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!
The egg-bot intrigues me! I’m looking forward to it, and am likely to make one.
Looking forward to the eggbot kit. The idea has always been cool, but completely homebrewing one has always seemed just a bit out of reach…
Sweet!
i have been a fan of Bruce for years. I refer people to his site all the time. My teen age son and i have been working on our own version off and on for years ever since we saw the original on Bruce’s site. maybe we will have to get one of the driver boards to use on ours so we can use the same software. that looks great.
Jerry Ficke
As someone who occasionally dabbles in Pysanki (Ukrainian dyed eggs), this idea FASCINATES me….since half the battle is usually getting the initial divisions and guidelines straight. It might be cheating but how awesome would it be to have a nice neat geometrical pencilled pattern put on the egg for you so you can just wax and dye to your heart’s content? Geek meets traditional handicraft. Glee!
I know my electronics-kit-handy hubby could help me with the kit construct. But can anyone give me a clue how the programming will work with it? I’m computer savvy to a point, but hope it’s something that an existing application can feed into to make the pattern work? Feedback appreciated, please?
For most uses, you won’t so much program it as just *draw* what you want it to plot. We have a driver integrated into the freeware illustration program Inkscape, so you can draw your egg pattern there and send it directly.
Windell H. Oskay
drwho(at)evilmadscientist.com
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
So is there a way to scale a repeating design so that it fits around your object exactly N time, or does that just happen automagically anyway since it’s basically a spherical coordinate plotter?
It’s mostly automagical, but there are a few ways to approach it. Mostly you can draw within a rectangle defined to be a 0-360 degree window, but you can keep drawing wider if your pattern requires that you get to a larger number of degrees. In other words, you don’t have to *slice* a repeating pattern anywhere, you can just let it overlap naturally.
Windell H. Oskay
drwho(at)evilmadscientist.com
http://www.evilmadscientist.com/
I noticed the sale yesterday when I was poking around.
I also noticed a few new kits and products added, such as the AVR Starter Kit, the Deluxe Kit, servo motors, and a few other goodies. Awesome additions to the store, for sure, and the sale has my brain churning away at all of the things I want to get! :)
Have fun at MF! I’ll be stuck here in the MidWest, watching longingly from afar.
that’s all