Lenore is the Co-Founder of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories and currently lives in Sunnyvale, California – if you don’t know that’s the “heart of the silicon valley” according to the city brochure of Sunnyvale – but seriously, it could not be more central in the valley.

Established in 2006, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories strives to live up to its motto, “Making the World a Better Place, One Evil Mad Scientist at a time,” serving as a resource for budding evil mad scientists everywhere.

The Evil Mad Scientist Shop is the place to go if you are looking for fun, geeky and educational projects. For example, I purchased the Egg-Bot years back which is a plotter for eggs. After building the project kit, you can design with the open source drawing program Inkscape and then instruct the Egg-Bot to transfer the drawing to an egg. 

I once planned a wonderful workshop at school with this great tool, which did not stop at designing and creating the eggs, but also involved making pancakes after we emptied the eggs and later we even drilled holes to add LEDs to the eggs to make them shine. 

Another great product is AxiDraw.  AxiDraw is a modern pen plotter, capable of writing or drawing on almost any flat surface with a variety of pens and markers. It can be used for drawing computer generated art, which makes it popular with math and computer science teachers.

Shownotes

• Lenore Edman on Twitter
• Evil Mad Scientist Labs on Twitter
• Evil Mad Scientist Labs 
• Blog Post about Bristlebots
• Vibrating Motors
• Blog Post about The EggBot Pro
• The Original EggBot – Deluxe Edition
• The AxiDraw V3 Pen Plotter 
• Lot’s of LEDs
• Flickery Flame Soldering Kit

So Mitch grew up in Chicago, Illinois, USA, went to high school and later  got a master’s degree in electrical engineering. In 1986 he then moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to work in Silicon Valley

Photos of Electronics Workshops and Conferencess involving Mitch Altman.
Photos by Mitch Altman, CC BY-SA 2.0

You might know Mitch mainly from the maker movement, but Mitch has also been an early developer of VR technologies – and he always stayed true to himself and is a big advocate for positive and responsible use of technology. He quit a job at VPL Research where he was working on virtual reality and he also stopped supporting the Maker Faires after they got involved with the United States Department of Defense.

Mitch started Cornfield Electronics,  a consulting company and after the launch of on of his products, TV-B-Gone, he gave the company the tagline “We make Useful Electronics for a Better World”

What is TV-B-Gone? The website says: The TV-B-Gone® universal remote control allows you to turn virtually any TV On or OFF.  We prefer OFF.

I think this really shows how Mitch is interested in helping us to use technology for CREATING something new and the TV-B-Gone is a fun tool combined with some rebellion against mainstream media consumption that he created to get awareness for this topic. 

Mitch is super important and respected person in the international hackerspace and maker movement. He co-founded Noisebridge, the San Francisco hackerspace, which was probably one of the first three hackerspaces in the US. 

Mitch is traveling a lot and encouraging the formation of hackerspaces, holding panels and workshops on teaching introductory electronics workshops to people of all ages and visiting electronics enthusiast groups around the world.

Shownotes

• Mitch Altman on Twitter
• Mitch Altman on LinkedIn
• Mitch Altman on Wikipedia
• Flickr Account of Mitch Altman
• TV B Gone
• Cornfieldelectronics
• Noisebridge San Francisco Hackerspace
• Ardutouch Music Synthesizer Kit and Ardutouch videos on Youtube
• Soldering DIY Projects
• Trippy RGB Waves Kit and Youtube video about it