Tessel

01 / WHAT IT BUILT

What the company did

Tessel was a microcontroller brand from Seattle startup Technical Machine (co-founded by Jon McKay), built for hardware hackers who knew JavaScript. The original Tessel was an open-source, Arduino-like board — an ARM Cortex-M3 with WiFi and 32MB of flash and RAM — programmable entirely in JavaScript or Node.js, with plug-and-play hardware modules. Its crowdfunding campaign raised $196,682, nearly four times its $50,000 goal. The follow-up Tessel 2 used a MediaTek MT7620 running Linux/OpenWrt with an Atmel SAMD21 real-time I/O coprocessor.

03 / EVENT HISTORY

Events in the structured record

1. 2013
   Crowdfunding

   Technical Machine launches Tessel on Kickstarter, raising $196,682 — nearly four times its $50,000 goal — and ships beta units.

2. 2015
   Tessel 2 and community independence

   Technical Machine develops the Tessel 2 and transfers the Tessel Project's ownership and direction to the independent open-source community.