Matt McCoy tweeted this shot of his Egg-Bot in action! Looking great, it’s going to be a swell Easter at the McCoy household.

The Original Egg-Bot! – Deluxe Kit! – The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

WaterColorBot is a brand-new project from Super Awesome Sylvia and Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories— a kid-friendly art robot that moves a paint brush to paint your digital artwork onto paper, using a set of watercolor paints.

The Original Egg-Bot! – Deluxe Kit! – The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The magic of the Egg-Bot is not lost on the mainstream media– check out these highlights about EMSL’s Egg-Bott in the press! Above is Bruce Shapiro with Egg-Bot on the Martha Stewart Show.

An Egg-Bot Prints Easter Egg Designs on NYTimes Gadgetwise

Eggbot turns eggs into masterpieces on Wired UK:

Painting actual eggs is an old-fashioned wholesome Easter tradition that keeps children away from the chocolate for half an hour, but for the not-so-artistically-inclined or the cack-handed, the Eggbot is the perfect device for creating intricately-designed eggs.

This hackerspace article in the Egyptian Independent mentions Egg-Bot:

In another room, a demo is being run on the “Egg-bot,” a machine that decorates eggs and pingpong balls with precise patterns, simply by rotating the egg around underneath a pen. Later, the “MakerBot,” a 3-D printer that is connected to a computer and creates objects out of layered plastic, “prints” out a tiny hand.

The Original Egg-Bot! – Deluxe Kit! – The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

Instructables user crgfrench writes, “Build an egg-coloring robot that is completely independent of external computers by embedding a Raspberry Pi into the EggBot chassis.”

The Original Egg-Bot! – Deluxe Kit! – The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

Decorate Easter eggs with the Egg-Bot by Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories! Above is Egg-bot Creations & Tips by Instructables user davewking

Larry’s eggs and EMSL’s 2011 Egg-Bot roundup

Once you make some, post pictures of your eggs in the Egg-Bot Flicker pool like user Hoo Dat.

The Original Egg-Bot! – Deluxe Kit! – The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

NEW PRODUCT – Alpha Clock Five – WHITE – From Evil Mad Scientist Labs! – Evil Mad Scientist Labs never disappoints with their fantastic kits and clocks. The Alpha Clock Five is no exception: An awesome alarm clock soldering kit– featuring five crazy-bright, crazy huge 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays in dazzling white, a Chronodot RTC (for precise quartz timing, complete with battery backup) and a handsome laser-cut acrylic case.

These big 18-segment alphanumeric LED displays are notoriously difficult to drive– there are 54 LED elements inside each LED character and the different segments take different amounts of current. We’ve now made it easy to drive five at a time, and wrapped it all up in neat package with classic alarm-clock styling.

Standard Features of Alpha Clock Five:

• Extremely wide display brightness range. All the way from very dim (for dark bedrooms) all the way up to annoyingly bright
• Huge 2.3″ (5.8 cm) tall digits are easy to see, even if you normally wear glasses
• Alarm on-off indicator
• Four standard alarm tones
• Snooze function
• 12-hour (AM/PM) and 24-hour clock modes
• Rear-panel white LED nightlight; can be turned on or off from the options menu
• Sturdy acrylic case features subtle, laser-engraved button labels
• Transparent rear panel lets you show off your handiwork
• Comes complete with plug-in power supply and backup battery
• Microcontroller comes pre-programmmed; no programming is required

Hacker-friendly Design:

• Open source hardware design– easy to hack!
• Open source software design– easy to reprogram (if you want to)!
• Upgradeable firmware
• Based on the ATmega644A microcontroller with 64 kB of flash, with plenty of room to grow.
• Comes pre-flashed with Sanguino bootloader; can be programmed through Arduino IDE (with extensions).
• 6-pin TTL-serial connector, can be used to display data or time sent from computer
• Unused I/O pins are broken out from the microcontroller, including one ADC and 5+ GPIO
• Open-frame case design gives easy access to serial connector and reset button

Alpha Clock Five kit configurations:

The full (non-basic) Alpha Clock Five kit– available on this page –comes complete with the beautifully made Alpha Clock circuit board, the five alphanumeric LED displays (ultrabright white, 2.3″ character height, with upper and lower decimal points), machine pin sockets for those displays, pre-programmed ATmega644A microcontroller with Sanguino bootloader, 5 tactile button switches, 20 ppm quartz crystal, universal-input plug-in power supply, stainless mounting hardware, alarm buzzer, all of the the LED driver chips, transistors, resistors, capacitors and other little parts needed to build the kit, plus a Chronodot real-time-clock module and a handsome laser-cut acrylic case.

