Shopify
Floatplane
Introducing Meet the Makers – our newsletter series where we sit down with a Creator Warehouse employee and get the inside scoop on what exactly goes on here at the company that powers LTTStore.com.
Today we’ve sat down with a face many of you may already recognize – especially fans of the AMD Ultimate Tech Upgrade series and those of you who checked out our booth at OpenSauce this year. It’s Nate from our product design team! We’ve also got a preview of an exciting product he has in the pipeline: the LTT Battery Bank!
In your own words, who are you and what do you do at Creator Warehouse?
I’m Nate! I’m an electrical engineering designer here at CW, working mostly on products that haven’t been released yet, namely the battery bank which we’ve mentioned in a few videos, leaked a few times, and actually brought to OpenSauce this year to show those who were in the know.
How was it – going to OpenSauce?
OpenSauce was a really good experience. It was really cool to meet all the amazing talent that exists across the world. It’s basically just a giant adult science fair; everybody brings cool stuff. So I got to share my battery bank project along with the Nuclear Screwdriver project with the rest of the world.
When did you start at Creator Warehouse and what made you interested in working here?
I think it was in March 2023… so a little over three years ago. So, stuff happened at my previous job – they sort of went under, or at least no longer wanted to retain employees based in Canada. Tynan (another CW employee) is a good friend of mine and said “Hey, we’re hiring,” so I kind of rolled with that, submitted an application, and it worked out. I’d heard of Linus Tech Tips before, but I was never, like, a superfan. Although I did use his videos very early on in my teens whenever I was building my first PC, so it was kind of a cool thing.
What were you doing before?
I worked in the automotive industry; specifically I was designing electric cars. NOT Tesla.
What’s an average day at work like for you?
A lot of days it’s pretty solo to be honest; I work pretty closely with Kyle as my manager, and I work with Tynan somewhat closely, but we’ve started to really divvy up our projects in terms of skillsets, which means I’m doing far more firmware and electrical than Mechanical, which Tynan for example is not taking on. That’s sort of my day-to-day. One nice thing is that I get to work from home some days and bounce childcare back and forth with my wife.
What other hobbies are you into?
Well as some people may have seen in my tech upgrade, I’m very into building my own stuff. Right now, my main project is building a custom track set for my daughter’s Hot Wheels cars using the 3D Printer I got in my upgrade. It’s kind of sick – 3D printing a whole bunch of segmented track assemblies that you can kind of stack together. I design that in Fusion 360 with my home license. My daughter finds it fun but I’m also surprised at how much I’m finding it fun.
Another of my bigger projects is a homemade CNC router table. I’ve gone through a number of adjustments as far as what machine I’m using, but it’s going to be running LinuxCNC. Starting out, I planned to put a Raspberry Pi 4 in it, but then I decided I wanted a bit more performance. I bought a Raspberry Pi 5, put that in, decided that also wasn’t enough, so then I started looking at old computer hardware I had lying around.
I ended up deciding on a laptop – it was my very first laptop actually, an old Sager, I don’t remember the model number, but a chunky, chunky machine. And I was like “okay, let’s try putting this in the machine,” and after about a day of it being on, just with LinuxCNC installed, the power supply died. I went “Well, do I buy a new brick for it to see if it’s just the power supply? Or do I just swap out the computer to a different one?” I ended up dissecting one of my wife’s old computers.
What’s your favorite part of working here?
Probably the flexibility – to a certain extent – in terms of the work I get to do. Like, I get to do a large portion of the design projects from theorizing the business case all the way to actually designing and implementing it. For example, the scope of the battery bank project, which has replaceable battery packs. The flexibility and breadth of being able to cover all these different topics and really delve deep into their design aspects, like if we choose this chip, we get these benefits, or we can’t use this chip because it has a weird leakage current on a pin in this location, which makes it do this weird thing.
We’re also a company that kind of affords you the time you need in order to make the best-possible product, and investigate things. I think it’s funny when you’re trying to develop a new product stack – I mean, people know it takes a long time – but to live through that, well, it takes a really long time. A new product stack for a company is, you know, two to three years minimum if they don’t have any previous experience and aren’t relying on outside design houses essentially.
What was the first project you worked on at CW?
Probably the computer mouse.
Oh… So that’s dead, right?
Yeah, that’s dead. We killed it because of the competition mostly. There’s a lot of good, cheap mice out there which address a lot of the issues that we, and Linus specifically, had with previous peripherals. So it’s just gotten to a point where there’s not a huge amount of innovation you can do to add value in that space, so it didn’t make sense from a business standpoint. That said, we did purchase a lot of chips for that project and maybe there’s value in using them for some other project at some point.
Any weird stories from working at CW?
Doing fittings for the Fashion team is always fun, and providing feedback on their product lines like the backpack.
Are there any projects you’re working on right now that you’d like to share? I’m sort of teeing you up for the Battery Bank here.
Well, what’s really cool about the Battery Bank is, in my opinion, the replaceable pack. So you’ll be able to take the housing apart with one screw, and slot in a new battery pack whenever the original battery starts to wear out. You’re producing a lot less e-waste and you’re also saving money because you’re not replacing the enclosure, or the logic boards, which means we get to put a lot more money into the enclosure design. We were able to make it fully aluminum, both for heatsink reasons as well as making the design feel premium. The capacity is probably going to be in the range of about 20,000 mAh.
---------
We hope you enjoyed today’s edition of the LTTStore Newsletter – stay tuned for more and don’t forget to subscribe using the form at the top of this page!
