's controlling it. But to be able to tell it like, I want you to go 25 degrees up north, you have to utilize a compass, a gyro, and an accelerometer and filter all of that in with a Kalman filter. That's very complicated. It's actually extended Kalman filter. And using all that, we translate a lot back to the phone, where the phone knows all of that same stuff too. So I say I tilt at this degree. It's saying, okay, well, you're pointing this at 32 degrees off north. And I'll say you go 32 degrees off north.

Now, can you customize the ball and put LED lights in it or do anything fun to make it flash and light up?

It does have LED lights on, and that's kind of a big thing that people were doing on the hack day, is just, let's light it up, let's get it to move, let's maybe get it to spin the lights around. Kind of like an interactive toy. And that's probably the thing that the cats like the most, is that, yeah.

This is torture for cats.

This is torture for cats. Kids love it. We made the API so easy that, you know, on our hack day, everybody was able to just get it going. And even we had some kids that were really like 13 years old just got the API and started making something kind of neat. So how long does the battery last inside? Like, right now, going full speed at like 40 minutes to an hour. You can, you know, max up the lipos inside of there, the lithium polymer batteries. To get a little more time. We're gonna charge with inductive charging, so you don't have to plug anything, and you just set it on a charger. And the cool thing is, since your phone's got, you know, Facebook and all this cool stuff, just make it light up when you get a Facebook message. So you're going to the bathroom and you're like, oh, I got message instead of checking my phone, or. Yeah, your balls are.

Seems to be pretty easy to play.

With your balls, Adam. It's simple. It's simple to play with their balls, and it's pretty easy to break them right now too.

And where did we get on the waiting list for these things?

So on our website, we're going to put up a pre order for just people who want to pre order their own. For now, it'll probably be a little higher than 40 right now, but through enough sales and pre orders from companies, we can hopefully get this down to a really good price.

Now, on stage at techstars, you were showing off some ways to hack it, and you can send some code to the. Tell me a little bit about what you could do as a programmer or a hacker who wants to do something custom with your phone.

All right, so one of the really cool things is the way that we develop the chip in there is we allow you to kind of run your own wires onto the serial port. So somebody who wanted to could just control their garage door or start their car. I mean, we did all of this with this board so you can also just take a normal RC car.

Bring that over here. I want to get.

Yep. So you can take a normal RC car, cut the motor wires, connect our board to it, and then you have the simplest control RC car from your phone that you could ever imagine.

That's cool. So you can actually use this to technology to do things other than balls?

Oh, yeah. This technology can be used to do a lot of things. The ball's just a really fun, like, kind of unique way to do this. And it's really flexible. Like, if you made a car, it's a car. Like, the games have to be around a car. You make a ball. Like, monkey ball, soccer, golf. Like, the game started kind of coming out. We're like, let's make the ball. That might have been a bad decision because the ball is very, very, very, very difficult to make. Just we're both very good at robotics, and it was still very difficult to make. So cars and humanoid robots are kind of easy for us. The ball was crazy because it's rotating. So you're like, so where did the episodes come from?

What kind of party were you at? I think I'll make a robotic ball.

Actually, the story's pretty funny. Ian and I kicking around the idea. We made the dev board. We could control all kinds of cool stuff. We're sitting at a table, and Ian's like, man, I want something. I just pull out of my pocket, throw it on the table, and it does something really cool. I was like, let's make some marbles. I was like, well, let's make a robotic ball. Like, he's kind of made one before in the past, but it was very challenging. Again, he's like, let's do it. Let's really just focus on it and let's do it. And so that's what we did. And we made it and tested it, and we broke it a lot. And then, you know, past couple of days, we had to make a presentation to show it off.

Very cool. Was this the first time you guys have shown it off to a few things in town here, but this is the first time you really have come out and shown it off?

Yeah, kind of. We took it to Aspen Maker Faire, like, so all the. All the nerds liked it. We took it out here on the Pearl, and we had girls playing with it and kids and everything, because it was like, hey, girls, come play with their balls. You know, it's funny. It's not a joke book. Yeah. All the ball jokes. The kid playing with your.

Well, probably isn't well.

And actually, it's funny. Like in one of our presentations, we usually do that. Like, you know, we say a funny joke and then somebody was like, well, his kids could play with it. And I was like, man, you gotta stay away. You gotta watch out. Because I was like, like, your kids could play with our toys. I just. I had to hold myself back a little bit. But how's it powered? Is it. You have to plug it in and charge it, or is it removing batteries? No, we're gonna use inductive charging, so you just set it on the pad.

So where's the battery in here?

What is it?

Right now, the. The batteries are right in the middle. We're using two lithium polymers.

What else is here? So there's two wires, and that's what causes the locomotion to happen.

Two wheels.

So it's basically like a hamster inside of a ball. We have some motors on the bottom. We have our communication system, little microcontroller, and then a sensor board that tells the ball which way it's facing so that we can orient the ball with the phone. So we tilt the phone forward, the ball will go in that direction.

Who are you?

I'm Ian. I'm the CEO of Gearbox. Very cool.

Cool product. Very impressive. I want one. Thank you so much for showing up.

Awesome tutorials.

Sam.