The Alpha Clock circuit board is 9.430 X 2.736″ in overall size, and extra stiff at 0.094″ thick. It has a black soldermask and gold plated finish. Once assembled with its case, Alpha Clock Five is approximately 9.44″ wide, 3.78″ tall, and 2.80″ deep.

ChronoDot
Alpha Clock Five comes complete with a Chronodot real-time clock module. It provides your clock kit with (1) a higher accuracy quartz crystal oscillator, (2) a backup battery, and (3) extra geek cred for having a TCXO-based RTC. The included battery is estimated to last for 7 years.

USB-TTL Cable
You may be interested to add an optional FTDI USB-TTL converter cable, which provides an optional interface between your computer and your clock. It can be used (1) to sync the clock’s time to the time on your PC, (2) to reprogram the clock through (a modified version of) the Arduino IDE, or (3) to send serial data to display on the five-character LED display. Note, however, that these are entirely optional operations– no programming is needed to build or use an Alpha Clock Five clock kit!

Power supply
The Alpha Clock Five kit includes a universal-input power supply that will work with worldwide voltages. The plug is a power-strip-friendly US type, so you may need an inexpensive “grocery store” plug adapter to fit the wall socket in your country.
If you need to provide power from an alternate source, Alpha Clock Five requires (and provides hookup locations for) a regulated 5 V dc power supply with 1 A capacity.

In stock and shipping now!

Lenore @ EMSL writes:

Here’s something we never thought of: John Fisher is using an EiBotBoard (EBB), a Raspberry PI and a camera to create “inverse panorama views” of cylindrical objects. It’s a little bit like using an Eggbot as a scanner. His in-depth article covers everything from hardware set up to code.

The Original Egg-Bot! – Deluxe Kit! – The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

Evil Mad Scientist just released their scaled down version of their gigantic version of the vintage Digi-Comp II, and have made it available for sale in a kit version.

The Digi-Comp II: First Edition is a modern, fully-operational recreation of the Digi-Comp II, the classic 1960′s educational computer kit. It’s an automatic binary digital mechanical computer, capable of conducting basic operations like adding, multiplying, subtracting, dividing, counting, and so forth. And what’s more, all of these operations are conducted by the action of balls rolling down a slope, directed by mechanical switches and flip flops, and all powered by gravity.

Overall, it is slightly smaller than the original (mid 1960′s) Digi-Comp II, which used half-inch diameter glass marbles. Rather than marbles, we’ve opted for pachinko balls, which are shiny steel balls 11 mm (about 7/16″) in diameter. Using the smaller size has allowed us to reduce some of the feature sizes, and reduce the overall size of the machine from 14×28.5″ to 10×24″, while retaining all of the original functions and remaining finger-friendly.

The Digi-Comp II: First Edition is CNC carved from rock-solid half-inch hardwood plywood, laser-engraved to provide it with labels, and hand fitted with over 60 laser-cut parts. It comes assembled, tested, and ready to use.

Check out some other Evil Mad Scientist products that we carry at Adafruit.

Lenore at EMSL posted up about this bar designed with their interactive LED panels by Alter Itay. Looks awesome!

Octolively Kit – Blue – Tileable Interactive LEDs – Octolively modules are tileable, digital interactive LED surfaces filled with ultrabright LEDs that respond in complex and gentle ways to stimulus provided by human interaction.

Learn more!

Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories writes:

Today we’re releasing a major update to Alpha Clock Five, our alphanumeric LED desk clock, alarm clock, and data display device.

Alpha Clock Five still has five remarkably bright, remarkably huge 2.3″ alphanumeric LED displays. But for version 2.0, we’ve rewritten the firmware from scratch. It’s packed with new features and it is simply a joy to use.

