Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Tales of Evolution: Windell Oskay, Evil Mad Science”.
Good afternoon uh, i’m windell oscar and i’m the co-founder of evil, mad scientist laboratories, and i would like to thank dale and travis for inviting me today. Um, i’m also the uh one of the founding board members of oshawa, the open source hardware association and its vice president right now, and i’m going to be talking about um perspectives on open source hardware companies and why we do open source hardware and what it means To be an open source hardware, company um, so i’m not going to go into depth here, because you all know what open source hardware is it’s it’s uh, it’s hardware where you share the design file, so other people can replicate your stuff and advance it and help You and get involved with the community as part of that process. I don’t really want to talk about this too much. What i want to talk about is instead, how i got involved in open source hardware and that’s kind of a funny story um, but it starts with um this diagram that you may not be familiar with, and the reason you may not be familiar with it is Because it’s actually a diagram of my kitchen and my apartment in austin, texas in december 1999, and this was a very small apartment. We had three people living here.
We had the washer dryer, fridge and stove and sink and counter all in this little room, and you may notice that there’s one thing missing here, which is a kitchen table. We didn’t have a kitchen table and there wasn’t any room for a kitchen table because there was no room, and so we had this idea. Ah we’re gon na put a kitchen table and it has to fit these three chairs. It’S gon na be half the shape.
Exactly like this, it has to be sitting here. Okay, so um we did the natural maker thing and let’s make one right now this is 1999. I didn’t know the term maker yet and i identify with it now. But what i made was this thing the mosaic table – and this is a collection of found materials and broken tiles and grout and pressed flowers and photographic filters, and whatever else i could find, i don’t have detailed schematics on this.
For you, this is not an open source project, but i can tell you that the main processor for the 386 and that it has a 256 kilobyte eprom the reason uh. Well, you know people talk about open source hardware, we’re talking about atoms, not bits – and this is actually a near and dear topic to me, because the reason i was in austin is that my background is in atomic physics and i was going to grad school university Of texas, at austin and after graduating, i moved to boulder colorado to work at the national institute of standards and technology on the atomic clocks there. So i actually, you know, trap an atom and interrogate it for months. At a time make it reveal its secrets to me and then um, you know um and then after leaving my post doc, i moved out here in 2005 to sunnyvale uh, where i still live, where i got an actual job and some free time and stuff. But the reason i’m telling you this story: why do we care where wendell moved the reason we’re telling the story is because in the process of this move the table broke and that led to a difficult decision? Do we repair remake, replace, go, buy a table from ikea? Well, the the goal was to make something useful or use something useful, and because we no longer had this really weird constraint of the tiny, tiny apartment kitchen, we decided to make a table. That was this time going to be rectangular in shape.
Also, my cat is making a guest appearance here, that’s jelly bean, and so as long as we’re building a table, we thought well, let’s make it interesting. Why just make a boring table you could go buy one. So um we thought: oh, let’s make it do something, so i i’m pretty good with analog electronics. I filled around some photo sensors and leds and stuff and then went to home depot and bought a giant piece of pegboard took some wire and an obscene number of solder connections later, because this has 448 individually wired leds.
We had this thing, which was the interactive, led dining table, and the idea is that the surface is translucent and you wave your hand over it and there’s the sensors inside and it changes the patterns the lights lit up now the sensors are intentionally obfuscated from where The leds are lit, so when you wave your hand over you pick up your wine glass, the pattern changes a little bit and does something gentle and complex and organic and well. This was our dining table and that’s all we thought of it until we heard of this event that was being planned, called the maker faire and we submitted this and we were accepted to display it at the first maker faire. So this is my portland.
Excuse me. This is lenoir and i at the 2005 maker faire you can see under the table the macintosh 2ci, which has been adapted into a power supply to run the tabletop version of it and uh maker faire was really special for us, because we’d found you know, sort Of our community, we didn’t know there were other people like us, were hacking, these weird things in their kitchens, but that was good to know and we um, we started realizing, there’s really a community out there, and so what we did. We started a blog and we called our blog evil, mad scientist laboratories, because it sounds way better than wendell and leonard’s kitchen and we started.
You know documenting some of our interesting hobby projects, organizing and so on, and we also kept on working with these things. Like these coffee tables, this is the 2007 version and it’s been sort of reworked to um ripple the lights after you wave your hand over it, and the big advance over the previous version is actually that there’s no pegboard here. Instead, we have this monster of a circuit board, and monster of circuit board is a good thing in a lot of ways that it um, it’s really big and you don’t have to run 400 wires, individual leds and it’s easy, and so on. It’S just that. It costs 500 to make it and well. This was just a hobby project for us this was getting crazy expensive, but we wanted to keep doing this stuff, so we had this brainstorm well. If we like made 10 of these, we could afford to keep one, and so we started a business. So we took a 5k from personal savings and we rented a tiny office at our local startup incubator, and this is not really.
