All posts by Windell Oskay

About Windell Oskay

Co-founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

Make a peepmobile

By on

Ready to roll!

Here’s how to take your left over Marshmallow Peeps, add a few components, and make them into pimped-out peepmobiles.

Okay, so Easter has come and gone. Really gone. And if you’re like us, you didn’t eat all of your Peeps. Have they gone bad by now? Probably not. As it turns out, the yellow chick-shaped Peeps are made all year long to build up enough supply for each easter, so the ones that you get for Easter could *already* be a year old. (So why can’t you buy them all year long? You can… you just have to know where to look.)

Even if you’re still saving your Chicks to eat them later, you’re not alone. The official Peeps site has a poll up asking whether you like your Peeps “Fresh from the package or aged to perfection.” According to the results so far, a full 12% of peepeaters like to wait six months or more.

However, we seem to be digressing. Let’s just go ahead and assume that you weren’t going to eat all of them. Then whatever’s left, you can make into Peepmobiles.
Continue reading Make a peepmobile →

This entry was posted in Play with your food and tagged , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Interactive LED coffee tables

By on

BWC's new coffee table

Last year at Maker Faire, we showed off our interactive LED dining table. There, we met the fine folks at Because We Can, who make amazing mostly wooden things with a little help from their robot. We eventually all decided on collaborating to design and build a new series of interactive coffee tables. We’ve just wrapped up the project and are introducing them this weekend at Maker Faire.

Besides what is written about them on this page, you can read more about them on the
Because We Can Blog, and you can also see lots of photos in the product pages for the two different coffee table designs: the wave and the ripple.

The new tables are designed to look really great whether or not you can see the LEDs. The wooden bases are elegant and attractive, and also if you go up to one and touch it, it will respond by pleasantly lighting up in that area. The tables are designed to respond in a subtle and gentle fashion to stimulus provided by human interaction. They are normally dim and constant– the most you’ll see in a dark room is a faint glow of twinkling like the night sky. When you set your glass down on the table, however, the table “sees” the motion that induces a slow ripple starting in that location that spreads out to other areas of the table as it dissipates. The overall effect is a bit like touching a pool of water, in that your local disturbance turns into an overall gentle rippling, and eventually settles down. It is decidedly not a disco floor– there is no blinking, no programmed oscillations, or for that matter, any digital electronics at all– the circuitry is completely analog to improve aesthetics and reduce eyestrain.

Continue reading Interactive LED coffee tables →

This entry was posted in Electronics, EMSL Projects and tagged , . Bookmark the Permalink.

A few more sugar sculptures

By on

Sugar Soliton

This is a rendering of the sculpture Soliton by Bathsheba Grossman, as output by the CandyFab 4000; it’s a three-dimensional form made out of pure sugar. Seeing Bathsheba’s sculptures at the 2006 Maker Faire was the inspiration for us to build the machine in the first place, so it’s quite exciting to be able to print this. (The design is used by her kind permission– please buy some of her sculptures!)

This is our second try at fabbing this difficult shape. Our first attempt was at a somewhat smaller size and ran into trouble with the thin beams when *one* of our thin horizontal layers turned out to be too weakly bonded. To avoid a second failure, we enlarged the model but also ran the heater element very hot and for an extended period of time to make the pixels srong, but also larger, more rounded, and richer in color– a darker caramel.

In this view we’re looking right down at the printed layers of sugar; we think that the grain of the layers makes this look a lot like a wood carving.

Of course, that’s not all that we’ve been printing this week. Here is one more large-scale object that we made:

mobius monster

The shape is a 3/4 twist mobius strip with a square cross section and windows cut at regular intervals in all of the sides the side. Even though it’s hollow, it still weighs seven pounds and fourteen ounces– that’s a lot of sugar. We’re bringing this monster to Maker Faire this weekend, so you can see it for yourself, too.

This entry was posted in Art, CNC, EMSL Projects, Play with your food and tagged , , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Maker Faire 2007 is this weekend

By on

Maker Faire 2007 is this coming weekend, May 19-20, in San Mateo, CA. We’ll be bringing the CandyFab 4000 to show off. Besides the CandyFab, we also have one or two (or maybe even three) other projects at the Maker Faire, depending on how you count, which we’re scurrying to (1) finish up and (2) document sometime this week.

Consequently, our publishing schedule will continue to be a little wonky for the next week– so little to do so much time and all that! So, stay evil and come meet us at the Maker Faire!

This entry was posted in Field Trips and tagged , . Bookmark the Permalink.

Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar

By on

CandyFab Sign

In February we gave a sneak preview of our project to construct a home-built three dimensional fabricator. Our design goals were (1) a low cost design leveraging recycled components (2) large printable volume emphasized over high resolution, and (3) ability to use low-cost printing media including granulated sugar. We are extremely pleased to be able to report that it has been a success: Our three dimensional fabricator is now fully operational and we have used it to print several large, low-resolution, objects out of pure sugar.

Coil Screw, dodecahedron

Continue reading Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar →

This entry was posted in Art, CNC, Electronics, EMSL Projects, Engineering, Play with your food, Robotics and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.

I want this toy.

By on

I’ve always been a big fan of marble runs, starting with the Gravitram in Portland, Oregon (pictures), all the way up to the modern marvels like this one by Matthias Wandel. While I’ve been dreaming about making my own amazing machine, a toy company in the UK has gone ahead and made it easy. Take a look at this amazing line of Techno-Ball sets by Cheatwell Games– in sizes from a diminutive 173 pieces to the 920 piece monster pictured here– with two independent motorized marble-lifting chains. (I want the big set. Maybe two.)

It looks like these are easy to get in the UK, even from Amazon.co.uk, but it’s not obvious that they’re even for sale in the states.

So, I’d like to ask: does anyone know where I can order a set (or two)?

Update:

A reader left a comment about Steve Jackson’s Chaos Machine— a giant ball-run construction toy that he brings to conventions. It’s apparently so cool that it has its own fansite.

The Chaos Machine is made out of a number of Chaos Tower sets from chaostoy.com. The sets can be built in a number of configurations, like the six-foot-tall one pictured to the left. This looks like a really fabulous construction system– enough so to change my mind about which set to get! The tracks look a lot nicer than the ones in the techno-ball set, and it has all the features of “real” marble runs: trampolines and catchers, vortices, switches, accumulators, a series of tubes, and probably more that I can’t see in the photos.

So… can anyone beat that?

This entry was posted in Everything Else and tagged . Bookmark the Permalink.

Laying out printed circuit boards with open-source tools

By on

There has historically been, and still is, a lack of good, free MacOS native EDA (electronic design automation) software. The situation has somewhat improved in the past few years because the X11 layer in Mac OS X allows graphical unix applications to run natively on the Mac, concurrently with other programs. I recently learned to use some of these tools in the gEDA suite to lay out printed circuit boards. These (loosely, if at all, organized) notes should be helpful to anyone that wants to get started making PCBs using a mac, linux, or other unix-like system.
Continue reading Laying out printed circuit boards with open-source tools →

This entry was posted in EMSL Projects, Software and tagged , , . Bookmark the Permalink.