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.
Donald Bell of Maker Update was recently on the Cool Tools podcasts, and gave the WaterColorBot a very nice shoutout. He also mentioned Turtle Toy, which is a tool for creating your own generative art using a minimalistic Turtle graphics API. We recently found Turtle Toy as well, and have been inspired by the art people are sharing there.
Previous Cool Tools posts:
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.
Today we are releasing our newest set of “Download and Print” cards for Valentine’s day. This is our seventh year, and seventh set of cards. The 2013 set had six equation-heavy cards, the 2014 set was a set of six symbol-heavy cards, and the 2015 set included love, hearts, and arrows. The 2016 set featured Pluto’s cold heart, and the perfect card for your robotic expression of love. In 2017 we featured atomic orbitals, exponential growth, and an epsilon delta declaration of love. The 2018 set featured normal force, stable equilibriums, and something about RPN calculators.
This year’s set features geometry, division by zero, batteries, a nod to quantum chromodynamics, and two very bad puns. (Sorry not sorry.)
To the extent that it is important that romance is rational, this is an extremely romantic card.
A proton or neutron is made up of three quarks, but its mass turns out to be dominated by chromodynamic binding energy, not the mass of those quarks. Corollary: By weight, humans are almost entirely binding energy.
Unlike most Valentine’s cards, which neglect the vast majority of your potential paramour, this card will let them know that you appreciate more than a tiny fraction of them.
I tried to compute my love for you but my calculator gave me an error.
Like a LiPo battery charged at the proper rate so that it does not explode.
You had better be positive before you give this card to someone.
You can download the full set here, which includes all 42 designs from all seven years (PDF, 1.8 MB).
As usual, print them out on (or otherwise affix to) card stock, personalize, and [some steps omitted] enjoy the resulting lifelong romance.
Yesterday I gave a talk at the inaugural Plotter People meetup titled Plotter Projects from Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories. My slides were a series of pictures from our projects, so rather than publish the presentation itself, I’m publishing a list of links to all of the projects I talked about.
The first part of the talk was introductory information about Evil Mad Scientist with some example projects from our blog and our early kits.
The main part of the talk delved into all of our plotter related projects, including hacking plotters, things we’ve made from plotters, software we’ve made for use with plotters, and plotters we’ve made.
Many thanks to Plotter People for inviting me to speak!
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!
For Hanukkah this year, Ol Rappaport modified one of our Deluxe LED Menorah kits into a custom fluorescent acrylic body, substituted UV LEDs and used a USB power supply.
