Just announced on the OSHWA site, the OSI and OSHWA have signed a co-existence agreement around the use of the community generated open source hardware logo. From the announcement:

This agreement means that each group separately has control of their respective logo and in particular that the Open Source Hardware community will be able to continue to use the Open Source Hardware logo.

We’re very happy that the open source communities were able to work together on this issue.

The ROBOT PARTY is tomorrow (Thursday) at 8PM ET / 5PM PT! This is a very special edition broadcasted LIVE from Evil Mad Science that is celebrating the fantastic website LetsMakeRobots and their recent version 4 fundraiser! If you donated to their v4 fund before May 1st, then you were entered into a drawing to win 5 fabulous prizes from seeedstudio!

But the fun doesn’t stop there! How are we to determine who will win these prizes? With a robot of course! Read on more!

Continue reading →

Erin “RobotGrrl” Kennedy is currently our artist in residence at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Erin writes (via Google+):

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a profile of us yesterday.

“In recent times, they have helped create an accepted definition of open source hardware, participated in the annual Open Source Hardware Summit in New York, and are in the exploratory stages of building a foundation to support open source hardware.”

You can read the rest of the (front page!) article here.

It’s a busy week at the labs here. We’re getting ready for Maker Faire this weekend in San Mateo, CA– the biggest, baddest, and most awesomest DIY festival of the year.

We’ll be showcasing an updated version of our mechanical Pong game. We’ve added a curved playing field, new user-friendly knobs, and a host of other improvements that we’ll plan to write about at a later date. We hope you’ll come by and try it out–we’ll be on the west side of the Expo hall.

Some of the other projects that we’ve taken to Maker Faire in the last few years include our Interactive LED Dining Table, CandyFab, Bristlebots, Interactive LED Coffee Table, Peggy 2, and Meggy Jr RGB.

We’re also participating in the Open Source Hardware Panel, on Saturday at 1 pm at the Innovation Stage at the south end of the Expo Hall.

We’ll have much more to say about this later, but we’re thrilled to announce our new collaboration with Bruce Shapiro, Ben Trombley, and Brian Schmalz. While we’re demonstrating the Tabletop-Pong game, Bruce and friends will be giving a sneak peek at the results of our collaboration: a fantastic new version of the Eggbot kit, which we are preparing for release as an open source kit sometime this summer.

You can sign up here for more info about the kit, and you can try out the Eggbots– or just see them in action –in the center of the Expo Hall.

Lastly, to help get everyone else in the DIY mood, we’re having a DIY Fever sale over at the store, with 20% off of Evil Mad Science open-source kit favorites such as the Larson Scanner, Meggy Jr RGB and the Bulbdial Clock, and 10% off of everything else!

Happy hacking, and we’ll hope to see you all at the Faire!

We’ve seen a lot of great Arduino Halloween projects out there this year. A few of them have been submitted to our Arduino contest over at Instructables, and we’d love to see more. The entry deadline is Nov. 15, so you’ve still got time to send them in.

Speaking of contests, the Make Halloween contest deadline is here. Quick, get those microcontroller projects entered before midnight on Nov. 3!

Over at Instructables, we’re sponsoring an Arduino contest with prizes including Meggy Jr RGB kits. The rules are simple: use Arduino in your project! And by Arduino, we mean any project involving the Arduino IDE in some way. (And yes, you can use your Meggy Jr RGB or your Peggy 2 for this contest.) We look forward to seeing your projects and would love to see them in the flickr auxiliary, too.

We’re thrilled to see Peggy 2 on the cover of Make Magazine vol. 18 which is showing up in mailboxes now and will be on shelves soon. We were especially excited to get our copy so we could see Windell’s article on making a one-ton servo motor out of an electric automotive jack.

Speaking of our friends at Make, Maker Faire is coming right up! We’ll be there again and hope to see lots of you in San Mateo on May 30 and 31. Discounted tickets are only available through May 20, so if you’re planning to attend, get your tickets soon!

Our new forums have been quietly live and gathering dust (and a few posts) for a little while now, so we thought it was about time to announce their presence.

We hope that the forums will be a good place to share information. Got stuck building one of our electronics projects? Want to know where to find parts in your town? Want to tell us what projects you want to see us cover?

Some of the places you can ask and answer those questions are:

• Ask an Evil Mad Scientist
• Project support
• Suggestion box

Whether you are seeking help on a project, want to beseech us to stop posting articles about peeps (sorry– there’s one more coming this year), or just want to help out your fellow evil mad scientists, please join in!

“Phylm,” pronounced as “film,” is a portmanteau built out of the words “physics” and “film.” It’s also the name given to a new award, The Phylm Prize, aimed at spurring interest in physics and the educational use of new media. Translation: it’s a YouTube contest for physics geeks!

We’ve been invited to sit on the panel of judges for the contest, and so we’ll be looking forward to seeing the submissions. Videos up to two and a half minutes long featuring physics will be judged on clarity, accuracy, and creativity. This year’s winner will receive a check for $100 (US) to be dispersed in June 2007.

You can watch the video announcement at YouTube or (embedded) here:

We are guessing that many of you, our fine readers, already have an interest in physics and/or new media, so get started already! Let’s see your submissions! And don’t let the word “educational” intimidate you– educational propaganda is a highly appropriate diversion for evil mad scientists! (Besides, you could probably use the cash for your world domination scheme.)

Here’s some info from the rules on what kinds of things the clips can contain:

• A critique/analysis of the physics presented in a fictional work. For example,
  could the bus in Speed have made “the jump,” or how strong would Spider-Man
  have to be to throw a car that far?
• An analysis of physics as revealed by the examination of a real-world video clip.
  For example, what forces does a gymnast experience during his routine?
• An explanation/presentation of some physics concept or theory. For example, what is the conservation of energy?

Submissions are due by 12:00 am (GMT) May 1, 2007. We’ll be waiting.