CNC Egg Decorating

Lacking the patience to do it by hand, GeekPhysical built a CNC machine to decorate Easter eggs. We do mean eggs from chickens used to celebrate the Christian holiday of Easter, not hidden nuggets in technology used to amuse geeks. The results seen in their video (after the break) are quite impressive considering that the printing medium is not perfectly round nor perfectly smooth. The hardware design is ingenious; one servo rotates the egg, another is mounted on one side of the egg and moves a track in an arc so that a felt-tipped pen will follow the curve of the shell. The pen moves in an out along that track through the use of a third servo physically removed by a Bowden cable. We were able to get a closer look at the hardware via their Flickr set and the device is indeed Arduino powered. This fun build is a great way to celebrate the season!

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dPNILXHLTpA]

17 thoughts on “CNC Egg Decorating

  1. Okay those Laser eggs are *awesome*! I love them!

    We actually had *no* clue about the ‘other’ eggbots. It was created over two days, enthusiastically playing with eggs, and not even considering the magic of Google…until this morning…so we wrote a blogpost to explain: http://geekphysical.blogspot.com/2010/03/eggbot-is-one-in-millionliterally.html

    Thanks for the post though, next time we Google first, well either way we have fun and get to be creative right?

  2. There’s something therapeutic in watching that video… I love watching the process of C.N.C. anything, and this is an elegant and clever solution to a problem that I never knew existed.

  3. I still haven’t seen one that actually mills an eggshell. It always seems like the next step with these bots–to make one that will churn out lace cut Fabergé eggs.

    Anyone want to take that next step, or is there some serious problem with the idea (Other than making sure the egg doesn’t collapse)?

  4. i can hack water into wine too. just gimme some sugar and TurboYeast lol.
    i dont see how building a CNC mill and designing the.. designs would require less patience than just doing it the normal way. until after all that stuff is done, then you can mass produce your sharpie’d chickenseeds much faster. its always nice to see holiday hacks in time for the holidays though.

  5. Hi guys great work, i was wondering how did they code the 360º servo, i mean how did they do the steps?? i know that if you send a medium pulse you stop and a littel one goes on side and a bigger one goes the other, depending on how big or small the pulse is, you get the speed, but the steps? how you know how far it should spin?

    Thanks for all.

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