Incubator relationship was more uh. Landlord-Tenant relationship, but they gave us a place to have an office that we could use as our registration form of where we’re going to be. You know our have our business and so on um, and we had this plan that we’re going to hang out at the office after work a couple days a week and again we have this genius uh business plan. Let’S sell 10. um anyway um we started building some neat stuff now that we’re able to afford it. So this is one of our first more complicated kits.
This is called the peggy um and this is an led display that is run by an avr microcontroller, and it was something we decided to make open source hardware after learning, about open source hardware from the maker community and maker faire, and all that and uh by The time we were ready to make the second version of this, we learned about arduino and realized. Oh, i just need to change which exact processor i’m using and change this wire here and now we can make it arduino compatible and then we were hooked um. This is another one. This is our bulb dial clock kit, which has three rings of leds: that project uh light at a spike in the middle to make three hands of different lengths that are made out of shadows um and after that, um we got contacted by the artist bruce shapiro Who’S another regular maker faire, who had uh tried his hand at making kits before, but wasn’t really having a good time and asked if we’d adopt his egg bot kit and the eggbot is a it’s a real success story. For us. It’S a little pen plotter, but in spherical coordinates um.
You could call it the world’s best easter egg, decorating machine or maybe beer pong ball decorating, machine or golf ball or christmas ornament, or we actually like mini pumpkins too. It’S the pen kind of sits on this little thing where it can dangle and bump over, but all of these are open source projects, and this has been really neat for us because we get to see people posting modifications in different parts on thingiverse like you can Change your pen holder, to look like this instead, like that’s a good idea. Um.
This one is alpha clock 5., it’s another one of our hackable led products and here’s some of the things we’re working on last year, a relay shield for arduino. That was designed to be much simpler to use than the other ones out there, newer, open source, interactive, led kits, interactive game of life display for museum and an art controller, which is sort of replacement for 555 timer boards, um, and so, as of this year. Here’S the business update, we are bootstrapped and profitable.
We are out of the startup incubator into our own shop and fab lab and we’ve both left our day jobs and for me, it’s one year, solo now and we have employees to support this year having lost connectivity. This year, our project is water and watercolor bot is a another pen, plotter type thing it’s actually derived in part from the eggbot hardware and it’s a machine that uses a set of watercolors to paint your drawing on the paper, and this has been built and designed In collaboration with a young maker, superstar named super awesome sylvia, who is here and um she got invited to the white house to show it off to the president. Okay. So briefly, coming back to that open source hardware stuff, i was supposed to talk about um. So we are what many people would call an open source hardware company, but i don’t believe in that term i i don’t think there’s such a thing as an open source. Hardware, company, because open source hardware is not really an all or nothing thing.
You can’t. You can’t really say that anything is truly open source at all layers and people start to talk about layers. Can we call this product 25 percent open source because we released the electrical schematic in the layout? Well, i can make an open source anvil that i specify the alloy and the cad, drawing exactly that’s as close as we get, but in real life.
There’S more layers than that and there’s components: i cannot buy an open source resistor or i don’t think you can either and so what’s important in working in open source hardware is to be clear about what it is that you’re actually putting out there. So for our googly eye shield for arduino um, which doesn’t really have much to it, the you know we released the bill of materials, our electrical schematic, which is really simple and the layout, and we think of this as open source, because we released all that. But i can’t tell you the formulation of the fr4 used in the circuit board and all that um. So anyway, i got connected to this open source hardware, community and i think it’s a good thing. I would like to help it grow, so i joined oshawa, which is a new non-profit organization, still in the forming stages, with the goal of supporting open source hardware um and one of the things we’re gon na do in oshawa is to document best practice for creating And using open source hardware, so that kind of guideline about you want to label your layers and be clear about what it is that you are giving to the world. Um is one of those core things when you get done. Osha also was created because we need an organization to actually run the annual open hardware summit uh this year’s conference uh. The fourth open hardware summit will be september, 6th at mit mark your calendars and, if you’d like to join oshawa, we are accepting individual incorporate memberships and that would help to make the organization grow. Lastly, why build open source hardware and i think for everyone who does open source hardware, there’s a slightly different answer and there’s one answer, which is the altruistic answer? I want to make something good and i want to put it out there for people to play with that might be the open source geiger counter, which is going to be a public good it.
It might be a selfish, no non-altruistic, motive. Uh, we are facebook. We are releasing these plans for these giant data, centers and switches, because we want people to build them cheaper and more efficient for us, or it might be um kind of what rob floyd was getting at in our first talk.
This is a conference that, because you like your customers and you want them to be happy all right. Thank you. .