- A jumping sun dog.
- Design and 3D print parametric battery holders.
- Code Combat: An open source programming game for learning how to code.
- 3D print your own (oversized) Curta Calculator.
- Why spaghetti breaks into 3 pieces, via finite-element simulation (YouTube).
- Inside the LM108 op amp on Ken Shirriff’s blog.
- A baby dinosaur tail, preserved in amber.
- Mike’s Electric Stuff tears down a $500k Genome sequencer (YouTube).
- The Brother Type-O-Graph pen plotter.
- If you don’t talk to your kids about quantum computing, who will? (SMBC Comics).
- Single-stroke fonts on the HP1345A vector display and in the movie WarGames (1983).
- How it’s made: Ribbon candy (YouTube, via Neatorama).
- Threadtone: Computational string art
- A sweater for your drone.
Category Archives: Everything Else
Linkdump: November 2016
- Matchbox cars: 1965 Factory tour video
- Strain wave gearing (like Harmonic drive) as a Lego ball lift mechanism (Youtube)
- Help crowdfund the Open-V, an open source RISC microcontroller
- Disseminating the New Kilogram: An International ‘Dry Run’
- “How we turned $140k on Kickstarter into $40k in debt. And how we broke even.”
- Cat demonstrates Anamorphic 3D cube optical illusion (YouTube)
- Shape Tiler application in Processing — tile shapes for use with WaterColorBot and other plotters.
Linkdump: October 2016
- Spiny backed orb weaver making its web (Video by Rachel Barry Hobson).
- Why Your Next iPhone Won’t be Ceramic.
- A Wirebonding Factory Tour.
- How gas station fuel pump nozzles work (YouTube).
- Finalists of the Comedy Wildlife Photography Awards.
- Cardboard CNC Mill (YouTube).
- Steve Jobs apparently hated function keys.
- A programmable Stranger Things wall costume.
Linkdump: September 2016
- The Art of Making a Nixie Tube (video)
- How The World’s Most Beautiful Typeface Was Nearly Lost Forever
- A photographic tour of a Soviet Typhoon class submarine
- The BBC Creates Step-by-Step Instructions for Knitting the Iconic Dr. Who Scarf
- Sonicare toothbrush teardown by Ken Shirriff (complete with an interesting footnote about Bluetooth)
- Insulin pump teardown (video) by Mike’s Electric Stuff
- Repair and restore video of a 1980’s Armatron toy robot arm
- A series of ‘shopped pictures showing the relative scale of things
- Noodlefeet the robot: Progress on the gripping, tasting, and drooling mechanisms
- TED talk: An athlete uses physics to shatter world records in high jumping
- Ghost Minitaur: A quadruped robot that can leap and open a door
Linkdump: August 2016
- Reading makes you carsick because your brain thinks that it’s being poisoned.
- “Freshly ground sprinkles“
- High speed footage of past SpaceX missions
- The Moral Machine: Try to think like an (ethical) self-driving car.
- Hot-wheels POV video: As awesome as it sounds.
- The GIF is dead. Long live the GIF.
- Centro de Exposições do Centro Administrativo da Bahia: not a suspension bridge, but a suspension building. Exhibit hall in rising pyramid, auditorium in descending pyramid
- Apollo CPU Core 1, implemented in open FPGA code
- Tiny Caterpillar Robot Powered by Light
- Reverse engineering a real candle
- Teardown: Same Product, Fifty Years Apart by Steve Hoefer
- The center of our solar system (its barycenter) is located outside of the sun for the next few years, thanks to the motion of the planets.
- A Robotic ‘Burger Drop’ Machine to Capture One Slow Motion Shot
Linkdump: July 2016
- Birds-eye-view of Ruins of San Francisco from Captive Airship (via @rrmutt) and description of the technique used: George Lawrence: A Giant in Kite Aerial Photography
- LOGO Turtle for Processing by Leah Buechley
- Buechley Woodworking
- LEGO Calculating Machine
- Luminary Pendant — a lovely little LED project
- A giant scale model of the Mississippi river basin from the 1940s, used to design flood controls.
- pcb-stackup: Create beautiful SVG stackups to preview circuit boards, starting from gerber data.
- A creepy “lifelike” LEGO minifigure costume
- Fontastic: A Processing library to create your own fonts.
- A two-hour retrospective by the “Vid Kidz” who created the classic video games Stargate and Robotron: 2084
Winners of the 2016 Adafruit Dronies
The winners of the 2016 Adafruit Dronies have been announced! A couple of my favorites, like Droneboy above, made it to the top, and the entries ranged from funny to dizzying to beautiful. Head over and check out the winners– the videos provide an interesting example set of how drones are being used as a creative filmmaking tool. Thank you to all of the entries. It was an honor to help judge!
Linkdump: June 2016
- A tour of the MegaProcessor (YouTube)
- Inside the tiny RFID chip that runs San Francisco’s “Bay to Breakers” race
- Inkscape extension: Trace along centerlines
- A 3D-printed light-based zoetrope
- Dinosaur-era feathers, preserved in amber.
- Feynman diagram sculptures by Edward Tufte
- Schematics and manuals for the 1979 Asteroids video game cabinet
- Fliers for a Father’s Day Sale, from Obvious Plant.
- Dashcam footage: Driving Around San Francisco in 1953 (YouTube)
- NASA’s Juno mission to Jupiter: Orbit insertion as a dramatic movie trailer.
Ten Years of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
Ten years ago today, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories went live. Happy birthday to us!
We started Evil Mad Scientist way back in 2006 as a blog to help us document and organize our various hobby projects. Since then our projects have been featured in print magazines, in books, on television, in newspapers, at the White House, at museums, and on thousands of other blogs. We’ve built many friendships and many wonderful and bizarre machines, resurrected old computers and video games, and spent a lot of time playing with food, from 3D printing to fractal foods and on and on and on and on. We’ve published a book, released software, and published designs for physical things that people can make into their own. And of course, it all stopped being just a hobby about halfway through the decade.
As the years have passed, our projects have gradually gotten bigger— from a project every Wednesday (originally) to fewer but much more complex, multi-year projects. Along with big projects like the book and the 6502, we’re designing and producing families of soldering kits and art robots like the EggBot, WaterColorBot, and the new AxiDraw, which all bring joy to so many people.
What does the next decade have in store for us? Who knows! But we’re certainly looking forward to seeing what wonders it will bring.
To celebrate the anniversary, we are hosting an open house on July 21 at our shop in Sunnyvale, California, from 5-9 PM. Please come join us!
To all of you: Thanks for being such a great community, thanks for reading Evil Mad Scientist, and thanks for your continued support in all of our endeavors.
– Lenore & Windell
Linkdump: May 2016
- Mars is currently making its closest approach to Earth.
Here are some viewing tips. - Mining platinum from the roadside (YouTube)
- Crowdfunding a book about The Secret History of Mac Gaming
- How it’s made: “Long Eggs” (YouTube, german language)
- The Cattle Prod Selfie Stick
- Cute japanese bags, modeled on deep sea creatures
- Radio Shack to return once more?
- Converting stepper motors into industrial servo motors
- Camera tests for the Muppet Movie in 1979 (YouTube)