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About Me — Francis Tse
An inventor and tinkerer— building an open-sourced companion robot to see how far we can push technology to work for the rest of us
Born Tinkerer
Ever since I was a very young kid, I have been fascinated by logic.
In those days, the early 60s, there were no computers or even stuff like logic gates in Macau, where I grew up. Our family was not well off, or at least I did not have any money to buy things. Luckily, there was always stuff lying around that people didn’t want. I collected these to build things. One of them was a simple logic circuit.
I took a piece of wood. Put nails on it. Wired it up with copper wires and parts from a broken flashlight. The switches were really nails that I used as terminals to direct the current to different paths. And if conditions all lined up, the light bulb at the end would light up.
I would use my logic circuit to solve different problems. For example, I could wire it up for rain prediction by checking on conditions such as whether the color of the sky was red the day before, whether it was full of dark clouds now, whether the atmosphere felt heavy, etc. After all the conditions were wired up, I would click the switch that I took off from the flashlight, to see if the…
