Embedded - 40: Mwahaha Session

Episode Date: February 26, 2014

  Evil Mad Scientist's Lenore Edman (@EMSL) talks about what evil mad scientists do on their path to world domination. Surprisingly, it consists largely of art, education, and soldering. Some EMSL items we talked about: LED Menorah kit (solderless breadboard and soldering version). ATtiny2313 Target Boards Bristlebot: a very cute, easy to build mini robot  We also mentioned Maker Faire, a wonderful community, and Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. There is a give away on this show: EMS's Snap-O-Lantern kit. Tweet to Elecia (@logicalelegance) or contact the show. Send in the name of the author of the final quote, first one to do so wins the kit! [Update: Matthew J has won the kit!]  

Hello, this is Making Embedded Systems, the show for people who love gadgets. I'm Elysia White, here with Lenore Edmond, one of the founders of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Hi Lenore, thank you for joining me. Hi, thanks. You do prefer laboratory, don't you? Of course, that's my favorite pronunciation. So what does Evil Mad Scientist Laboratory do? We started out as a blog to categorize and sort of corral our hobbies and projects.

And then that grew into a business where we sell primarily electronic kits, soldering kits, and microcontroller kits, and a few robotics kits as well. And so what did the blog start out as? So it started, the name was Evil Mat Scientist Laboratories, and we had, we've always done projects together, whether it was Halloween extravagances or playing with our bikes and when we moved into California we realized we were doing a lot more really sort of self-contained projects and we started writing about them and wanting to document them so that we could either explain them to other people or just be able to know what it was that we did for that project.

And so it just was a way to get that information recorded. And you say we, who do you mean? We is Wendell and myself, my husband and partner. And so it started out as a blog and it was kind of all the do-it-yourself maker movement sort of people? Right. Well, back then we didn't-yourself maker movement sort of people? Right. Well, back then we didn't know about this maker movement thing. In fact, we heard about this maker fair that they were going to be having back in 2006. Oh, yeah.

I remember the first one. I was like, what is that going to be like? Yeah. It sounds strange. We had seen an issue of Make magazine that was advertising that they were accepting applications for attendees and that they would be providing a table for you to show off your project on. And it was funny because the table, they said it would be a 30 by 60 inch table. And we're like, huh? Our dining table, our interactive LED dining table is 30 by 60 inches.

We should just take our table and instead of using one of their tables and see what they think. So we took our interactive dining table to Maker Faire, the very first Maker Faire. And we had at that point, I think, just started the blog before, like within the year before Maker Faire, because we were doing projects like this table, that we wanted to, you know, keep track of what we had done and how we had done it. I'm torn. I want to ask about the table, but I also want to ask about Maker Faire, because I was at the first one. My project was a group of people that involved a math professor, an embedded software engineer, and a manager at HP. It was all very strange.

And so it was one of the bands. Oh, that's cool. And so the Ballistic Cats played, and that was very cool, although the band now is different. But I remember that first Maker Faire with a huge amount of affection. It was a really incredible event.

That's really how we found our community of people in California because we had only recently moved out from Colorado and the Bay Area is very segmented. It's so dense with people that most people find a particular hobby and they hang out with that group of people and do it, whether that's tennis or ping pong or karate or historic dance. But even the little, I mean, strange things. There's the Pi ladies and they all know each

other really well and they're inclusive. But you have to be into Python. But you have to be into Python. But you have to be into Python. Right. You have to know what your group is in order to find that. And yeah, they're very inclusive. Everybody's very welcoming once you find your group. And we didn't find it for quite a while. And then we went to Maker Faire and like, ha, here are people.

They've been here all along. Yes. Yes. And so back to the table. A lot of people really liked it. Um, it has 448, uh, LEDs of all different colors in it. And when you wave your hand over one of the sensor nodes or, you know, past the salt or move a napkin or whatever, when, when something triggers a sensor, it shifts, which LEDs are

on, um, in a non-obvious pattern because they're just kind of wound throughout the LEDs are wound throughout the table. And so people really enjoyed playing with it. And are they individually dressable LEDs? No, no, no. These are strings of 15 LEDs that are just in series. But there are, throughout the table, there are, I think, 12 nodes that have a, in the first table, I think they were photoresistors. I'm not sure which sensor we used back then. But it would just sense a change in the amount of light that it was getting

and trigger a reaction. And it would send a signal to its neighbors so that if there was enough change there, they would change as well. So it sent kind of a shift in what was happening in the table. And people said, oh, this is really cool. I want to make one. Yeah. And we were like, no, no, you don't understand. They're handwired and then hot glued to a piece of pegboard underneath. And it's all, you know, we went down to, I don't know, Home Depot or Lowe's and bought wood and sanded it and stained it. Oh, but the maker for people.

