Hackaday Interview: [Grant Imahara]

We had a chance to interview [Grant Imahara] at the 2014 Electronica conference in Munich, Germany. If you don’t recognize [Grant’s] name you’ll probably recognize his face. He’s been on the cast of the television show Mythbusters for about 10 years now. We heard recently that he was leaving the show and that’s how we crossed paths with him.

[Grant] has signed on with Mouser Electronics to promote their Empowering Innovation Together program. They hosted him on a press junket at their booth and since we have a good relationship with Mouser they offered Hackaday an interview slot.

We had a lot of fun talking to [Grant]. Unfortunately the wireless microphones the Mouser videographer was using were picking up a lot of interference. This didn’t directly affect our recording setup as we were using a handheld voice recorder, but we kept getting interrupted as they tried to figure out the problem. Still, as you can see from the video below, we managed to get all the way through a few questions about [Grant’s] introduction to electronics at a young age, his first job out of school working for Industrial Light and Magic, and his advice to others who want to get into electronics and specifically robots. He mentions his early learning was guided by the books of Forrest Mims and that these days learning about electronics is no more than a keyword search away.

21 thoughts on “Hackaday Interview: [Grant Imahara]

    1. I had to look up those McDonalds commercials on Youtube to see why people hated them so much. I mean, he’s an engineer, not an artist. I understand now. Dude must have really had to make his boat payments to agree to those.

  1. doesn’t really explain what he’s going to do with mouser, just a spokesman?
    that page says he’ll be making videos, lets hope they’re better than the make/radioshack videos and not a total ad campaign. Maybe something more like the ben heck show where it’s sponsored by a company but it’s not like they’re trying to tell you to buy all this stuff from it.

    now digikey just needs to hire someone to make cool videos too…and a bunch of other electronics websites

    1. How about an electronics marketing company who throws money to keep a broad hacking community going, who don’t push their presence to said community?
      Now, wouldn’t that be a great dream. ;-)

  2. I had so much respect for the man without knowing much about him, beyond his
    electronics and mechanical skills. I separated him from Mythbusters in my mind, and just
    looked at what he actually did on the show- the guy is good.

    I just couldn’t come up with any reason he should have taken the McDonalds ads, other than
    straight money. It just wasn’t a smart move. He lost some respect from a lot of people with
    those, but when you’re not Brad Pitt 1st tier celebrity, I get that you make money where you can.

    I’m not here to judge him, I have a lot of respect for his skill, and he seems like a decent human
    being, from all the interviews I’ve seen of him. I’m really happy he gave Hackaday an interview,
    and I was happy to watch it. He does seem to have a bit of a twitch and slowness- I’m betting he
    was a bit tipsy or something. It was Germany, after all- can’t blame him if he went out for a few
    awesome german beers :)

    Also, never knew the TH from THX was a person’s initials. That guy must be a sound god or
    something.

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