Over at How 2 Today, Chris Connors has written about his Egg Lathe project, which was inspired by the Egg-Bot. It’s made with recycled materials and he has published design files and posted a video of how it works. Looks like a great project, and a fun way to decorate eggs.
Hey all you Raspberry Pi and Eggbot lovers: over on Instructables, user crgfrench shows how to load Inkscape and the Eggbot extensions on your Raspberry Pi. He even goes so far as to mount the Raspberry Pi on the Eggbot for compact plotting.
AJ Fisher posted an incredibly thorough write-up about his Twitter/Raspberry Pi/Arduino controlled LED lit Eggbot decorated Christmas tree ornaments. Each ornament would light up when twitter keywords represented by their icons were being used.
In the words of a friend of ours, “It makes me feel as though there are people all over the world celebrating with their family and friends just like we are, and you’ve brought them all into the room with us” – and if that’s not what doing this sort of technology is all about then I don’t know what is.
The article includes techniques he used, links to his code, source vector art, and so much more.
We’re very excited to be heading to New York for the sold-out Open Hardware Summit next week. There is another fantastic lineup of speakers this year, and it will be good to have the opportunity to catch up with the community after an eventful year for open source hardware.
After that, we’ll be going to Maker Faire New York, where you can find us demoing our kits in the Maker Shed.
We’ll be on the Make Demo Stage with the Egg-Bot on Saturday at 2:30 and Sunday at 3:00.
We hope to see you there!
The 2012 Bay Area Maker Faire will take place May 19 and 20— just 9 days away — in San Mateo, California.
This is the big Maker Faire, and the best. If you’ve never been to Maker Faire, or if you’ve only been to one of the little ones, it’s an experience not to be missed.
Today (Wednesday, May 9) is the last day to buy advance discount tickets for Maker Faire. If you don’t have your tickets yet, this is a great time to get them.
This year we will again be bringing the Giant Digi-Comp II— our supersized binary digital mechanical computer —to Maker Faire. You can read all about the Giant Digi-Comp II here and see a video demonstration of it here. We will also be doing an Egg-Bot demonstration in the Maker Shed.
Finally, we’ll also be participating in Maker Faire Education Day (Thursday, May 17, for K-12 students).
We hope to see you there!
Over at RasterWeb, certified Egg-Bot Operator Pete Prodoehl has written at some tips for using the Eggbot as a machine for decorating ping pong balls:
I found the trick to doing them well […] was to put the ball in with the printed logo aligned directly upwards, and then using the manual control to spin the ball 180 degrees (1600 steps) so the logo is facing downwards so you can center your plot onto the backside where you’ll have the most room and (in theory) the artwork should be centered.
We’ve seen plenty of printing on ping pong balls before— often in the context of beer pong(!)—but these look great, and that’s a pretty neat tip about making sure that the logo doesn’t get in your way.
Link: Ping-Pong Ball Bot @ RasterWeb
One of the perennial problems that we come across in a variety of contexts, including CNC artwork and producing artwork for the Egg-Bot, is the difficulty of creating good-quality toolpaths– i.e., vector artwork representing halftones –when starting from image files.
One of the finest solutions that we’ve ever come across is TSP art,” where the image is represented by a single continuous path. You can generate a path like this by connecting all of the dots in a stipple diagram. Designing a route that visits each dot exactly once is an example of the famous Travelling Salesman Problem (or TSP). From the standpoint of toolpaths (for the Egg bot and most other CNC machines), a “TSP” path is even nicer than stipples, because little or no time is spent raising and lowering the tool.
Today we’re releasing a new program, StippleGen, which can generate stipple diagrams from images, using Secord’s algorithm. StippleGen saves its files as editable, Eggbot-ready Inkscape SVG files, which can in turn be opened by other vector graphics programs, or re-saved as PDF files for use in other contexts. It can also generate a TSP path from the stippled image, and either save that path as an SVG file or simply use that path as the order of plotting for the stipple diagram.
StippleGen is free and open source software, written in the Processing development environment. It comes ready to run on Mac, Windows, and Linux, and it is available for download now.
Continue reading StippleGen: Weighted Voronoi stippling and TSP paths in Processing
The Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories Holiday Project Archive!
We’ve rounded up our projects from holidays past and present and will add future projects to this archive each year. You can start with decorations or jump straight to food projects. We’re also including our cookie posts for your geeky holiday cookie making fun.
Decorations:
Holiday Edge-Lit Cards
Decorating Ornaments with the Eggbot
EggBot holiday project roundup
LED Micro-Readerboard, version 2.0
Deck the halls with fine components
Vector Snowflake Application: open-source snowflake generator
Evil new year: Turn your Champagne into a DEADLY weapon!!!!
Easy high-power LED blinking circuit
Food:
Spangled Star Biscuits
Five Tricks for Thanksgiving Leftovers
Now that’s an Apple Pie!
Indian-style Cranberry Chutney
Pumpkin Spice Truffles
A Chocolate Debian
Fractal Snowflake Cupcakes
Cookies:
Fractal Cookies
Atomic Cookies
Asteroids Cookies
Ice Cream Gyoza
Circuitry Snacks
Edible Googly Eyes
As we are approaching that time of year when conifers tend to sprout up in living rooms, here are some techniques and tips for making awesome personalized ornaments with the EggBot. Continue reading Decorating Christmas Ornaments with the Eggbot