The firmware is upgradable and we’ve still got some Alpha Clocks Five in stock!

StippleGen: Weighted Voronoi stippling and TSP paths in Processing @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

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 Adrian Secord’s algorithm, which uses an iterative relaxation process to optimize a weighted Voronoi diagram, producing a set of points (stipples) that can closely approach the appearance of a traditional stipple drawing.

Another important technique 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.

Works with the EggBot in the Adafruit store!

In stock and shipping. If you choose OVERNIGHT shipping in the USA today (weds or thurs 4/5) it will arrive on Friday JUST in time for easter!

The Original Egg-Bot! The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens, one pen is included. It can fit almost any pen of similar size.

The Eggbot is normally controlled through a set of open-source extensions to Inkscape, the excellent, popular and free vector graphics program.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you’ve mounted in the Eggbot. It’s all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro, dating back to 1990. Our version, the “Egg-Bot 2.0,” is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.

In stock and shipping. If you choose OVERNIGHT shipping in the USA today (weds or thurs 4/5) it will arrive on Friday JUST in time for easter!

Decorating Christmas Ornaments with the Eggbot @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

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.

The Original Egg-Bot! The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens, one pen is included. It can fit almost any pen of similar size.

The Eggbot is normally controlled through a set of open-source extensions to Inkscape, the excellent, popular and free vector graphics program.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you’ve mounted in the Eggbot. It’s all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro, dating back to 1990. Our version, the “Egg-Bot 2.0,” is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.

Cairo, Maker Faire Africa (photos).

Ostrich Eggbot @ Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories.

What’s just like an Eggbot but quite a bit larger? The all-new Ostrich Eggbot! So yes, just like the Eggbot, it’s a machine capable of drawing on the surface of all kinds of spherical and egg-shaped objects. As the name implies, the Ostrich Eggbot is big enough to (very easily) fit ostrich eggs– one is shown above with a (rather large) chicken egg for scale. And, like the Eggbot, we’re releasing it as an open source kit. Given all that, we feel confident to suggest that the Ostrich Eggbot may already be quite possibly the worlds finest open-source CNC ostrich-egg decorating machine.

Very cool!

Wow, ad agency TBWA London is doing something very cool, very smart and using OSHW Eastern Eggs!

We’ve asked some brilliant artists, designers and illustrators to send in their art for the eggs. The eggs are pretty special because the designs are drawn on by a little robot called – the egg-bot. The eggs will be made from solid wood and are approx 6cm high. Most of the proceeds from the sale of every ‘Eastern Egg’, will be donated to the British Red Cross – Japan Tsunami Appeal.

The Original Egg-Bot! The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens, one pen is included. It can fit almost any pen of similar size.

The Eggbot is normally controlled through a set of open-source extensions to Inkscape, the excellent, popular and free vector graphics program.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you’ve mounted in the Eggbot. It’s all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro, dating back to 1990. Our version, the “Egg-Bot 2.0,” is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.

Pete Prodoehl printed up the new OSHW logo using his Eggbot! Neat!

Customer writes in…

Hello Limor and friends, I thought you’d be interested in seeing my daughter’s latest blog.  She shows the Eggbot I built for her (purchased from Adafruit, of course) and a couple of eggs she made with it.  She also shows some of her hand decorated eggs.

From EMSL and Instructables…

We are pleased to help Instructables launch an Egg-Bot Challenge for egg-related projects.

“Make something awesome that is egg inspired. Share your favorite omelet, a picture of your best decorated eggs or your favorite “recipe” for knitted eggs. Anything egg related is eligible.”

You can win some prizes, including a Deluxe Egg-Bot Kit, and we’ll be helping to judge the the finalists. The contest closes on May 1, so start writing up your projects!

BACK IN STOCK – The Original Egg-Bot! The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens, one pen is included. It can fit almost any pen of similar size.

The Eggbot is normally controlled through a set of open-source extensions to Inkscape, the excellent, popular and free vector graphics program.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you’ve mounted in the Eggbot. It’s all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro, dating back to 1990. Our version, the “Egg-Bot 2.0,” is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.

In stock and shipping now!

