Maker Faire 2007 is this weekend

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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!

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Evil Mad Scientist Forums

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Our new forums have been quietly live and gathering dust (and a few posts) for a little while now, so we thought it was about time to announce their presence.

We hope that the forums will be a good place to share information. Got stuck building one of our electronics projects? Want to know where to find parts in your town? Want to tell us what projects you want to see us cover?

Some of the places you can ask and answer those questions are:

Whether you are seeking help on a project, want to beseech us to stop posting articles about peeps (sorry– there’s one more coming this year), or just want to help out your fellow evil mad scientists, please join in!

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

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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

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I want this toy.

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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?

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Laying out printed circuit boards with open-source tools

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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.
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Weekend project: Phylm contest entry

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As we mentioned before, the deadline for the entering the Phylm contest is 12:00 am (GMT) May 1, 2007 extended to May 14, 2007, which is rapidly approaching. That leaves you just one weekend two weeks! We know that many people work better under a deadline, so our challenge to you is to make this your weekend project. We’re sure you can put together a two and a half minute film featuring physics over the weekend. So, let’s see your submissions!

Videos will be judged on clarity, accuracy, and creativity. The winner will receive a check for $100 (US) to be dispersed in June 2007. Once again, you can watch the video announcement at YouTube or (embedded) here:

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