Linkdump: July 2016

San Francisco in Ruins by George R. Lawrence
San Francisco in Ruins by George R. Lawrence (larger version available at wikipedia)

AxiDraw in the Wild

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.

this #axidraw and #sharpie #tinfoil print was first designed by Aldus Manutius in 1499!

A photo posted by adam sontag (@ajpiano_official) on

Adam Sontag posted several marker drawings on foil.

Moritz Stefaner discovered StippleGen, our stippling program.

Box with creature drawn on it using AxiDraw

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.

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:

Just numbers

The campaign ends in a few days, so act quickly to support the project!

Paper Circuits roundup at MakerBlock

toner - 15

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

Feynman diagram sculptures by Edward Tufte

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 Houseat 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 bookreleased 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

watercolorbot collage

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.

Tennis balls in the EggBot Pro

We’ve since updated the wiki.