Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com The Egg-Bot printer decorates eggs with markers.The April issue of Martha Stewart Living always bums me out. I covet the beautifully ornate decorated eggs featured within the glossy pages of the magazine. But who am I kidding? I can’t recreate that at home. It’s hard enough getting a single color consistently dyed around my shell, let alone stamp them with a botanical print.
I need a helping hand, and you can bet your Easter basket that technology will give it to me.
The Egg-Bot Kit, designed and sold by Evil Mad Scientists, prints detailed illustrations on spherical or ellipsoidal objects using standard stationery store fine-tip markers. You can ink anything from eggs to Christmas tree ornaments.
The device, in essence, is an updated pen plotter. Working with Inkscape, an open-source vector graphics editor similar to Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw, designs made in the app are sent via software built by Evil Mad Scientists to the USB tethered Egg-Bot. The machine then plots each layer of color on the object, automatically rotating it to wrap the image around. Since the Egg-Bot can only hold one pen at a time, you have to manually switch out colors between layers.
The kit, which sells for $195, ships flat packed, requiring that you assemble it at home with mini Phillips-head and flathead screwdrivers. Luckily it’s fairly simple to do; Egg-Bot is recommended for anyone 10 and up. Evil Mad Scientists’ Lenore M. Edman jokes that it’s often the adults, not the children, who are intimidated by the kit.
Windell H. Oskay, www.evilmadscientist.com The Egg-Bot decorates spherical or ellipsodial objects.You can find Egg-Bot specific, freeware illustration files on Thingiverse, which you can then port to Inkscape to be printed onto your eggs. There are some pretty cool designs, including one that plots an egg’s nutrition label on its shell, intricately detailed geometric patterns, and even an abstract portrait of Nikola Tesla.
Time to blow some minds at at the egg hunt.