At a Glance:
- Follow along as Machine Design interviews John Ellis, an entrepreneur, inventor and founder of Massachusetts-based engineering consulting firm Optics for Hire.
- The Optics for Hire team—a group of engineers, designers and experts in optical technology—design systems that are based on the use of photon manipulation for a range of applications, including microscopes, cameras, lighting, medical devices, projectors, night vision and thermal imaging.
- The three-part series includes discussions on the RollRanger, a tape edge sensor (Part 1); optical solutions for medical devices (Part 2); and the role of AI in future inventions (Part 3).
Countless light technologies used in everyday life are taken for granted.
But that changes when one speaks to John Ellis, a serial inventor, who often brings real-world challenges to his team of primarily physicists to figure out solutions.
“That could be anything from light emitting from a streetlight, which must make a particular pattern on the ground to meet a transportation standard or a camera that’s looking at boxes moving on a conveyor belt and trying to read bar codes or dimensional information,” Ellis said.
His Massachusetts-based company, Optics for Hire, provides contract optical systems, design and prototyping and manufacturing services. “It’s just a very wide range of applications, but it always involves sending light, which could be in any wavelength or collecting light,” explained Ellis. “We’re designing the lenses that collect that light or send light, the mechanics that hold those lenses, and then electronics to process the light or move motors or drive lasers.”
For the most part, solutions revolve around optical engineering, spanning the gamut of products. As a simple example, there’s “little optic” installed inside Mattel’s Barbie doll, and for a more complex example, look to the $100,000 microscopes that Argonne National Lab uses to look at scintillators.
Licensing Technology as a Revenue Stream
Over the past few years Optics for Hire has developed its own products and started licensing its technology to create commercial solutions.
“One of those products was a little toy that has spinning fan blades, that has animation on it,” said Ellis. “Our engineers figured out how to make the animation work based on the timing of the fan blade spinning, and each fan blade had a bunch of little LEDs. You can see these at any kind of retail outlet—Walmart, Target, Walgreens—and our customer, who uses this technology has then licensed it to Disney and Marvel and other companies and put animation of the Frozen movies or Jurassic Park movies on it. So that was a little technology that we licensed and got a feeling for the potential of licensing. That has sold many millions of units.”
Solving Everyday Problems with Basic Sensor Technology
A natural tinkerer, Ellis is apt to find solutions to everyday niggling problems. A case in point was not knowing whether his kids’ hockey skates needed sharpening. Ellis took his query to the office and worked with his engineering team to figure out a solution.
“We came up with a sensor that would use a camera to look at the edge of a hockey skate and determine whether that skate needed to be sharpened again,” he said.
The blade sharpening project was soon nixed because Ellis realized the cost of manufacturing the product would outweigh the value added. Instead, he moved on to solving the problem of knowing when to sharpen knives.
“Most people, when they’re sharpening their knives at home, don’t have any feedback methods—it’s all subjective,” explained Ellis. “How well does it cut a tomato? Is it cutting paper easily or not easily?”
The outcome of his team’s effort was an optical system sold by the Farberware brand. The knife-sharpening system could be used with electric or any kind of knife sharpener and would signal the sharpness level with the aid of a light. A green light indicated the knife was sharp, a yellow light meant it needed more sharpening, and a red light signalled the knife was dull and needed sharpening.
“It gives you that feedback that is based not on some subjective method, but actual data about how light was scattering off the edge of it,” explained Ellis. “This was an indication of thickness of the blade, which then was negative sharpness of the blade.”
Patented Sensor Finds the Edge of Your Tape
When Ellis was frustrated with the annoying task of peeling back the tape at the edge of a roll, his natural inclination was to find a better way. “I couldn’t find the edge,” he said. “Even with my glasses, I would stare at the roll of tape, and I would feel around for it. I could never figure out where it was. And then, even if I did eventually start to figure out where it was, it would tear as I was ripping it off the edge. It was just annoying enough that I had a conversation with our team about whether there was a way that you could optically sense the edge of a roller tape—and you must do it very inexpensively.”
His team came up with a system known as the RollRanger, which doesn’t use optics at all. “It’s a lot more like a phonograph record with a little pin,” described Ellis. “If you can imagine an old phonograph record, the pin was going around and going up in those pits around the track to play the music.”
A patented sensor moves along the roll of tape until the “pin” reaches the edge of the tape. An LED indicator light comes on as the pin senses the edge. A scraper forms part of the design and can be used to uniformly lift the tape. “Because we all have a lot of better things to do with our day than get frustrated with rolls of tape,” quipped Ellis.
The RollRanger is for sale on Amazon and through retailers.
“It’s been a lot of fun to learn about selling consumer products and getting the price point right and getting the packaging right and getting the marketing messages correct,” said Ellis. “This is really precision mechanics. You have to know how to create a spring just the right way. You have to know about manufacturing and injection molding to make a product work properly. The skills that we have from optical engineering are applicable to lots of different things. Some are really important problems, and some are not so important, but annoying enough to want to solve.”
Watch additional parts of this interview series with John Ellis:
Part 2: Behind the Optical Solutions that Help Detect Malaria and Treat Brain Cancer
Part 3: Ask the Inventor: What Room Does AI Leave for Inventing New Solutions?
