Category Archives: General News

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!

Uncovering the Silicon at Bay Area Maker Faire 2019

We had so much fun introducing visitors to what is inside of integrated circuits last year at Maker Faire that we’re going to do it again! For Bay Area Maker Faire 2019 we are excited to be again joining forces with Eric Schlaepfer and Ken Shirriff, along with our new collaborator John McMaster. We’ll again be bringing decapped chips along with microscopes to let visitors see what’s inside of famous and interesting integrated circuits. We’ll also be bringing large scale reference models. Bay Area Maker Faire is May 17-19 at the San Mateo County Event Center. You can check out our Maker Faire page and we’ll hope to see you there!