From IEEE Spectrum:

Mobile phones where the batteries run down in a few hours are really annoying but I think dropped calls from bad reception runs a close second in my annoyance scale.

I may not have to wait that long if research at the University of Illinois in making a 3D antenna for mobile phones can successfully make it commercially available cell phones.

The research, which was initially published in the Wiley journal Advanced Materials, employed an ink jet printing method that used silver nanoparticles and were sprayed on the inside or the ourside of a small hemispherical dome.

…

The functionality of antennas for mobile phones has not fared well in the overall miniaturization of the gadgets with characteristics such as gain, efficiency, bandwidth, and range all suffering.

According Jennifer T. Bernhard, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Illinois, the 3D antennas that the research team has developed are an order of magnitude better in performance metrics than the typical monopole designs.

“There has been a long-standing problem of minimizing the ratio of energy stored to energy radiated—the Q—of an ESA,” Bernhard explains in the article. “By printing directly on the hemispherical substrate, we have a highly versatile single-mode antenna with a Q that very closely approaches the fundamental limit dictated by physics (known as the Chu limit).”

The first person to do this with an Eggbot wins my eternal admiration!

Whoa! This is neat! Thingiverse user dnewman posted this great Eggbot project — nutrition information printed directly on the shell! He writes:

In need of nutrition information for your large eggs? Then this drawing is just what you’ve been looking for!

This is a 3200 x 800 pixel plot intended for plotting with the Eggbot.

P.S. The text was rendered using the new Hershey Text extension by Windell Oskay and distributed with the latest Eggbot software release. It may be found in Inkscape under Extensions > Render > Hershey Text (after you update to the latest Eggbot software). The utility of that extension is not limited to just the Eggbot. Among other things, it provides nice, non-filled, single stroke fonts ideal for use in CNC and CNC-related applications.

Read more and download the file on Thingiverse.

Thanks to Andrew for the tip!

BACK IN STOCK – The Original Egg-Bot! The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens, one pen is included. It can fit almost any pen of similar size.

The Eggbot is normally controlled through a set of open-source extensions to Inkscape, the excellent, popular and free vector graphics program.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you’ve mounted in the Eggbot. It’s all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.

The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro, dating back to 1990. Our version, the “Egg-Bot 2.0,” is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.

In stock and shipping now!

NEW PRODUCT – The Original Egg-Bot!. The Eggbot is an open-source art robot that can draw on spherical or egg-shaped objects from the size of a ping pong ball to that of a small grapefruit– roughly 1.25 to 4.25 inches in diameter (3 – 10 cm).

The Eggbot is super adjustable, and is designed to draw on all kinds of things that are normally “impossible” to print on. Not just eggs but ping pong balls, light bulbs, mini pumpkins, and even things like wine glasses– with a bit of work. See the photos above for some examples of personalized golf balls, christmas ornaments, light bulbs, and (yes) eggs.

The Eggbot chassis is made of tough fiberglass, with integrated heat sinks for the included motors. The pen and egg motors are high-torque precision stepping motors, and the pen lift mechanism is a quiet and reliable servo motor.

The Eggbot kit is easy to assemble in a couple of hours, and only requires a couple of basic tools like miniature Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. No soldering required. You’ll also need a recent-vintage computer with an available USB port (Mac, Windows or Linux), plus internet access to download assembly instructions and necessary software.

The standard pen holder included with the EggBot kit is designed to fit various art pens including Sharpie Ultra Fine Point pens, one pen is included. It can fit almost any pen of similar size.

The Eggbot is normally controlled through a set of open-source extensions to Inkscape, the excellent, popular and free vector graphics program.

Basic operation is much like that of a printer driver: you import or make a drawing in Inkscape, and use the extensions to plot your drawing onto whatever object you’ve mounted in the Eggbot. It’s all handled through an easy to use graphical user interface, and works cleanly on Mac, Windows and Linux.

For tons more information, please check out the Egg-Bot webpage and Egg-Bot FAQ from the makers at Evil Mad Science.

The kit is based on the original design by Bruce Shapiro, dating back to 1990. Our version, the “Egg-Bot 2.0,” is a modern and friendly update, designed with the assistance of Bruce and his team.

In stock and shipping now!