Oh, yeah. Everybody loved it. They are the people who want to make these things. They do, but you still... It's still hard. It's still hard. And it's a lot of handwork to do something like that. And most people who are into getting started in electronics would rather do something that's more self-contained or doesn't require quite so much tediousness. So one of the very first kits that we made was giant PCBs for making interactive LED panels. So that's kind of how we got started in the business.

And how big are these? The first ones were 12 inches by 14 inches. We currently make placemats. Well, since the LEDs stick up out of the PCBs, you actually have to put them underneath like a glass surface. And so people would do a full array of them underneath a table surface or like one would be enough for an end table or a nightstand and then when you put your when you reach for your book then it lights up and that kind of thing um so

we currently do still make interactive led kits and we sell assembled ones as well because it turns out that some of the people who want to have interactive LED things are nightclub owners and they don't want to solder. So we had to learn how to do manufacturing and contract out those kinds of things. So, okay. So, so you started the blog and it was for amusement value. Um, and then, then you you went to maker fair and you showed off this thing it was really cool and people wanted them and so i suspect you wrote about it

on your blog at what point did you start being able to monetize this i mean was it with the kits or was it with the blog it was with the kits um the the blog is really um supplementary to the hardware business at this point, that it's a place for us to provide documentation, ideas, tutorials. But our business model, as it were, is to make things and sell them. You know, that's such a good business model. It's succinct. It makes sense. The profit path is there. I like that. It's very clear, yeah. I've heard much worse. Well, when we started out the business, we needed to get a business license in order to be able to sell things in California.

And we were renting a house at the time. And in California, if you want to get a home business license, you have to have approval of your landlord. And we didn't want to go through that hassle. So we decided to rent an office in a startup incubator because that was an easy way to get a commercial address and a receptionist and conference rooms. And somebody to sign for shipping if you were out at lunch. Right, right. And, you know, daily UPS pickups and those kinds of things. So while we were there at the incubator, we would go to the social events. They'd have a monthly get together

for all the different companies in the incubator. And so you'd introduce yourselves to these other companies and they'd be like, what's your business model? We make things and sell them. And they would just be so confused by that. No, no. What you should do is you should make an app and then you should provide free kits. And then on each kit, you should have advertising. Totally. They would have understood that better. So much more Silicon Valley. And so you were, but you're no longer in a startup, right? Right. We outgrew that space. We had a little closet that had been a copy room and, um, our boxes were stacked up

practically to the ceiling boxes of LEDs and circuit boards and components and things. So, um, we found a place with a little bit of warehouse and a little bit of office space and moved out. And we're still there now. Your Sunnyvale office. Yep. And we've added on a little bit more as our landlord has had a room in the building open up. And so we have a workshop. And a laser cutter, I think.

We have a laser cutter and a CNC router and a vinyl cutter and a vacuum former. Oh, yes. All the fun tools. That's actually one of the great perks about running a business like this is that you get to get tools that you can play with. I completely agree with that. When we got our laser cutter, we're like, ha, ha, ha. Then we did it. Yes. Running a consulting business, we do tend to buy the good tools. And you know,

well, someday we may need to develop for virtual reality. So of course we need the Oculus Rift and the Cast AR. And you know, maybe someday we'll need to develop for cars. So of course we need the newest, shiniest car. Right, right. I'm sure there's a good excuse for this. So I've been there with an open house. I don't think we actually met. It was kind of one of what you said about finding your crowd.

And clearly those people could be my crowd, but I didn't know any of them. And I was too socially awkward to fix that. I totally hear where you're coming from. And some of them were just as socially awkward so it was going to require some sort of... Our crowd tends towards social awkwardness. And so you put the kids together in your, I want to say place of business, but I can't think of it. Shop. Your shop. And you order your resistors and your LEDs from DigiKey or whatever big distributor you go through.

And then you make these kits together, whether you solder them or you send them out for the receivers, I mean people who buy them, to solder. And that's it? Yes and no. So some of our kits have a little bit more labor involved, like our watercolor bot was our big project for last year. That one has, we do much more of the assembly in-house, and then it also has quite a bit of software behind it that requires a lot of customer support and maintenance and so on.

Oh, okay. So what is the watercolor bot? Tell me about it. The watercolor bot is basically a pen plotter. It works with an etch-a-sketch style mechanism with strings that pull a carriage that holds a paintbrush. And it moves it over the paper and goes and dips in the water and gets paint and paints the things that you do on the computer. And so is it, I mean, I'm thinking about the old like printers that went line by line. So it's not raster, it's vector. So each line then gets finished before the next line gets started. Right. Whether the line is vertical or...

Diagonal or round or whatever. And that makes sense because it has to change colors. Right. And so that doesn't sound so hard. I mean, I'm not sure I could sit down and build it right away. But what do you, what's the software? I mean, the software actually really does sound like the hard part. Yeah, in this case kind of is.

