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!
Linkdump: March 2019
- The Use of a Cosmograph to make a Sankey Flow Diagram
- An interview with SFO’s museum program curator Nicole Mullen
- What Finally Killed AirPower
- Build a Lego Launch Umbilical Tower for your Saturn V
- Lessons learned from the Prince of Persia source code
- How Banksy authenticates his work
- DIY tiny landing barge for your vertical-landing drones and rockets
- Sealed Cache of Moon Rocks to Be Opened by NASA
- Hydraulic press versus candles: An unfair but very satisfying fight
AxiDraw at TinkerFest
We’re excited to be bringing AxiDraw out to demo at the Chabot Space & Science Center for their third annual TinkerFest.
Tinkerfest is a one-day festival that celebrates the creative, curious, and innovative spirit in all of us. Tinkerfest brings together makers, artists, and tinkerers to showcase their work while inviting attendees of all ages to join in on the DIY fun! During the festival the entire Center (inside and outside) will be activated with activities that spark curiosity and ignite creativity.
TinkerFest is Saturday, April 13 from 10:00 am to 5:00 pm.
Math foods for Pi Day
Linkdump: February 2019
- The art of transcribing old documents
- 3D Print your own Digi-Comp II
- WRL Technical Note TN-13, April 1, 1989: Characterization of Organic Illumination Systems (139 KB PDF)
- Examples of legal and illegal LEGO assemblies with explanations of why: Stressing The Elements (1 MB PDF)
- Ken Shirriff on Reverse-engineering a hybrid op amp module
- How to make a Super-Hydrophobic Labyrinth Game (YouTube)
- maker.js: A library for creating and sharing modular line drawings for CNC and laser cutters.
- Plotter People #2 is happening on March 13 in San Francisco
- 3D print your own traditional Marble Clock
- A crimp connector compendium (via hackaday)
Evil Mad Scientist Valentines: 2019 Edition
Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our seventh year, and seventh set of cards. The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love. In 2017 we featured atomic orbitals, exponential growth, and an epsilon delta declaration of love. The 2018 set featured normal force, stable equilibriums, and something about RPN calculators.
This year’s set features geometry, division by zero, batteries, a nod to quantum chromodynamics, and two very bad puns. (Sorry not sorry.)
To the extent that it is important that romance is rational, this is an extremely romantic card.
A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, but its mass turns out to be dominated by chromodynamic binding energy, not the mass of those quarks. Corollary: By weight, humans are almost entirely binding energy.
Unlike most Valentine’s cards, which neglect the vast majority of your potential paramour, this card will let them know that you appreciate more than a tiny fraction of them.
I tried to compute my love for you but my calculator gave me an error.
Like a LiPo battery charged at the proper rate so that it does not explode.
You had better be positive before you give this card to someone.
You can download the full set here, which includes all 42 designs from all seven years (PDF, 1.8 MB).
As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
Linkdump: January 2019
- Chirping bird sculpture made from electronic components (one of many entries in the Hackaday Circuit Sculpture contest which recently ended)
- Glow-in-the-Dark Plotter Clock
- Fast HSV to RGB Conversion for small CPUs
- The Maraschino Mogul’s Secret Life
- Dissection fonts: Typefaces made of pieces that can be assembled into a square, from Erik Demaine Puzzle Font page
- It’s Time to Rethink Who’s Best Suited for Space Travel
- 3D printed Wire Spool Holder With Straightener
- Finding an earth rock on the moon
- Inside the Apollo Guidance Computer’s core memory from Ken Shirriff
AxiDraw on MythBusters Jr
I’m super excited to see the new MythBusters Jr episode tonight, because I’m in it with the AxiDraw!
In their quest to see if a single pencil can write 45,000 words, @valerie_mbj, @NotABombBunkE and @braintwist2112 turn to @1lenore's AMAZING #AxiDraw. But can it substitute for a human? Well … hmm. Don't miss an all-new #MythBustersJr TONIGHT at 8p on @ScienceChannel. pic.twitter.com/YDkOJzF78r
— MythBusters (@MythBusters) January 23, 2019
I had a fun time working with Valerie, Rachel, and Elijah, as well as the great crew.
Plotter People Talk
Yesterday I gave a talk at the inaugural Plotter People meetup titled Plotter Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. My slides were a series of pictures from our projects, so rather than publish the presentation itself, I’m publishing a list of links to all of the projects I talked about.
The first part of the talk was introductory information about Evil Mad Scientist with some example projects from our blog and our early kits.
- Interactive LED Dining Table
- Interactive LED Coffee Tables: Update and kits!
- Larson Scanner
- Fractal Snowflake Cupcakes
- Bristlebot: A tiny directional vibrobot
- Asteroids (the edible kind)
- Circuitry Snacks
The main part of the talk delved into all of our plotter related projects, including hacking plotters, things we’ve made from plotters, software we’ve made for use with plotters, and plotters we’ve made.
- An AVR-based Analog Plotbot with an E-Paper Display
- Solid freeform fabrication: DIY, on the cheap, and made of pure sugar
- Finally, CNC toast!
- The CandyFab 6000
- The Egg-Bot Kit
- Ostrich Eggbot
- The MarshMallowMatic
- Introducing the EggBot Pro
- A Diamond Engraving Tool for Eggbot
- The Egg-Bot Electro-Kistka
- STEM at the White House Easter Egg Roll
- Vector Snowflake Application
- SymmetriSketch: A simple app for playing with symmetry
- Operation: CNC Snowflake
- CNC halftones with ASCII art
- Hershey Text: An Inkscape extension for engraving fonts
- StippleGen 2
- Introducing The WaterColorBot
- White House Science Fair Roundup
- Introducing WaterColorBot 2.0
- Introducing the AxiDraw
- Introducing the AxiDraw V3
- AxiDraw V3 XLX
- AxiDraw V3/A3
- The AxiDraw SE/A3
- AxiDraw Accessories
- AxiDraw CLI (beta)
- AxiDraw Python API (beta)
Many thanks to Plotter People for inviting me to speak!
Linkdump: December 2018
- Pillows based on ant faces. Backstory here.
- The Titanic was on fire, before the iceberg.
- Forever Pizza: Real pizza, encased in acrylic (via Laughing Squid)
- Turn your cell phone into an Etch A Sketch with 3D printing
- On the design of the nacelle struts in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (via io9)
- How to Deal with Difficult People on Software Projects
- How restaurants got so loud
- Giant New Salamander Species Discovered in Florida and Alabama
- A map of locations from which you can see the sun set right in the middle of the Golden Gate Bridge
- 3D printed 7-segment clock
- The Best Laid Tracks: Stories of San Francisco’s ghost stations
- Spotify player for the Mac SE/30
- Miniature Japanese Furniture for Cats
- Millitext: Subpixel encoding and a one-pixel-wide font
- A controlled medical study on the effectiveness of parachutes in preventing injury
- A Primer on Bézier Curves
- A collection of mechanical Keyswitch datasheets from keyboard.io
- Recovering Nintendo’s Lost SimCity for the NES
- The best fossilized mummified dinosaur ever (there’s also one named after Zuul)