Each hour we are featuring a woman we admire who is currently doing amazing work right in the tech/maker/art/science space. Woman of the hour, Electronics Hacker Jeri Ellsworth!

Jeri Ellsworth is an American entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer. She is best known for, in 2004, creating a Commodore 64 emulator within a joystick, called Commodore 30-in-1 Direct to TV. The “computer in a joystick” could run 30 video games from the early 1980s, and was very popular during the 2004 Christmas season, at peak selling over 70,000 units in a single day via the QVC shopping channel. She is a pinball machine aficionado and owns over 60 full-sized pinball arcade games (Lifehacker article here).

Jeri recently put up photos of her “chip fab”. She writes, “It took me 2 years to achieve my dream of making transistors and simple IC’s at home.”