So the hardware, it has a CNC cut wooden frame and it has a couple of motors and a controller board and it connects to your computer with USB. Then it has the strings that pull the carriage and a servo motor to lift up the paintbrush. And then we have three different software interfaces for it. One of them is similar to the Eggbot, which is one of our other products, that it works as an Inkscape extension. So you start... Inkscape is the program that you draw with. Right. It's a vector program exactly

so we've written an extension for inkscape that lets you take your artwork that you've created in inkscape or imported into inkscape and um and then draw it with the watercolor bot we also have robopaint and robopaint rt i like robopaint rt it's. It's real time. So what you draw with your mouse on the screen is what the watercolor bot does in real time. It just follows along after you. So it's like the puppet and you're the puppet master. Right. So you can click on the green paint and it'll go get green and then paint your hills or whatever it is that you do. So that's one of my favorites. And then the other one is a little more intermediate that you can import images and it'll do a little bit of automated color mapping and fills and things. Fills are a little unusual with vector art.

So you have to have lines that go somewhere to fill it up rather than a standard like paint bucket tool. Okay. somewhere to fill it up rather than a standard like paint bucket tool. Okay and so you you make the you make all of these parts and you is that when you ship out fully complete or is that a kit? It's partially assembled so there's some assembly required. We've found people really like to to participate in the building of something. And it gives people intuition about how it works if they have done at least some of the assembly. Um, so, uh, we, especially with this product, our collaborator on the watercolor bot is a super awesome Sylvia. She's 12. Uh, she's 12 now. She was 11 when we started the project together. And so she wanted it to be a kit as well so that people could build their own robot.

Um, because that was important to her. Uh, and, and, and we like that as well, that people get that, uh, sense of accomplishment in creating it and then using it. That's what I like about kits too. I mean, I, I really do like not only the building something, which I do all the time and I like that, but every once in a while I like to build something and know that at the end it's probably going to work, which is not something I get when I build my own projects. Yeah. When you're prototyping or you have an idea and you're

not sure exactly how it's going to turn out, but yeah, with a kit, it's a little different. There's a destination, a kind of known destination. And what was the 12-year-old's name? Sylvia. Sylvia. Did Sylvia just come to you and say, what I really want is a robot to do watercolors? Pretty much. Cool. Sylvia, we've known Sylvia through Maker Faire. I don't remember which Maker Faire we met her at first, but we've been friends since early Maker Faires.

And she wanted to enter a robot in the RoboGames competition. Oh, yeah. Because she'd gone a couple of times. Have you been? I haven't been, but i have talked to a few teams yeah so um she wanted to so she'd been and wanted to participate instead of just going as um as an attendee and um so she looked through all the different types of robots that compete and she's like oh art robots i want to do an art robot and i want to do a painting robot she talked to her

dad about it and her dad's a software guy and he's very much a software guy and i love james he's cool and he worked on the on the software for the um watercolor bot um and he wasn't as comfortable with helping her with the process of making a robot because because software is different they've played with arduinos together and they've done you know some building projects and things, but this was bigger. And motors catch on fire. I mean, everybody knows that. I don't think they were worried about that. They're pretty comfortable with things catching on fire. Good. She's like a cool little girl. She's great. So she spent ski week the the winter break um with us last year um

designing a robot which she then took to um robo games and then she got invited to take it to the white house science fair oh my goodness that's so cool yeah it's so cool um and she took it to maker fair as well so yes and and she's taken on all kinds of TV shows and things. There's nothing quite like a 12-year-old girl with a robot. Well, not only a robot, but a robot that makes pretty things. Right, right. And that's one of the really neat things about that particular project for us is that it's a non-traditional robot and it engages a different audience than... And it isn't violent. I like that.

Exactly. And so watching it at Maker Faire was very different than watching any of our other projects because people of all ages and genders and backgrounds connected with it almost instantly. They could draw right away and see what was happening and know what it was doing and feel comfortable with it. So it was this just great introductory robotics thing that engaged people right away. And changed. I mean, I, I like the violent robots too. Oh, me too. There's nothing like having this robot smash that robot, but, but for engaging a large group of people something gentler and something that when you walk away you have the watercolor and it makes you still think of the robot right right um and it makes sense for you to have done it because you did egg bot which you mentioned and that is a a painting you paint on an egg right that one uses typically sharpies um so um it's a again a pen plotter

although you can put different tools in the pen holder um we have an engraving tool for it um and we've seen people put all kinds of interesting things in um there's someone who is using a screw just like a wood screw as a scribe and putting in clay slips um to for ceramics to um make patterns you know ridges and things in the in the clay yeah you get a sa graffito style all right never never mind no need to show off my ceramics knowledge. So they were building a ceramics thing at the end. At the end, right. They weren't using an egg. Well, they were putting the ceramic piece in the egg bot and having the egg bot draw on the ceramic.

Because it's not only for eggs. Right. You can use the egg bot for anything round. So one of our favorite uses is actually Christmas ornaments. So we've done a lot of, uh, actually this Christmas we released a set of patterns for the egg bot that were intended for use on Christmas ornaments. Um, but. And by released, you mean, uh, that was more like for the blog. Right, right.

