HackSpace Magazine issue 31 has an article on kits that inspire, and it includes our very own EggBot!
Thanks, Marc, for the awesome write-up!
All posts by Lenore Edman
Opening back up
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.
Evil Mad Scientist on KidsLab Podcast
I recently had the pleasure of talking with Sven of the KidsLab podcast and the Evil Mad Scientist episode is now live!
KidsLab is “a podcast for parents, educators and everybody passionate about #STEAM education.”
An EggBot Brunch Party
Heather Seeba wrote in to let us know about a gathering she has hosted around the EggBot.
The EggBot brunches have been big hits with my friends. Seeing the fascination and excitement showing new people my EggBot has to be my favorite part of playing with it. The inspiration came when I took the ‘bot to my (engineering) office so colleagues could make eggs for their kids: people were skeptical then couldn’t stay away. Thus for an EggBot brunch, invite awesome nerdy people over, feed them, and gather round the EggBot.
Heather told us about her events earlier this year, before the advent of physical distancing. Many of her suggestions can be adapted for family groups living together and we’ve added some suggestions for remote attendees as well.
Some recommendations for an EggBot brunch include:
- Print outs of suggested (speedy) designs will engage interest quickly.
- For in-person attendees, buffet and easy lap food works better than a sit-down meal so the focus can be on the drawing.
- For remote attendees, have a camera set up pointing at the EggBot so they can see their design being drawn.
- Print some outline designs in advance and let folks color eggs if they like.
- Make a photo shoot station for guests’ creations. Flower pots with herbs and blossoms are a great example.
The photo booths can be used even for eggs decorated without the EggBot!
Linkdump: March 2020
- Dial Indicator Clock
- Anatomy of a rental phishing scam
- The Best Crispy Roast Potatoes Ever Recipe
- Fixie Clock with OLED based “fake NIXIE” tubes
- The placebo effect and veterinary care
- Fruit Walls: Urban Farming in the 1600s
- A list of projects that took an exceptionally long time
- Trash Amps: Nifty DIY speaker and guitar amp kits
- How 3M rapidly scaled mask production
- US National Institutes of Health 3D print exchange
- Projected hospital resource use in COVID-19
- Meet the doctor who ordered the Bay Area’s coronavirus lockdown, the first in the U.S.
Sheltering in place
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!
Open Hardware Summit 2020
The tenth annual Open Hardware Summit will be in New York held online on March 13. I’ll be participating in a panel looking back at the past ten years of open source hardware and looking forward to the next decade as well. The schedule is filled with great speakers and I’m looking forward to seeing so many friends, old and new.
Note: the session has been turned into a podcast so you can listen at your leisure!
Edited March 11 to reflect the change to online.
Edited March 18 to add podcast link.
Windell and Lenore on the Embedded.fm podcast
Elecia and Chris of Embedded.fm invited us to come back on the show for episode 317: WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY DISINTEGRATED?. We also had the added enticement of a low tide adventure after recording.
Lenore had been on the show back in 2014 for episode 40: MWAHAHA SESSION, and Windell was on the following year when The Annotated Build It Yourself Science Laboratory was published for episode 124: PLEASE DON’T LIGHT YOURSELF ON FIRE.
We enjoyed the conversation immensely. We wandered from talking about our kits, to plotter art, to PCB art, even to seaweed. The tide pooling afterwards was wonderful as well!
Linkdump: December 2019
- An interactive history of the subway map @ NYTimes
- Audubon weighs in on memes: When Is a Bird a ‘Birb’? An Extremely Important Guide
- Wired profiles Cliff Stoll
- Lego Axle Sorter
- RasterCarve: A free software package for CNC carving images
- Touchscreen interfaces and the USS John S. McCain
- Waiting For An Earthquake is a demo of the title track on Doc Pop‘s new chiptunes album which was created on a old school Game Boy.
Four Favorite Tools
The kind folks at Cool Tools sent us a copy of Four Favorite Tools, which is a compilation of recommendations from the Cool Tools Podcast, including from the episodes we were on. I’ve had it sitting on my desk since it arrived, and I’ve been flipping through it pretty regularly. It’s been fun to look up the people I know and see what they recommended. It’s also fun to learn about people I don’t know from their browsing their recommendations.
All of the information in the book is also included in each person’s podcast episode on the Cool Tool’s site (here are ours: Lenore and Windell), but I’m much more likely to flip through the book and happen upon something new than I am to go explore online. This book would be a great gift for the tool-users in your life.
Thank you Kevin, Claudia & Mark!
