Our Team
John King
John got an early start with all things technical due to having a father who was an electrical engineer. A child master of taking things apart and rebuilding them, John soon branched into remote control as well. Some of his projects included building an "armchair remote" for his dad's record player (linear tracking and infrared track identification, from DAK), and having a remote control watch (also DAK) that he pretended was a voice control system. In Junior High, John started learning to write programs on a TRS80 Model III (read geek), given to him by his dad. John's senior project in college was to build an RS232 computer interface for an x-ray goniometer.
After graduating from college with a Physics degree, John soon went to work for an AV company as a bench tech. One day, John's company, being shorthanded, sent John to troubleshoot a large control system. His boss intended for John to call tech support for help. Not knowing this, John analyzed the code on his own, and soon had the system up and running. On that day, John graduated from bench tech to programmer, and has never looked back.
Today, fourteen years after his first foray into AV programming, John is trusted by many companies and end users to meet their control system programming needs. A talented designer and programmer, he’s known for his pie-making skills and his big fluffy dog. John is married to a wonderful wife, Ginny, and is involved at his church, with both technical and missions departments.
David Ives
David knew from the 7th grade that he was going to follow in his grandfather's footsteps to become an Electrical Engineer. Graduating from the same college (Oklahoma State University) with a Masters Degree in EE, David went on to join Harrison Systems as a design engineer. David learned of Harrison through his summer job working for Doug Brown Enterprises in Tulsa Oklahoma as an audio systems installer.
David spent 20 years at Harrison, at first programming, concepting and designing large format recording consoles for the broadcast, live, music recording and film re-recording industries. Early in his career at Harrison, he was offered a management role and continued in management for the rest of his tenure at Harrison. However, even in management, he always kept a hand in the technical aspects of the company. Eventually, he was forced to manage exclusively, which, while challenging, deprived him of the hands-on technical experience that he loved.
After leaving Harrison, David joined John at The King's Controls in May of 2008. And in doing so, David has found a way to combine his love of audio (and now video) with hardware and software. Nirvana!
David is married to Renee and together, they have six children, Nathan, Jonathan, Sam, Sweet Margaret Ruth, Jed and Rachel. When not programming or playing with children, David is involved in playing music and his church.
Eric Bernhardt
Eric's mom was an opera singer and his dad was an engineer. To resolve that conflict he had no choice but to go into AV integration. In 1993, after several years of pulling wire, building racks, recording and editing live audio and working on the electronics bench, a sales engineer challenged Eric to create his first graphic user interface. Well, never bet Eric he can't do something. Not only did the graphics entice him, but even more so the nitty-gritty, behind-the-scenes code logic that makes it possible for non-technical people to operate very technical systems.In 1995 Eric created Stikman Engineering, a sole proprietor software business based in Nashville, TN that took on any AV remote control system challenge, with projects from New Jersey to California. For the next eight years Eric honed his skills to evolve increasingly more concise and powerful software authoring techniques that allowed him to tackle the more complex and innovative projects that others preferred to pass on. More importantly he rose above an industry trend amongst programmers, and specialized in not one but both of the dominant AV remote control vendor lines, becoming fluent in the languages and architectures of AMX and Crestron.
Waveguide Consulting, the largest independent AV consultant in the southeast US, recruited Eric in 2003 to create their new programming department. During 2004 Eric developed what would go on to win the “Most Creative New Product” of Infocomm 2004 from AV industry product consultant Gary Kaye – an integrated system demonstrating wide open interoperability between AMX and Crestron processors and touch panels. That same system also introduced the first Waveguide reconfigurable user interface, which allowed the end user to customize their UI for specific persons, all during run time with no code recompiling.
In 2007, having guided a successful Waveguide programming department to include seven programmers, whose client list included Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Sprint, MIT and Emory University, Eric left Waveguide in order to begin formal study of the Chinese language, and return to his status as an independent programmer.
