Category Archives: Eggbot

New EggBot Software Version

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We are pleased to announce a major revision for the EggBot software with several significant improvements. It is now updated to support Inkscape 0.92. We have also streamlined the EggBot menu within Inkscape and updated the example set.

We have a new SVG reordering utility, written from scratch. In addition we have improved the Hatch Fill extension, which can now provide neat connections between the endpoints of the hatching, for fast, efficient filling.

We also have a brand new version of Hershey Text, which converts full blocks of text rather than just single lines.

The EggBot documentation has been improved and updated to reflect these changes.

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Hershey Text v 3.0

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Some years ago we wrote a neat little Inkscape extension called Hershey Text. Hershey text could take a little bit of text that you would type and render it into stroke fonts, also known as engraving fonts.

We are very pleased this week to release an all-new version of Hershey Text, written from scratch, and far more useful, capable, and extensible. We have a comprehensive user guide for it as well.

Hershey Text v 3.0 will be bundled into future versions of Inkscape, but it’s also included with the new AxiDraw software and available on its own for download today.

Continue reading Hershey Text v 3.0 →

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Designing with EggBot

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Our friend Fran posted this great example in the Eggers EggBot Facebook group of one of the things the EggBot excels at: placing a design evenly around any size of egg.

This time a medium sizes rhea egg with three six petal flowers. What I love about the EggBot is that I can get 3 equal flowers onto any sized egg.

After marking the egg with the EggBot, it gets painted and any decorations such as crystals, beading and figurines are added. She also incorporates 3D printed bases into her designs.

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Stroboscopic Ornaments

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Jiří Zemánek, whose EggBot work we have featured before, sent in this wonderful video of stroboscopically animated Christmas ornaments.

The stroboscopic patterns are designed in MATLAB and drawn by EggBot Pro on colored glass Christmas ornaments. Motion of the balls is controlled by custom mechanism built using components from two Prusa i3 MK3 3D printers, like six stepper motors and two Rambo boards. On top of designing the patterns, which is Jiri’s hobby (when he is not busy with research) and building the whole contraption in a very short time, the team had to deal with issues including non-spherical ornaments, or how to use Rambo board to precisely control the velocity profiles.

We love to see how people make things, and Jiri did not disappoint, sharing process photos of making the rotation mechanisms.

With great help from his colleagues Martin, Krištof, and Filip they took Christmas ornaments to the next level and taught them to dance!

The final setup shot captures how they created such a beautiful video.

Merry Christmas to Jiri and the Advanced Algorithms for Control and Communications group! Thank you for sharing your project!

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From the mailbag: Sciencey!

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Dave wrote in about the EggBot:

My daughter wanted to tell you that she loves your creation. The other day she told me that she is more sciencey than girly, and I told her that she could be both. I have attached a picture of her with her first multi color print, Wonder Woman.

Thank you for sharing, and the egg turned out great!

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Robert Dering: Batik Egg Artist

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Daniel Clifton wrote up a nice article at 101highlandlakes.com about Robert Dering, a retiree who makes batik dyed eggs he gifts to people in his community. The article talks about the process of making them, including using an EggBot.

He started batik egg coloring about 15 years ago after Martha Stewart demonstrated it on her TV show. (Dering said it’s a bit embarrassing to admit he watched the show, but he pointed out he was retired and you never know from where you can learn something new.) The first few were terrible, but he continued, improving with each one.

“I’m still improving,” he said.

For most of those years, he used a small, hand-turned lathe designed for batik egg coloring to pen on a design. It was a bit tedious. But recently, he came across a mechanical device called the EggBot, which does that step for him using a computer program. The program frees up Dering’s creativity. He simply scans a photo or a design into the computer program, which adapts it for the EggBot, which, in turn, draws it on an egg.

There ends the time-saving. Now it’s back to the dying, waxing, and washing.

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Tennis balls in the EggBot

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We recently found out about a project to make custom printed tennis balls for an event in Sweden last year.

The first challenge was finding a way to print on round surfaces. Luckily, in our previous R&D experiments, we had played the with quirky EggBot, a printer that lets you print on eggs (yeah, you read that right). We knew that, with some work, it was possible to use that mechanism to print on a “normal” round object too. The Eggbot producers did not agree, stating on their official wiki:

“No matter what you do, EggBot will never produce good results on a tennis ball. Golf balls are okay, though.”

But those words only fueled our creativity and made us move forward.

They 3D printed some custom couplers to hold the tennis balls and wrote some custom software to streamline the printing process, and then printed on hundreds of tennis balls.

Tennis balls in the EggBot Pro

We’ve since updated the wiki.

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