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Lenore Edman and her husband, Windell Oskay, had wanted to make a robot out of a brush for some time. Visiting hardware stores, they pushed brooms, scrub brushes and wire brushes along the floor to gauge movement and bristle stiffness.
Their “aha” moment came during a visit to the dentist. Handed free toothbrushes, Edman and Oskay smiled. the bristles were pliable. the nylon brush was cheap. And here was a brush that was soft but strong enough to motor.
They cut the toothbrush at its neck, affixed the head with a piece of double-sided tape, and placed a small battery and pager motor on top. Set loose on the floor, the BristleBot, as they called the bug-like brush, vibrated and zoomed to life.
Not long after, in December 2007, they posted an instructional BristleBot video on YouTube. Since then, the concept has inspired a book, “Invasion of the Bristlebots,” and the video has attracted more than 3.7 million views.
Even though their intent all along was just to share a concept – not to inspire a toy – Edman and Oskay say their idea is the forerunner for one of the must-have kids’ gifts of the season: the Hexbug Nano.
“Any hard feelings toward the Hexbug folks?” Oskay, a physicist and electronics hobbyist, asked rhetorically. “We’re happy if anyone copies our ideas, but it would be nice if they gave a little bit of credit.”
(Innovation first, inc., an international robotics company in Texas, which did a limited release of the Hexbug Nano at the end of 2009 and opened it to mass retailers nationwide in 2010, said in an e-mail statement that the company had no comment.)
In the laboratory
Edman and Oskay, who met in high school in Portland, Ore., run a small business in Sunnyvale called the Evil mad Scientist Laboratories, where their tongue-in-cheek motto is, “Making the world a better place, one evil mad scientist at a time.” they make an array of products – from “hacker friendly” alphanumeric alarm clocks to fuzzy percentile dice – and post do-it-yourself projects weekly (a recent project was concocting the perfect cucumber martini).
They are proponents of “open source hardware,” a movement and culture based on documenting and sharing ideas through blogs and links, collaborating online, and giving credit where credit is due.
“If someone uses our product and builds a kit that is a fairly direct copy of ours, they need to say this is based on Evil mad Science,” Oskay said. “That’s advertising for us, which is good. But also, if they have nice new features, we can turn around and use those to make our product better.”
Edman explained, “We come from a do-it-yourself ethic. the people we have been around have taught us different ways to do things. When we create a blog project, or new electronics, we like to provide enough documentation so people can do it themselves. you create a community where everyone gives back. We believe in the greater good kind of thing.”
From their small storefront, the mad scientists, both 37, host occasional workshops and an open house. their retail space fronts a large and growing back shop, filled with small parts and truck-size machines. their immediate neighbors are a guy who cooks trash into compost and another man who builds gliders. A stray cat named Zener – a type of diode, which is an electrical device – calls the office home.
Edman, whose academic background is in classical Greek and English, was a latent tinkerer and a self-professed geek. she designed and sewed her own wedding dress, and overhauled a mid-century Hawthorne bicycle named Stella.
Oskay, whose day job is as a design engineer in Silicon Valley, was always interested in “learning how stuff works at the most fundamental level.” he has built an array of things, from a CandyFab machine, which is a 3D sugar printer, to Nixie tube clocks, made of glass vacuum tubes filled with neon gas.