And so people with egg bots could just download them and suddenly they have all of the snowflakes and whatnot. Right. Reindeer and snowflakes. And we even made a spherical dreidel pattern. Why? I mean, this is cool. I'm certainly not going to doubt that. But what are the goals of your kits? Is it just to make people love this as much as you do? Or do you have plans for world domination? Yes, both. So it depends on the kit. For instance, with the egg bot, the original inventor of the egg bot, Bruce Shapiro wanted it to have a broader place in the world and be accessible to more people. So he asked us to bring it out as a kit.

So in that case, you know, there was an impetus and there was a request for this thing. And sometimes that's how we find our projects. One of our Arduino compatible boards, the Diavolino, came about that way. It is a stripped down version of the Duomila Nova. So it runs on an ATmega328, but it doesn't have a USB interface on board. You have to use an adapter, you know, FTDI breakout board or cable. But the request on that was we need something that's really low cost that we can leave in a piece of art and a brand name arduino is normally about 30 bucks and it's really easy to use it's a great way to get started on a project but now i'm gonna take this thing to

burning man and i need 10 of them embedded in the whatever it is that I've made and I want it to be cheap so but I'm still comfortable with the Arduino world or my students are so I need it to be shield compatible it needs to have that form factor um but you know so so that one um that's why we made that one is that we had requests from the artists and teaching communities in San Francisco to make something that was low cost, shield compatible, and just easier to work with. How much does that cost? It's $13. That's really nice because I do get a little tired of the $35 Arduinos.

Yeah. dollar arduino's yeah i mean you do need the um like 15 dollar um ftdi breakout board or 20 cable but if you're doing more than one that ends up 20 cable and one 15 board it's a it's close in price initially but once you do two of them then you're you've paid for it ahead and if you're doing it in a full classroom and you've got 20 students and they can share a cable um then you're you're way ahead and it's and that's one of the areas that we found has been interesting is working with um teachers uh who are doing um usually art teachers or people who are just introducing electronics and want low-cost, easy-to-use options. So is this part of the normal curriculum or is this an after-school program? Some of them are actually college classes.

Some after-school programs use some of our things and some of our projects get used in high schools for teaching programming. So one of ours is the Meggie Jr. RGB, the handheld gaming platform with an 8x8 RGB LED matrix display as the screen. So it's only got 64 pixels. So it's very constrained. And it gives you a wide variety of tangible things. You've got buttons and a speaker and LEDs. So it's very limited on the one hand, but it gives you a range of things to experiment with and easy libraries to use. It's Arduino compatible.

So it's easy to get started with understanding, you know, physical things, programming a physical thing. Oh, I, I like that. I think that's so much more rewarding than pure software. You have something that actually changes the physical world and of course it's more. So there's a couple of high schools that use that for teaching programming. Great. Your website talks about do-it-yourself and open source hardware for art, education, and world domination. What is the priority order there? Is it education first or art first or world domination? So education and art both lead toward world domination. Those are tools toward world domination.

Those are tools toward that goal. You're going about it totally the wrong way. This is how we are going to dominate the world, is through our art and through subverting the educational institutions that already exist. And so is education and art the path forward for you? I think so. You know, in almost all of the products and projects that we've done, there's something artistic about it. We recently put out a T-shirt.

The STEAM T-shirt. The STEAM T-shirt. You know, we're trying, there's debates about whether it should be STEM or STEAM and we're heavily on the STEAM side. And so that science, technology, engineering, math is how it, you know, they say STEM education and that's what that means. Right. And you added art in there. And we're not the only ones. No.

There's a lot of people who have been advocating for keeping the art as a part of that set of things. Well, and as you're going about it, the art is kind of a lure to making sure that you have the other skills. Teaching science for science sake is awfully hard. It's a bunch of facts to memorize. When am I going to use them again? Especially early science. When you're first getting the basics, it really is. It's the same old thing that everybody's been doing for the last couple hundred years and you don't get to do anything new. Or it's very, it's very hard to give opportunities for students to do new and interesting and engaging science. Well, and even the older, even if it's not like new science, even if it's understanding how nature works, you get a lot better response from both the teachers and the students if you go outside and look at nature

instead of just read about it in a book and applying that to engineering you're going to get a lot better if you actually get to build something than if you read about engineering in a book i mean that's no fun at all i wouldn't know i haven't read about engineering in a book. I mean, that's no fun at all. I wouldn't know I haven't read about engineering in books. I don't know. I seem to recall you have a mechanical engineering degree. No, no, my degree is in English and Greek. Oh, well, never mind then.

I'm not sure where Emmy came in. Well, cool. So how did you get from there to here just making things just just um just doing it as we went along learning as we went um and most of what i do now is either customer service or technical support um i don't do a whole lot of design um but i i do a lot of mentoring um we've worked with a we work with the first robotics team um and that's been just a heck of a lot of fun and you learn so much more from teaching oh yeah yes uh and why evil mad Laboratory? Where did that name come from? That came from the days of collecting interesting domain names. Yes.

