The EggBot is Back, and it’s better than ever. Bantam Tools is spreading holiday cheer with the launch of the Bantam Tools EggBot™ Ornament Edition, a drawing machine designed to transform blank glass spheres into unforgettable custom ornaments you’ll take delight in unpacking every year for decades to come. Available Now.
Heather Seeba wrote in to let us know about a gathering she has hosted around the EggBot.
The EggBot brunches have been big hits with my friends. Seeing the fascination and excitement showing new people my EggBot has to be my favorite part of playing with it. The inspiration came when I took the ‘bot to my (engineering) office so colleagues could make eggs for their kids: people were skeptical then couldn’t stay away. Thus for an EggBot brunch, invite awesome nerdy people over, feed them, and gather round the EggBot.
Heather told us about her events earlier this year, before the advent of physical distancing. Many of her suggestions can be adapted for family groups living together and we’ve added some suggestions for remote attendees as well.
Some recommendations for an EggBot brunch include:
The photo booths can be used even for eggs decorated without the EggBot!
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.
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.
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.
Sandra wrote up her adventures with the EggBot on her blog in German. She ended up with some beautiful eggs at the end! Thanks for sharing your experiences, Sandra!
Thank you to Rebecca Zachau for this picture of Game of Thrones style dragon eggs made with the EggBot! They turned out beautifully.
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!
