- 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
AxiDraw in the Wild
plotter vids as a service. pic.twitter.com/S0o0bUwe0s
— anders hoff (@inconvergent) July 21, 2016
We’re excited to see so many people sharing what they are doing with the AxiDraw. Here are a few examples we’ve found in places like twitter and instagram.
We’re going back to pen and paper with our logo, with a little help from the EvilMadScientist #Axidraw. A video posted by Spies & Assassins (@spiesassassins) on
Spies & Assassins have been trying out different writing implements.
NO/R has been trying materials like leather (above) and canvas.
#envelope #casualcalligraphy #axidraw #wedding #invitation #jimandpamforever A photo posted by Bonnie Kingdon (@penandletter) on
Bonnie Kingdon posted this elegantly addressed envelope.
Adam Sontag posted several marker drawings on foil.
#axidraw pen plotter + stipple gen + moon photos = #win (thx to @joanielemercier for the inspiration :) pic.twitter.com/HrfvS22HSs — Moritz Stefaner (@moritz_stefaner) July 9, 2016
Moritz Stefaner discovered StippleGen, our stippling program.
Miki is using AxiDraw to create custom packaging.
Keep all these great pictures and videos coming! We always enjoy seeing the creative ways people use our tools.
Reminder: 10th Anniversary Open House July 21
To celebrate the 10th Anniversary of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, we’re having an open house tomorrow!
When: Thursday, July 21, 5 pm ? 9 pm
Where: Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories
175 San Lazaro Ave, Suite 150
Sunnyvale, CA, 94086
Please come help us celebrate, meet Zener the cat, and share in food and conversation.
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!
Nixin: a font inspired by Nixie Tubes
Nixin is a font being kickstarted by Nelio Barros inspired by our Nixie tube take-apart post.
Simply put, the original nixie tubes are beautiful and retro. They bring us the spirit of an era where technology often looked like magic.
Nixin is based on the original 9 numbers that are exactly the same as can be found inside the nixie tubes, and all the other characters are my interpretation to what they would look like, if they existed inside a tube.
Here’s one of our photos he used in the video to talk about the inspiration behind the font:
The campaign ends in a few days, so act quickly to support the project!
Paper Circuits roundup at MakerBlock
MakerBlock is exploring paper circuits, and has published a roundup of articles, including our Single Sided Circuit Board, Electric Origami, and Edge-Lit cards.
While I’m a big fan of paper and circuits, I’ve never really given paper circuits/circuitry a shot. Unfortunately, I have no good excuse for this. (Fair warning: I’ve been collecting links and ideas on this topic for several weeks now, and even though I intend to break up the post into more manageable chunks, I have a feeling this is going to be a doozy) …
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
National Week of Making: WaterColorBot in the Tinkering Studio
This week for the National Week of Making, the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium is celebrating with a WaterColorBot and Beetleblocks workshop.
WaterColorBot always brings unexpectedness and whimsicality to your design. Here, getting the outcome does not become the end of your project. You feel you want to try more. Whether it is revising the code, tweaking the WaterColorBot setting, or replacing the brush, you are making a small but important adjustment for you. You find yourself in an eternal loop of iteration!
Tennis balls in the EggBot
We recently found out about a project to make custom printed tennis balls for an event in Sweden last year.
The first challenge was finding a way to print on round surfaces. Luckily, in our previous R&D experiments, we had played the with quirky EggBot, a printer that lets you print on eggs (yeah, you read that right). We knew that, with some work, it was possible to use that mechanism to print on a “normal” round object too. The Eggbot producers did not agree, stating on their official wiki:
“No matter what you do, EggBot will never produce good results on a tennis ball. Golf balls are okay, though.”
But those words only fueled our creativity and made us move forward.
They 3D printed some custom couplers to hold the tennis balls and wrote some custom software to streamline the printing process, and then printed on hundreds of tennis balls.
We’ve since updated the wiki.