Automated egg printer

Roywanglu's mysterious EggDrawer automates creating designs on eggs. Put one of these in the kitchen and you'll be eatin' pretty.

The egg printer

I write books. My latest is a YA science fiction novel called Homeland (it's the sequel to Little Brother). More books: Rapture of the Nerds (a novel, with Charlie Stross); With a Little Help (short stories); and The Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow (novella and nonfic). I speak all over the place and I tweet and tumble, too.

MORE: Gadgets • Kids

More at Boing Boing

Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

jfrancis

Can I still use Mathematica?

http://www.boingboing.net/2008/03/08/using-mathematica-to.html
kpelt

I was right, it was the Decoregger. I found a pic on flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/32637333@N00/3412863193/
ndollak

Cool machine, but Polish/Ukrainian/Russian girls are much easier on the eyes and do just as good a job of coloring the eggs.
Branfeast

FINALLY!
JulianR

It’s not about eating pretty, it is for Easter Eggs, of course.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter_egg
Anonymous

It won’t be long before we’ll have an automated FabergÃ© egg carver. Imagine how intricate the patterns could be.
Pantograph

Looks more like an egg plotter to me.
minamisan

if it printed the whole egg and design, color/print me impressed.
Irene Delse

Oh, noes! There goes another cottage industry, homemade decorated Easter Eggs!
Architexas

@16

3D printers. Slap some lacquer and gilt on it, and you’re good to go.
Anonymous

I love his tags on Flickr: “I am a Chinese boy”, “it’s my first time upload picture to MAKE.It’s my EggDrawer”
TroofSeeker

Tho our “baby” is nearly 19, we still color eggs on Easter eve. My wife is goofy that way. We invite Pete’s friends to come in and decorate an egg, writing on them first with a light colored crayon (that means ‘coloured’, for you Brit/Kanukian boingers and lurkers).
It always ends up an Ugly Egg contest.
We don’t need no steenkin’ CNC rotary plotting lathe to generate ugliness.
That reminds me: “Pete! Throw out those Easter eggs, and fer Gosh sakes, don’t break ‘em!”
kpelt

#10 Yes, I had one too. I think it was called the DecorEgger.
PaulR

I believe that there’s a certain attention to details that only comes from there being a certain amount of difficulty or time in creating a piece of craft or art.

If Disney’s “Jungle Book” ever comes to a large screen in your area, go see it. Again(?).

Watch Shere Khan walk, just like a cat – all those drawings took so much time, the details are there. You can see all the brush strokes, the imperfections, changing with almost every frame, imparting life to the character.

It also can be seen in the Wallace and Gromit films. The scenes take so much work to create and animate, that Nick Park puts in little details that elevate the films.
arkizzle

Great Master,
I’m having trouble seeing the relevance of the link.. Seems self-serving and spammy..
shiva7663

I remember back when ink jet tech was new, there was a magazine advert that featured a company logo printed on the unbroken surface of an egg yolk. Of course, these days, it’s relatively simple to photoshop something like that, but it was impressive at the time.
Auto Parts for Brains

Awesomeness. I wonder if you can put other objects that at least approximate the egg size in this printer and have those printed too. I like the versatility that using a normal marker offers as well.
Anonymous

Reminds me of the intricate Easter eggs my family members made using wax. We’re Russian Orthodox. http://artquiltsbyjen.com/eggs.jpg
sciencemike

@16 It already exsists.

There is a wonderful artist by the name of Bruce Shapiro who has been using EggBots as teaching tool for a long time. He has some amazing emu eggs were etched using a dremmel tool. Here is the link to his site.

http://www.taomc.com/educational_uses/teaching_machines/eggbot.html

Make sure to check out his pipedream and sysiphus.
PaulR

EeyoreX, I stand corrected. Or chastised. Your pick.

However, after much surfing and dead-ends: Xerox animation, as far as I can tell, is photocopying some of the (black line) drawing (onto the cels) so that the artist can fill in the rest by hand. The new part of the Xerox process was the ability to photocopy onto clear film.

And the colour was still/only filled in by hand for that film, no?
nanner

i had a version of this from like Dudley or Paas in the early 80s. you put colored markers in and turned the egg but it was all kid-powered. Anyone remember that?
Ilovechocolatemilk

Reminds me of one of those automated engravers I learned how to use while I was working for a short time at Things Remembered. It was such a pain in the ass to engrave wine bottles– it must have been difficult to program this machine to account for the oblong curvature of the egg.
IWood

Well, technically it’s pretty food until you smash the canvas to get at the goo inside.

I want to use it to create oviform stippled portraits of people with whom I disagree that can then be hurled against symbolically appropriate targets, so that I can record the event with a high-speed camera and become known as the master of egg-based political commentary.
EeyoreX

@paulr:

Ironically, the reason you can see “all the brush strokes, all the imperfections” in the Jungle Book is because at the time that movie was made, Disney was implementing a radical mecanisation of their animation process: something called “Xerox animation”. This new-fangled process made it possible to cut time and expenses by letting the designers put their raw sketches directly on transparent cels, so you could do away with the entire department of people that previously used to trace the art by hand from paper onto cels.
Hence the more “textural” feel in most of the movies from that era compaired to, say Snow White or Pinnoccio.

Is the irony starting to sink in yet?

It’s my firm belief that technological advances allways allows for truly creative people to expand their creativity, whilst lowering the bar for the less creative people to express themselves too.
Jenonymous

Can’t find a linky, but they made a non-electric version of something like this when I was growing up in the 70′s. Basically it had an arm that held a magic marker and a spring-loaded thing that held the egg, and you could use it to make either perfect rings or lines on an egg or various angular patterns.
Anonymous

I do, Nanner (#10)! It was the first thing I thought of when I saw the image, let alone read the article! I’ve been searching the ‘net for an image or description of it and I’m coming up short. I think my search-mojo is very low today.
Jenonymous

And yes to whomever said that they think Paas made this–that makes sense; we had Paas egg coloring in my house every year (and for those keeping track, me=mixed marriage so we did pretty much every Jewish/Xtian holiday).

My favorite thing though was the plain ol’ Paas color set every year. My Dad was really obsessive about buying two kits and doubling up the color tablets in each cup; that led to the most intense colors imaginable to my kiddie mind.