Recently there was a meeting of the minds between a few of the San Francisco Bay Area’s finest makers. The task was to find a DIY solution for custom engraving work along the curved glass surface of a Klein bottle.
Cliff Stoll is an astrophysicist and owner of Acme Klein Bottle. He’s also known for being the first American to catch a cyber criminal in a case of international espionage (see The Cuckoo’s Egg.)
Windell Oskay and Lenore Edman are the proprietors of Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. They design and sell startlingly original electronics kits and products, most recently the Watercolor Bot in collaboration with Super Awesome Sylvia.
The three got together with some Klein bottles and an Ostrich Eggbot (the XL version of the Eggbot, naturally.) They had to make extra-wide, padded couplers to hold the oddly shaped bottle and did a test run with a marker.
It came out well, so they moved on to an engraver, programmed a design, and set the Eggbot to work.
In many cases a laser could do a job like this on glass, but since the Klein bottles are made of Pyrex the results would be uneven. The Eggbot worked like a charm, and the Evil Mad Scientist folks said, “it’s quite wonderful to find an unexpected application like this, where our little robot can solve a real-world problem that we had never even considered.”
Cliff added, “If you’re traveling through Silicon Valley, make it a point to stop by Evil Mad Scientist for coffee or candy; It’s easy to find – just tool around the venn diagram of art, electronics, and DIY. Where all three overlap, you’ll find Zener [the shop cat], Windell, and Lenore.”
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