Yes. And when we were looking for a place to put our blog and looked through the collection of interesting domain names that we had, that seemed like a good one. So why have you kept the evil part just because it flows naturally yeah it definitely flows there's no real plan for evil world domination maybe artistic yeah okay we'll allow a little artistic license there in the name all right i'll go along with that but But do you practice your evil mad scientist laugh? Not very often, no. Most of the time I travel incognito.

I think get your next open house to help those of us who are wallflowers. We should have a muahaha session where we all practice together. Totally break the ice. I may do it at my next meeting. So did you bring me a kit? I brought a couple of kits that I've worked on in the last year. One of them is a breadboard menorah. So one of our most popular kits is an LED menorah kit. We've had a couple of different versions of LED menorah kits since very, very early on. And so it's nine big LEDs, different colors. They're not tricolors.

They're individual colors each. And it's a standard breadboard with each each line is wired across and there are five and you know what a breadboard looks like and there's ground power blah blah breadboard and a bunch of resistors uh to i assume to make the power on the leds to balance the brightness yeah yeah and then some chip that i can't read that's an an ATtiny2313. That's one of our favorite little microcontrollers. Yeah. It's just a nice one. It's a good size. It's efficient. It's cute. And if I turn the, if I push the button, I turn the switch on the battery box, uh, on the top side, top front there. There it is. Okay. And so when you push the button, it will advance to the next

day of Hanukkah and I'll light one more. Oh, if you hold it button, it will advance to the next day of Hanukkah. And I'll light one more candle. If you hold it down, it will change the brightness or flickering mode to a different one. There's a couple of brighter or dimmer and candle flicker or steady modes. So when we first started making menorah kits, we made them all with a steady light um because part of the Hanukkah miracle was that the oil lasted and with good oil lamps it's supposed to be a steady flame that you can easily see by so not a flickering candle thing that's but now everybody made with candles and that's what everybody wanted candle flicker we're like but that's not authentic we did it anyway because everybody wanted it you know you're making it with leds right

we have been asked if they're kosher um and we're like you're gonna have to ask your rabbi uh and so you what do you ship with this kit? You ship the LEDs. You get nine LEDs. Battery box. Battery box and a pre-programmed microcontroller, the button, the resistors, and the wire jumpers. And you tell them how to put together. Yep.

It comes with a pattern, what length to cut all the resistors to, and how to bend them so they'll be the right length. Are those zero ohm resistors over here? Yeah, they are. I had never seen one with just a one line across it. It's just a one black line. So we could have included lengths of wire in the kit, but it turns out lengths of wire you have to cut to length and keep track of how many and it's really easy to keep track of zeroms because they're just like a resistor they're easy to pick up off the table as opposed to a little bit of wire and they're a

little easier to explain yeah i mean if you're putting resistors everywhere else right why do some get resistors and some don't i mean, eventually you want that math and you want to understand. But the first kit, maybe you just want to put the right resistor in the right place. So we like serums. They're a nice way to do a jumper wire and include it in a kit easily. So this is cute, but does it sell very well? Oh, yeah. Menorah kits sell year-round.

It always surprises me. I mean, I always like blinking lights. It's an excellent way to touch something. So as I was saying, we started out with soldering kits. And as a soldering kit, it's ideal. It's self-contained. Once you build it up, it does something. If you made a mistake, you can tell where the mistake is because there's an LED that isn't lit.

And so it's easy to debug. So it's a great beginner soldering kit. And we sell a similar one, the Larson scanner, which makes a red light that goes back and forth. Like a Cylon. Like a Cylon or like a kit from Knight Rider. Larson was the producer behind those shows. Oh. So that's why we named after him.

We thought we might get in trouble if we called it the Cylon Kit. Silly TV studios. So it's really good to have self-contained projects that when you get done, it's easy to debug and figure out what went wrong and have it do something. But this one has no solder.

Right. So like I said, we've been selling menorah kits for a long time and there are some people for whom soldering is a barrier. It is. I mean, you can buy a cheap soldering iron and it teaches you how to solder badly. This is true. And you buy an expensive soldering iron, you don't have money to buy anything else. We actually recommend about a $40 soldering iron, a Weller, if you're just getting started.

But we'd had so many requests for a solderless menorah kit that we finally released one this year. I think that's a good idea. I like the solderless breadboards. It's an easy way to get into it. It's a little cheaper and you can take it apart and build it again next year, which is kind of cool too. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But you have the solder, you still have the solder version.

Oh, yeah. And so you give them a board, a PCB. PCB, yep. And then they do their own assembly. Right. Cool. What's the other kit? Oh, this is one of my favorites.

