Category Archives: General News

Bantam Tools Acquires Evil Mad Scientist

Bantam Tools Logo

Lenore Edman, Windell Oskay, and Bre Pettis standing in front of Bantam Tools headquarters
Bantam Tools Acquires Evil Mad Scientist to Accelerate Development of Next Generation Art and Handwriting Machines

Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman of Evil Mad Scientist named CTO and COO of Bantam Tools 

PEEKSKILL, N.Y, January 16, 2024 — Bantam Tools, the desktop CNC manufacturer that builds exceptional computer controlled machines for innovators, is excited to announce the acquisition of Evil Mad Scientist, the designer and manufacturer of popular computer-controlled drawing and handwriting machines that provide versatile solutions to artists and educators. Dr. Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman, co-founders of Sunnyvale, California based Evil Mad Scientist, will move to Peekskill, New York, headquarters of Bantam Tools, as CTO and COO overseeing technical development and operations. 

“We are excited to announce the acquisition of Evil Mad Scientist and its amazing art machines,” said Bre Pettis, CEO of Bantam Tools. “I’ve been a fan of the art plotters and have been using them for years. We have an amazing year planned where we intend to release several new and different creative machines. This acquisition will help accelerate these new products and we are very excited about bringing on these innovative and creative machines and Evil Mad Scientist’s co-founders. I’ve been friends with Windell and Lenore for almost two decades since my days at Make: Magazine. We share a love of creative tools that empower our users.” 

As developers of popular drawing and handwriting machines, the acquisition of Evil Mad Scientist will expand offerings at Bantam Tools to include art machines, in addition to the high-precision Bantam Tools Desktop CNC Milling Machines. This added product category of drawing and handwriting machines will give artists, designers, and educators the ability to create new art forms, convert digital art to physical artwork using traditional materials, and teach the next generation to use computer controlled art machines to express themselves. 

The next generation of Bantam Tools art machines that Dr. Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman are helping to develop will be marketed under the Bantam Tools NextDraw™ brand. The Bantam Tools NextDraw will be manufactured in Peekskill, New York, and will launch in the spring of 2024 as a reliable and well-supported computer-controlled drawing machine that provides versatile solutions to artists, innovators and educators.

“We are thrilled to be joining forces with Bantam Tools,” said Dr. Windell Oskay, CTO of Bantam Tools. “With my background in atomic physics, I bring nearly 30 years of machining and designing computer controlled instrumentation. I am especially looking forward to leading technical development and harnessing the combined experience of our hardware and software engineering teams to build the next generation of creative machines.” 

I’m also excited to be joining Bantam Tools and bringing to the company a focus on customer service and product documentation that has been so important to us at Evil Mad Scientist,” noted Lenore Edman, COO of Bantam Tools. “I’ll be continuing to support our existing customers with love and a supply of spare parts. I hope they’ll be as excited as I am about what my fantastic team at Bantam Tools will be building next.” 

To learn more about Bantam Tools and the Evil Mad Scientist products, visit bantamtools.com.

Bantam Tools builds exceptional computer-controlled machines for innovators, engineers, artists and educators, including desktop CNC machines with professional reliability and precision and computer-controlled art machines that are fast, automatic, mimic handwriting and create physical art from digital designs using traditional materials. Bantam Tools machines are easy to set up, ready to use right out of the box, and like its namesake the bantam rooster, punch above their weight class, empowering mechanical engineers, product designers, entrepreneurs, electrical engineers, machinists, designers, students, educators, artists and digital fabricators to stay ahead of schedule and under budget. All of Bantam Tools Desktop Milling Machines are clean, safe, and easy to use, making them a great choice for any lab, shop, classroom or studio. To learn more about the Peekskill, New York, company, at bantamtools.com, on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook at @bantamtools, or on  Medium. Bantam Tools is hiring

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Evil Mad Scientist interview in HackSpace Magazine

Hackspace magazine article pages with title

I was recently interviewed for HackSpace Magazine and just got the copy in the mail! It’s a meandering conversation about how Evil Mad Scientist got started and covers some of the wide variety of projects we’ve worked on.

Picture of hackspace magazine pages showing Evil Mad Scientist Projects

In the same issue, there’s a clock kit review that is very complimentary of the Alpha Clock Five and mentions the Bulbdial Clock Kit which they reviewed in a previous issue.

Hackspace magazine pages showing clock kit reviews

Thanks to Hackspace for the opportunity to ramble on about the things we love!

Opening back up

Evil Mad Scientist front door with signs about opening and COVID-19 requirements

A couple of months ago, we wrote about our status under our county’s shelter in place order and it’s time for an update! The situation has been gradually changing locally and the newest guidelines allow for us to bring our employees back to work. With their help, we’re starting to ramp production back up and that feels great.

Our Sunnyvale retail location will remain closed to walk-in business for the time being, but we are offering no-contact local pickup for orders placed online.

We have been excited to be able to help out on a few COVID-19 research projects during this time. We want to reiterate that if your order is related to health care or related to COVID-19 research, please let us know so that we can prioritize and expedite your order.

We’re grateful to all of our customers and community for being so understanding and helpful during this time.

Sheltering in place

Picture of shop door with closure sign on it.

We started Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories in 2006 as a “personal project blog”, to capture, organize, and share some of the things we do for fun. It has evolved over time to become a resource for our customers as well as a way for us to share interesting and educational information from a variety of sources. It also gradually become our livelihood, as the hobby projects started to take over more and more of our lives.

Right now, we want to let you know where we’re at. Here in Santa Clara County (the south end of the San Francisco Bay Area), we are under a Shelter in Place order due to COVID-19. Windell and I are working from home, and checking in on Zener at the shop regularly. We’re bringing work home with us, and have even been able to start shipping some orders again. Our employees cannot come in, which means that assembly, kitting, packing and shipping have slowed to what the two of us can do.

We’ll be doing our best to communicate with our customers about their orders and we’re doing tech support and customer service as usual. Orders will likely be going out every few days instead of every day. Some items will not be restocked as quickly.

As we work through these details, there are a lot of resources here on the blog that may be useful to all of you doing your part by staying at home.

We have many tutorials for projects that can be made from things you can find around the house. We have lots of cooking projects, some of which are also math or science projects. We have a series of basics articles you may enjoy for people getting started in electronics. And our linkdumps have lots interesting links to occupy your time.

We want you all to stay safe and healthy! Please reach out to us if you have questions, concerns, blog post ideas, or pictures of projects that we may have helped you instigate!

Thank you all for being such a great community, such amazing customers, and sharing with and helping each other so generously!