Chris Shaw - BrightSparks Class of 2017 Award Winner

RS Components partnered with Electronics Weekly on its inaugural EW BrightSparks programme to celebrate the achievements of the UK’s most talented young electronics design engineers and help to inspire and encourage new entrants to the industry.

Chris Shaw is the lead engineer at the company Sensible Object, makers of the technology game Beasts of Balance (now on sale in John Lewis and Harrods, amongst others). The original founders of Sensible Object had started working on a prototype with the Engineering department at Bath University, which is where Chris became involved, helping with the hardware – for example using 3D printing, Arduino, Autodesk Forge and Unity – and became the fifth member of the team. He has progressed to become the senior hardware designer at the company with wide-ranging responsibilities.

The 26-year-old originally studied Mechanical Engineering at Bath University, but concentrated more on electronics, following on to complete his master’s degree. His design project involved a 3D controller for drones, which was funded by Innovate UK. This work has currently been put on hold to concentrate on Beasts of Balance.

Chris greatly values the community spirit of Makerversity, saying he was able to tap into fellow members’ experience (in developing Apple firmware) when he was grappling with interrupt handling issues using the ARM® mbed™ platform and Bluetooth communications.

A very intelligent and motivated individual, his talent for electronics shines through.

Wearing many hats

We caught up with Chris at the EW BrightSparks Awards lunch at the Houses of Parliament in May 2017 to find out more. Because it’s a small, start-up, Chris says the team at Sensible Object each wear many different hats. “I take care of the electronics design, manufacturing and testing procedures for the electronics, I am also interim head of logistics and customer support.” Many hats indeed!

For the next few years, at least, Chris hopes to continue working with Sensible Object to expand its Beasts of Balance game, both in terms of developing the electronics, but also Chris is enjoying the logistics challenges his interim role is throwing up. He says: “I’m really keen to stay in the start-up area and continue working with smaller companies because that’s where you get more responsibilities and the opportunity to make cool things from prototype to production.” 

Getting into electronics

We asked Chris how he got into electronics design: “I got into electronics quite late. I studied Mechanical Engineering at University and also did quite a lot of software and electronics development over the last 2 years, so I ended being a mish-mash engineer that could do a little bit of everything – which is exactly what the start-up project wanted. I really got inspired to do electronics because you can make the physical thing, and then make it move and actually do stuff and I really wanted to make cool products! When I started university, companies like Dyson and Apple were very aspirational and cool companies to work for, all their product designs involve mechanical, software, electronics – I just wanted to have a piece of everything.”

Chris pointed out too that during his time at secondary school, he had no idea what engineering actually was, he just happened to be really good at maths and physics, which he believes was the same for a lot of his peers.

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