This is the Snapple Lantern. It actually just uses one of our business card breakout boards for the 2313. So there's no dedicated PCB for this kit yet, although I may design that this year. What is this breakout board? It's just a breakout board for the AT Tiny 2313 we do so many projects with the 328 and the 2313 that we finally made breakout boards that identified all of the pins so that it made prototyping easy for us anytime that we needed a jig to do something we would have those on hand and these are actually one of our popular products

yeah I mean I want, the kit is very cool We would have those on hand. And these are actually one of our popular products. Yeah. I mean, I want, the kit is very cool. I want this. I want the breakout board. Right. Wow. This is very cute to have everything here. It's like having your own breadboard.

But better because you can solder it. It's reliable. It's not flaky like a breadboard. Yeah. So this, the Snapple Lantern has the breakout board, a servo motor, a battery box. you can solder it it's reliable it's not flaky like a breadboard yeah um so this the snapper lantern has the breakout board a servo motor a battery box because it makes a little snapping turtle like pumpkin thing right um and it has two led eyes um i think that's about it and a bunch of toothpicks so that you can probably stick your servo motor into your pumpkin um we use little mini pumpkins and carve big pointy teeth into them and um and then use the toothpicks to stick the

servo in so that it'll lift up the top of the pumpkin so that it can snap closed did you bring me this so i could give it away yeah oh cool we'll describe how at the end of the show excellent no no mr producer chris i am not well i'm not giving it to you or we'll buy one next halloween we'll put it on the business account this is clearly a business expense oh cool so we are going to give away a snapper lantern and uh i even know how we're going to do it for a change. Are there any neat projects you can tell us about that are coming up or maybe not quite kits yet that you want to make into a kit? We are probably going to be expanding our line of disintegrated circuits.

Disintegrated circuits. Is it like you make a 555 timer out of components out of discrete components right so uh so we're looking that we've had a lot of requests for doing a 741 so that may be the next one in that series what is the 741 i believe that's an op amp oh i'm painting the net i haven't actually used one i've used 555 for things but I believe that's an op amp. Oh, op amps are a pain in the neck. I haven't actually used one. I've used 555 for things, but I haven't done anything with 741. Makes things blink.

Yeah. So I'll show my ignorance there. But yeah, hopefully we'll do more of those kinds of kits where we'll take something small and peel it off and make it big. I saw a video for the bristle bot, which you cut the head off of a toothbrush, you put a little tiny pager motor and a battery and the toothbrush wanders around. And it was so cute because it was five minutes of engineering and probably 45 minutes of amusing your six-year-old. It was, yes, this is one of our most popular videos ever. Millions of views. And it's a project that gets done a lot. People understand toothbrushes and they don't understand pager motors anymore you have to

tell them that it's a motor from a cell phone that makes it buzz because they don't know what pager is at least not the kids um but it it's one of these circuits that it's really easy to understand and so it's a great introduction to circuits because it's a motor and a battery um and that you stick it on a tooth you know toothbrush head is sort of beside the point um however it did take us a long time to find the right thing to stick that on to um we for at least a couple years every time that we went into a store that sold any kind of brush we would look at them and see how we could, whether it would be something we could use for ratcheting a thing forward. And so we didn't know that the toothbrush was what we needed for a long time.

And so you'd stand there and people would come up and say, so can I help you choose a brush? And you'd be like, no, it would be more like we'd be in the back of the Chinese junk shop, you know, with all the little, little dishes and then the, then the, you know, scrubby brushes and, and things and looking at them and they'd look back at the crazy white people in the back. That, so has that video been awesome or kind of a pain because it's not really, I mean, your company is not going to be selling toothbrushes, right? We do sell toothbrushes. We finally started buying cheap, cheap toothbrushes. I think I'm

out of stock right now. But I have sold grosses of toothbrushes. Well, yeah, because if I was going to a fourth grade class, I would totally buy, you know, a couple dozen of these. And one of the things is we don't actually sell as many toothbrushes as we do pager motors because people have their own toothbrushes. They can use an old one and, you know, it's a great recycling reuse kind of a thing. So people don't actually need to buy a toothbrush from us. But it is hard to find pager motors that have wire leads already attached to make it easy for kids to do that assembly. Because most pager motors just have short leads for attaching to a PCB. Yeah, or wiggly wires. When you have in the video has hard wires so you can spring load it.

The ones that we sell actually have flexible wires. And what we recommend is that you just tape one lead of the wire to either side of the battery and that much leds and magnets yeah exactly it's it's the motor analog of the um uh throw lights throwy circuit yes and when people are asking you know what kind of intro electronics projects can i do with my kids i'm like well there's throwies and there's bristlebots and, you know, you could hook up a thing to a battery. It's a circuit. Yeah. Excellent. Do you have other, I mean, throwies, bristlebots? What's the third one in there? Oh, well, most of, we've done a ton of variants on the throwy. You know, what do you

