HELLO, I’M

Christopher Hansen

Though I was born in the Chicago area, I mostly grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio.  As a teenager, I spent nearly every available hour either working on my own engineering projects, or doing any number of activities with my Boy Scout troop.  

Though I generally considered schooling to be a burden to my education, I was active in a number of clubs and groups, including the high school orchestra (I play(ed) viola), Latin Club, Chess Club, Science Bowl, and Science Olympiad.  In high school, my favorite class was drafting class, and I still use computer aided drafting regularly today.  I also enrolled in a welding class at a local community college as well as pilot ground school, though I never got my pilot’s license.

I believe I learned many more useful life skills in Boy Scouts than I did in school.  I loved camping and backpacking and all of the preparation and planning involved.  I became the Senior Patrol Leader in my troop and later attained the rank of Eagle Scout.  Scouting also allowed me to interact with a more diverse group of people, in far more diverse settings, than was ever possible in a school setting.

I became extremely interested in radio control aircraft and built dozens of functional models.  I started with kits, then moved on to creating my own designs.  I still remember building and flying one of the first quadcopter designs (someone else’s design) over 20 years ago, back when that kind of thing was just becoming technologically possible.  

I realized that many of my own project goals required a knowledge of electronics, and when I was 15, I began reading electronics books – dozens of them.  I even blasted through an entire stack of 30 year old electronics training binders that my dad still had stored in boxes in our basement, which meant that I learned a lot about outdated technologies, like vacuum tubes.

While still in high school, I started an online business, designing and selling small electronics related to my radio-control hobby.  I did all my own design and assembly, and I even acid-etched my own printed circuit boards.  I grew that business during college and I still run that business today.

I moved to Urbana to start college in 2002.  I enrolled in “general engineering”, thinking that this was a type of undecided major, but I quickly switched to electrical engineering.  Like high school, I did not feel that institutionalized schooling was very useful, but being around other people who were interested in engineering was very useful.  I invested most of my time into working on my own projects and designs, and building things with other people who had similar interests.

A few memorable college projects include: using computer vision to teach a computer how to play a 1978 Star Trek pinball machine (2004), building an autonomous GPS-guided photography aircraft (2005-2006), and a randomized lighting controller for a vending machine we called “Caffeine”.  At the same time, I was developing dozens of new products for my electronics business.

While in college, I became the youngest undergraduate teaching assistant for GE 100, then for ECE 395, where I helped other students develop their own electronics projects, just like I’d been doing myself since high school.

In 2005, I was contracted by the Army Corps of Engineers to design environmental sensors for their Engineer Research and Development Center – Construction Engineering Research Lab (ERDC-CERL).  I designed and built sensors to count and track endangered Indiana bats, and helped deploy those sensors on site.  Because the sensors had to operate for a long period of time in the field, a significant component of the project was developing very low-power electronics.  I abandoned traditional practice and designed a super low-frequency hysteretic power converter which was extremely efficient.  In 2007, ERDC-CERL asked me to write a patent for my sensor designs, which I did, and that pretty much concluded my work there. 

In the spring of 2006, I started contracting for one of my professor’s startup companies, SmartSpark Energy Systems.  They developed battery equalizer technology and started moving into solar and ultra-capacitor technology.  

As I was nearing graduation in 2006, I was working as a teaching assistant, contracting for multiple companies, and running my own electronics business.  For my myriad of electronics design work, I was granted the Grainger Award and was asked to give a presentation at the award ceremony – an honor normally only reserved for PhD candidates to talk about their research.

By the time I’d graduated college, my small business had over 1,500 customers from 31 different countries.  It seemed like it was going to be sustainable, so instead of taking a “real job” after college, I focused on growing my own startup.  I began to shed the contract work and I think the last time I worked for anyone else was in 2007 or 2008.

In the fall of 2006, I bought a home in Urbana.  This kept me close to the resources I developed while in college, and was literally 2 blocks from my apartment, so moving wasn’t too hard.

The home that I bought was previously owned by a landlord who let it decline significantly.  It needed a lot of work, and over the years, the carpentry skills that I began to acquire in childhood were honed and tested while fixing up this old house.  In that time, I learned to appreciate and adore old homes.  In 2007, I was given the “Oomph Award” by the Preservation and Conservation Association (PACA) for my work.

Over the years, I’ve done a lot of restoration work on old homes, and many of my neighbors now come to me for tools/materials and advice on how to handle old-house problems.

In the years after graduating college, I focused heavily on growing my electronics business and restoring my home.  My business grew to the point where I could start hiring other people.

That pretty much sums up how and why I came to be in Urbana doing what I do.  I am a very project-oriented person and the past 10 years of my life, besides working on my business and doing normal life things, has been spent working on one project after another.  Some projects are silly, some are serious, some make money, and some spend it.  This site serves to organize those projects.  I’m not a huge fan of social media, but I thought it would be nice to organize my work someplace, here we are.