do with a throwy? So one of the variants that we did was... Wait, before we go on, we've done a ton of variants on the throwy. You know, what do you do with a throwy? So one of the variants that we did is. Wait, before we go on, we really should define throwy. I kind of mentioned it, but. A throwy is an LED and a battery and usually a magnet. So you put the LED on the coin cell, a little three volt lithium cell and usually tape it on. That's a watch battery usually yeah actually they're ubiquitous um they're in everything um and yeah you just hook it up it lights up then you can put a magnet on it stick it to a and i tape it on both sides yeah and then and then just

use it put it on a car put it on a building put it on whatever you want. Little breadcrumbs as you walk to school. Right, right. So we did a project we called Electric Origami where we put down foil tape on an origami pattern so that you could make a little ball that you would put the LED head inside the ball and the leads coming out on one side and put the battery in the pocket on the other side. And because the foil tape went across the pattern correctly, that acted as your PCB wires or traces. And so it made a complete circuit out of paper and foil tape. Well, it's a little hard to find, but... No, you can get it at Home Depot.

Oh really? Okay. Yeah. In the plumbing section or I guess there's some of the gardening section too with the copper tape. Right, right. Right.

Yeah. Yeah. It's actually pretty common. Well, and they have those pens that keep getting better and better. They are getting better. They're still pretty resistive. So you're better off if you've actually got a strip of metal.

Um, but yeah, there's the conductive inks are getting better. They're still pretty resistive. So you're better off if you've actually got a strip of metal. But yeah, the conductive inks are getting better. So I have one more kind of different subject to ask you about, and that's from the business side of things. EMSL, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories, is a startup or not? We've never really considered ourselves a startup. We started on our own. We're bootstrapped.

We've never taken investment money or anything like that. We've just continued. The first thing that we did, these interactive panels, we thought, okay, if we can sell 10 of these sets of boards that'll make tables, then we'll get one for ourselves. And there'll be enough leftover that we can invest in the next run of PCBs and of whatever project we're going to do. And that's kind of how it worked for a while is that every time we made something, we would make enough money to start the next project.

And that actually works pretty well. That is, again, a great business plan for a startup. So we've never really felt like a startup because we don't follow the same pattern as the other startups around us. Make a million dollars for writing another version of YTalk. But do you consider yourself entrepreneurs? Oh, that's another of those words i can't stand along with inventor i can't stand the word inventor i mean people people inventing invent things all the time but really they just make stuff that they need they're not so there are so few actual new you know completely new new things that calling yourself an inventor seems somehow wrong.

We're all making the things that are just making our lives better or more interesting. We're not out there trying to make a contraption. We're not Rube Goldberg-ing the world. Well, sometimes we are, but. Only for fun. But only for fun but but mostly for fun yeah i don't know i i don't really think about the word inventor um because i i that's patents to me and yeah it's totally been sullied absolutely engineer definitely i i very much own engineer title i i pry that one out of my hands.

But entrepreneur, we've known a lot of serial entrepreneurs. They start a business and they nurture it and they release it onto the world and then they start another business and nurture it and let it out. And that seems like an entrepreneur to me, somebody who makes businesses. And I'm not making a business. I'm running a business. It's a family business, which somehow seems different to me than the people who have an exit strategy. They seem like entrepreneurs. I don't know that I agree with you.

I mean, I run a business with my husband, so it's definitely a family business. And yet I have worked in in high tech at big companies I've worked at high tech in small companies that weren't mine and it's different it's it's definitely even contracting which is kind of the weensiest form of entrepreneur because contracting really um but we do our own books people don't pay us and we have to deal with it um and i suspect you have some of that there's always the contention of where does next month's check come from and what are we going to cut this month if next month isn't as good as we expect um there's no salary you You don't, I mean, you may get a salary from your business

because that's how it works, but that's just accounting trickery. Yeah. I'm sorry, Tori, my accountant, if you're listening to this, it's not trickery, I promise. Yeah, running a business has been interesting and watching just how much money can flow through. Without you getting any of it.

It goes from here to there, and then the government takes them. There it went again. Wow, it's gone. Yeah, especially when you have inventory and you're building up for next time. Inventory is always a challenge with a physical business. And you want to ship quickly, but you want just-in-time manufacturing, so those two don't quite go together. Yep, yep.

But how do you, you provide motors and you provide kits, but you also provide components. Yeah, we sell a lot of individual components. A lot of the people who are using our prototyping boards, whether it's Diavolino or one of the breakout boards or those kinds of things, need stuff to go along with it. We sell a lot of LEDs. We have pretty good LEDs. And as long as we're stocking that component for a kit anyway, it seems like it makes sense to make it available as well. It's just another part number.

How do you compete with spark fun and adafruit you don't i mean you kind of work with them don't you right right um it's kind of an interesting um community relationship no community that's so much better than mine um uh so we we resell adafruit and spark fun and spike nz um uh kits and they resell Adafruit and SparkFun and SpikeNZ kits and they resell ours. Most of us have different focuses and for the most part, we don't tread on each other's toes. I mean, Adafruit and SparkFun are pretty big and they have more in common, but we each have different focuses. We tend to make more complete kits. It does something when it's done um

whereas a lot of uh like the adafruit and spark fun things are modules that people are using for prototyping and um and their own ideas and their own ideas right and but you all have very much an education focus i think that's true yeah but education is big enough for everybody to play oh yeah yeah i do think i agree with that yeah um yeah what what works for one teacher isn't going to work for another and what works for one student isn't going to work for another um you know people learn in so many different ways that it's great that there are all these tools and ways for people to learn about electronics and engineering and all those wonderful topics and art how do you get hooked up with the teachers i mean do you do you go to teacher meetings or conferences or it just kind of happens it just

kind of happens um i mean we have teachers who seek us out and say, how can you work with us? We recently had the pleasure of hosting a group of students in an after school program. They came by for a tour of the shop and that was just a blast. They were they're all working on Maker Faire projects. So these are like fourth to sixth grade students who are all just making their new ideas. And they were going on a field trip to learn about where to get the parts for their projects. So they got to go to HSC and see all the surplus electronics and they got to go to Home Depot and they went to tap plastics. Oh, that's another great another i think i want to be in this class yeah i know i know so that was fun so we got to show them some of our projects and and uh some of the

kinds of components that we have that they might be able to use in theirs and what did you what do you guys get out of that i mean mean, you are running a business. And those are our customers. All right, yeah. Good customer relations. Yeah, and they may not be the ones making the purchasing decisions right now, but they're our next wave of engineers, and they're going to be making those decisions in a few years and they're the ones who we need to nurture in all the ways that we can.

And it is so much fun to see kids light up and get excited about this. When you have a bad day and a group of kids comes through and they think your job is the coolest job they can imagine, suddenly your job doesn't seem so bad anymore this is so true this is so true it's very very rewarding um to get that um you know see them light up like that and you said they were making maker fair projects yeah yeah a whole class world i mean maker fair has gotten so big are you going this year uh yes we have the no-iest yes i've heard in a long time yeah we we haven't decided if we're going to try

and take a project or maybe do a talk or something so we're very late i think the well by the time this airs the deadline will have passed um but yeah I love Maker Faire and I wouldn't miss it but uh it's a it's gotten really big and it's a lot of effort to bring a project well that first year was very much going and being a maker was so exciting. It was no hassle to spend a weekend talking about your passion. But now it's, I mean, it's a long weekend. It is a really long weekend. It's rejuvenating in a lot of ways, though.

This is how we reconnect with all of our online community. Because most of the people that we work with or collaborate with, we don't see in person because of the way that the Internet works. Even our collaborators in San Francisco, we rarely see. They don't like to come down here to South Bay. Can't get them out of the city. And Maker Faire is where we, you know, renew those connections. Um, so for most people going to Maker Faire is an exciting experience and seeing all of these neat projects for most attendees. But for, I've found for me, having gone back again and again, at this point, it's more

of a reconnection. Um, and I do love the part of showing off a project and meeting all the people. But the most important part for me is reconnecting with the community. Well, that seems like a really good note to end it on. Do you have any last thoughts you want to share? Not that I can think of. No, that's good. That's good.

Reconnecting with the community. And Maker Faire is fun. I highly recommend it. I don't know that I'll go this year because it is really crowded. But I went to Maker Faire. I say that every year. I went to Maker Faire once as an attendee. Every other time I've gone as a maker.

And the one that I went to as an attendee was in Detroit. Because I knew that I wanted to take my dad to Maker Faire. And I knew I couldn't take him to Maker Faire here. So one, you can't have a house guest when you're doing Maker Faire. Because you work for like 20 hours a week or a day on those days. Yeah, you do. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go to Maker Faire with my dad. So we went to Detroit together. It was awesome. But it was different. Oh, yeah. Very different. day on those days yeah you do um so i was like okay i'm gonna go to make a fur with my dad so

we went we went to detroit together it was awesome but it was different oh yeah very different but it's still make a fur yeah yeah you still get a bunch of people who are excited about building things those are totally my people yeah yeah definitely my guest has been lenore edmund co-founder of evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. Thank you so much for being on the show. Oh, thanks for having me. And as usual, I want to thank you listeners for listening. I cannot believe this is the 40th episode.

Thank you for your encouraging emails and tweets. And you can always contact me at the contact link at embedded.fm or at logical elegance on twitter and thank you to christopher white for being here for 40 episodes making the audio sound good and the final thought today was going to be from dr horrible sing-along blog something you absolutely should devote an hour of your life to if you haven't already. Unfortunately, I keep trying to sing the lines and you don't want that. Trust me. And clipping something out of context makes no sense. So I went with someone not evil, probably not even mad. And I'm not going to tell you who they are. That's how you're going to get the Snap-O-Lantern kit from evil mad scientist laboratories.

You're going to email or Twitter me the answer to who said this first. And the quote is, A scientist in his laboratory is not a mere technician. He is also a child confronting natural phenomenon that impress him as though they were fairy tales.